Does it make any sense to establish test scores as the goal of education? If that’s how we measure success, students in the bottom half who are poor, disabled, or barely speak English will always be left behind.
Politicians and Wall Street financiers like to blame teachers and their unions for low test scores. Wrong. The real fault lies with a society that refuses to take responsibility for conditions in which our children must live and learn. If we really cared about our children, we would (1) train teachers to support the social, emotional, and intellectual development of their students, (2) encourage and support local civic organizations to fight for our kids, and (3) demand national policies that build economic opportunity for the poor.
In her book, As Bad as They Say? Three Decades of Teaching in the Bronx, Janet Grossbach Mayer describes her combat experience – teaching kids in one of America’s poorest school districts. Her real-life, hands-on lessons contrast dramatically with the claims made by the financiers of public school reform.
How Poverty, Homelessness, and Hunger Effect Education
Ms. Mayer shows that poor children can excel despite the fact that all the demographic odds are stacked against them. Every testing program shows the tight correlation between scores and family income. Poverty dwarfs the impact made by schools and teachers in many ways that are related to family income.
Long before the first day of school, poverty takes a terrible toll on a child’s chances to excel. The medical care and nutrition that is readily available to pregnant women with higher incomes is either not there for poor mothers or is much harder to find. Consider too the educational levels achieved by the parents of poor children. Add in the vocabulary these kids hear and the negative, often violent experiences to which they are exposed before that first day of school.
The schools these kids are destined to attend are underfunded with overcrowded classrooms inside deteriorating, rat- and mouse-infested buildings. Bathrooms are dirty. There is often no soap or toilet paper. Ms. Mayer claims that suburban schools “spend double, sometimes triple, the amount of money per student that New York spends.” Inner city schools also continue to be racially segregated.
The nation’s economic crisis is pushing many more Americans into poverty. Foreclosures and job layoffs have pulled the rug out from under many families, particularly those living in low-income communities. Deepening poverty is inextricably linked with rising levels of homelessness, food insecurity, and hunger for millions of Americans. Children are particularly affected by these conditions.
Many kids come to school from roach- and rat-infested buildings and, as Ms. Mayer writes, from “divided families, hostile families, distant families, no families.” Students who suffer asthma arrive at school only to have their misery exacerbated by cockroach allergies and exposure to exhaust fumes. Once at school, they may have to climb flights of stairs to reach their over-crowded classroom, already exhausted.
Despite all these disadvantages, Janet Grossbach Mayer writes that her students were generally “young people of remarkable character, unlimited potential, uncommon courage, and indomitable will.” The school often provides the only stable environment they have ever known where a compassionate teacher may care for them and where a principal and guidance counselor may solve a personal crisis for them. The school may be the only rescue resource for kids arriving daily from such fragile situations.
How Important Are Low Test Scores?
The fact is that American students have never performed that well on standardized tests. Shameful though this fact is, it does not promise national economic decline. After all, for most of the past 50 years, America’s economy has been robust. Those to blame for the current great recession are not poor students. Those responsible are America’s best, brightest, and richest who work on Wall Street and who govern the country.
The crisis in education is nothing new either. A century ago, inner city schools were just as overcrowded; but instead of poor African-American and Hispanic kids, they were filled with immigrant children from Europe who didn’t speak English. Newspapers at the time warned that America was being drowned by inferior cultures.
Diane Ravitch writes in “School ‘Reform’: A Failing Grade” in the September 29, 2011 issue of The New York Review of Books, that “no country in the world has ever achieved 100 percent proficiency for all its students, and no state in this nation is anywhere close to achieving it . . . The Bush-era law is a public policy disaster of epic proportions, yet Congress has been unable to reach consensus about changing it.”
Utter Failure: No Child Left Behind
NCLB was signed into law by President George W. Bush in January 2002. It mandated that every public school must test all children in reading and mathematics from grades three through eight. Every student in every racial and ethnic group was expected to reach proficiency in those subjects by 2014. The Obama Administration has continued to support NCLB despite its ten year record of failure. The measure for why it should be named the worst federal education legislation in history was announced recently by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan: by federal standards, more than 80 percent of American public schools would be labeled “failing” in 2011.
