The Atlantic’s Emily Richmond touches on Florida’s “expectations gap“:
Education Secretary Arne Duncan, speaking at Ed Trust’s recent national conference in Washington, D.C., praised the organization for taking the lead in developing the “cut the gap in half” approach, calling it “very ambitious” but “also achievable.”
I spoke with Amy Wilkins, Ed Trust’s vice president for government affairs, who said she’s keenly aware that “when you put race and education in the same sentence and it gets volatile pretty quick — but the fact is unless we set higher goals for kids of color, and demand quicker progress, we’re never going to close that gap. And that means we have to name it, we can’t pretend that all kids start and the same point and that everything is OK.”
The Ed Trust-endorsed blueprint calls for schools to set expectations that students of color show greater — and faster — progress than what’s expected of their white classmates. While the final goal remains eliminating the gap entirely, Ed Trust argues that it makes more sense to set a realistic course for schools to chart over the next six years.
“Students of color start further behind, and even if they make more progress they’re still going to be behind at the end of six years,” Wilkins said. “But by 2018, the gap could be half of what it is today. If school and states are doing what they need to do, they’ll be educating these kids better than they ever have before.”
The gap was supposed to have been closed by 2014. That’s what No Child Left Behind wanted. Now the can has been kicked to 2018 or 2023, and we should expect it to be kicked again. I’m just basing this off of my understanding of diminishing marginal returns…to anything. NCLB placed heavy emphasis on closing the gap, and we’d expect that most of the gap closures would occur in the first few years of heavy focus and then diminish over time. One data set out of Florida indicates this trend. It’ll be interesting to see how short of expectations these states fall or how states manipulate statistics in order to comply (see: El Paso, Atlanta, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Philadelphia).
But Amy Wilkins is correct: you have to name the gap before you can address the gap. Richmond continues:
I put the question of states adjusting expectations based on a student’s ethnicity to Carla O’Connor, an associate professor in the School of Education at the University of Michigan. O’Connor, who specializes in African-American student achievement and urban education, said the new sliding bar for expectations is a huge step backward.
“No Child Left Behind presumed that all students would be able to learn and perform at similar levels – the current efforts suggest that not all kids have that ability, and we shouldn’t even try,” O’Connor said. “Once we shift to different standards, we’re institutionalizing the notion that’s not even feasible.”
O’Connor said there’s another problem to consider. The standards as they currently exist were already “pitching relatively low,” O’Connor said. “The tests we’re using aren’t capturing higher-ordered thinking. These are basic-level skills and now we’re saying we don’t think certain populations of students can even meet those expectations.”
Besides the fact that black and Hispanic students aren’t meeting these expectations, it’s important to point out that this isn’t a discussion of standards, per se. Every single student is held to the same standard. In Florida, a score of 3 on the FCAT 2.0 indicates grade-level proficiency. Every student is held to this exact same standard. But the expected distribution of different groups of students is different. Black and Hispanic students have the same standard, and they’re failing, in larger numbers, to meet it.
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“If you introduce a child who is in the 80 or so IQ range to reading at the usual age of six, he’s much more likely to fail than children with IQs of 100 or higher, and much more likely to be given up on by the time he’s at an age at which he could read with the same level of facility as the average six-year-old — that is to say, when he’s nine or ten. The average black entering first grade is about a year behind in level of development. A year is a crucial difference when it comes to readiness for reading and arithmetic.”
Interview with Arthur Jensen
Makes one wonder if there is a parallel focus on educating top-aptitude children. If NCLB is ostensibly about investing in left-half of the bell curve for make benefit of general citizenry, then one would think that somewhere attention is also given to super-smart youths who have the potential to be scientists and such.
Though I’ve never heard of such a program. Top-SAT students go to MIT or CalTech, without intervention from the Department of Education.
All this focus on “the gap” has to be discouraging to black students. I will only strive for small, obtainable goals and will not even attempt to achieve really difficult ones. I’ve learned in order to stay motivated, I need to set realistic goals, and only measure my personal improvement, not compare myself to other people. Anything else makes me give up.
O’Connor said there’s another problem to consider. The standards as they currently exist were already “pitching relatively low,” O’Connor said. “The tests we’re using aren’t capturing higher-ordered thinking. These are basic-level skills and now we’re saying we don’t think certain populations of students can even meet those expectations.”
You know, this is one of the few times I’ve heard someone who is (presumably) a lefty anti-racist admit how low the standards actually are. I appreciate her candor; she probably could have an honest conversation with all of us in the Steve-o-sphere. Take a look at the questions on these state tests. If you can’t find them online, go to your local B&N and get the study guides.
So, the standards are already low. What does it say about blacks, Hispanics, and plenty of whites that their kids suck at reaching these low standards? Yes, the IQ thing. But also, I honestly believe that most kids don’t even try on these tests. Why would they? They count for nothing.
We should base policy on more than a single test that most kids don’t care about. We should find a way to quantify classroom performance itself, via GPA, and maybe even grades on individual assignments. Lots of data, sure, but it can be handled. Will black kids come out looking more competent? I doubt it. Not by much, anyway. But at least we’ll have a fuller picture or and they’re failing to master the education process. We’ll also have recourse to more data that we can throw out whenever people start whining about how racist standardized tests are.
Oops. Meant, “At least we’ll have a fuller picture on how and where they’re failing to master the education process.”
As long as we keep coddling people they will never rise to the occasion. Return it to the old time methods where disruptive thugs get thrown right the fuck out of the school after 4-5 offenses. Let them get crappy ditch digger jobs and serve as an object lesson to the other students and motivate them to learn.
Oh and also eliminate welfare so the thugs can’t just get thrown out of school and laze around all day.
PA: “one would think that somewhere attention is also given to super-smart youths who have the potential to be scientists and such”
Not nearly as much as you would think. Programs for the gifted are few and far between, and usualy get so watered-down by the local schgool administrators that they are pretty much pointless except for soccer-mom bragging rights.
The real reason there is such a decline in student interest in STEM careers is that the pay sucks, and there’s no job security anymore. It isn’t like it was in the days of the Manned Space Program when you could actually get a decent job as a scientist. I know, I used to be a Molecular Biologist, until I got married and started a family and decided being working poor wasn’t going to cut it.
As far as the morons are concerned, I agree with a_peraspera: throw them the f*ck out of school and let them spend the rest of their lives shoveling sh1t.
People of Color have may children, therefore they are the future of America. We cannot jsut ignore them.
white people should have had more children
Liberals seem to miss a social engineering issue that hurts any efforts to close the gap. Libs like to rely on cultural or environmental factors in explaining the ‘gap’. Each passing year, the black kids who enter school are more and more likely to have been born to single mothers, to have been on food stamps, to have lacked a father in their life, or to have enjoyed food security. If libs do believe those factors play into test scoring, they should realize that with every passing year, those factors get worse for the kids entering school and reaching grades that involve the compared tests (4th, 8th). A black 8th grader in the 2008 test was born in the ’90s when the illegitimacy rate was in the 60s for blacks. The socioeconomic factors, if you give much credence to them, are getting worse, which would make closing the gap that much more difficult. In the nature/nurture debate, I say it’s more nature than nurture, but when the nurture factors keep getting worse, how the hell is any nationwide program going to help?
“Not nearly as much as you would think. Programs for the gifted are few and far between, and usualy get so watered-down by the local schgool administrators that they are pretty much pointless except for soccer-mom bragging rights.”
The few schools that do have gifted programs usually focus excessively on the arts and humanities. Very little integration of science or technology into the material. Of course, my perspective is from the 90s/early 2000s so things might have changed since then. While it was certainly fun to be pulled out of regular classes to do things like go to Renaissance festivals, make home-made paper or shoot our own movies, I’m not sure it benefited me much in the long run. In fact, it probably made most of us lazier.
I have never met or seen these ‘hungry kids’ with ‘food insecurity.’ I used to teach school in a low income area, and I just think this hungry thing is waaay overblown. If you don’t eat the food the cafeteria serves, (yes, I know it can be bad) you’re not ‘hungry.’ I also agree with throwing the thugs out and cutting off welfare if you are able bodied. I know so many people that are ‘disabled’ now, and most of them are not in any way disabled. What a crock