To get the numbers up, it’s no wonder that schools threatened with such impossible goals and standards have resorted to the kinds of cheating that led to the test score scandals that embarrassed Washington, D.C. and New York City.
On September 8, 2011, when the Obama administration agreed to grant states waivers from the stringent testing standards required by the law, Secretary Duncan said, "Unfortunately under current law you actually see some states moving closer to a 90 percent failure rate and to me that doesn't reflect reality. That's an absolute distortion of the picture. To see them all labeled as failures is dishonest. It is demoralizing to teachers and it's confusing to students and parents."
Even though the right-wing has used low test standardized scores to promote its efforts to privatize public education and reduce the status of teachers, four of the eight announced GOP presidential candidates have also agreed that the law should be revamped.
Most Charter Schools Are Also Failing
Research studies agree that students in charter schools have had no more success on standardized tests than public school children, despite their reliance on tight discipline and on non-union, lower-pay, no-benefits teachers often recruited from Teach for America.
The New York Times reported on May 2, 2010,“. . . for all their support and cultural cachet, the majority of the 5,000 or so charter schools nationwide appear to be no better, and in many cases worse, than local public schools when measured by achievement on standardized tests, according to experts citing years of research. Last year (2009) one of the most comprehensive studies, by researchers from Stanford University, found that fewer than one-fifth of charter schools nationally offered a better education than comparable local schools, almost half offered an equivalent education and more than a third, 37 percent, were ‘significantly worse.’”
Most educators believe that standardized tests are not scientific instruments. Nevertheless, the financiers of reform remain strict believers in measurable results. They claim that teachers are the primary reason for student failure. They blame the unions for propping up bad teachers. Right-wing reformers say that schools are crippled by teachers’ unions. Yet, school students in non-union states do no better on federal tests. Those who study in the most unionized states, such as New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, show the highest scores.
To show improving test scores, charter schools tend to narrow their curriculum to only tested subjects. In the face of these facts, proponents of privatization continue to call for the replacement of trained, unionized teachers with Teach for America candidates, ignoring the fact that charter school enrollments display smaller numbers of students with special needs and English language deficiencies. Teach for America’s five weeks of training does not include preparation to educate these students. After just five weeks, their graduates are expected to be qualified, full-time teachers in some of America’s most challenging, culturally diverse schools.
Scholars such as Linda Darling-Hammond, Stanford University, criticize Teach for America, saying that future teachers must receive vigorous training in professional skills and should commit to teaching as a career rather than opt for short-term charity work.
Dedicated, Compassionate, Motivated Teachers Can Make All the Difference
Public school systems have no control over the environments that produce their students. But colleges and universities can control the schools of education that educate future teachers, and school systems can work harder to recruit highly qualified teachers.
In 2003, the University of Memphis published a report entitled, “Highly Qualified for Successful Teaching: Characteristics Every Teacher Should Possess.” This meta-analysis conducted by Susan Thompson, John G. Greer, and Bonnie B. Greer focused on empirical studies of teacher quality and qualifications. It concluded that five broad categories of teacher attributes appear to contribute to teacher quality: “(1) experience, (2) preparation programs and degrees, (3) type of certification, (4) coursework taken in preparation for the profession, and (5) teachers’ own test scores.
The study may be accessed at the link highlighted above. It is summed up in these few lines: “Most people would agree that good teachers are caring, supportive, concerned about the welfare of students, knowledgeable about their subject matter, able to get along with parents…and genuinely excited about the work that they do….Effective teachers are able to help students learn.” Janet Grossbach Mayer epitomizes the teachers America needs now, more than ever.
Resources:
Janet Grossbach Mayer, As Bad as They Say? Three Decades of Teaching in the Bronx, Empire State Editions, An Imprint of Fordham University Press, New York, NY, 2011
Diane Ravitch, “School ‘Reform’: A Failing Grade, The New York Review of Books, September 29, 2011, New York, NY
Trip Gabriel, “Despite Push, Success at Charter Schools Is Mixed,” The New York Times, May 1, 2010, New York, NY
John Anderson - John Anderson has worked as a journalist, editor, advertising executive, Internet pioneer, and he has authored four books.
