Urgency. And candor
With
some insight and stupidity
Westchester
(NY) Journal News
November 6, 2005
Soul-searching of any kind, for individuals as well as entire systems, is by its
nature important. But close examination of "what it means to be us” proves
valuable only when it is painfully honest, and results in clarified values and
commitment to change. Otherwise it is navel-gazing.
More than 800 people attended a major education summit in Albany Wednesday,
gathering to confront the question of whether New York state truly is delivering
to all its students the education it says it is. Or says it wants to.
It was an informational and inspiring day, ended with "commitments” from
educational leaders to do something specific about "the achievement gap.”
But our fear is that, unless leaders and individuals summon the courage to take
on, and speak out against, the hypocrisy that permeates the state’s educational
system, particularly in the areas of funding and resource allocation, New
Yorkers’ collective gaze will remain downward.
Resource
allocation–as in what schools spend their money on–is the big problem.
Educators simply aren’t using technology effectively to increase flexibility,
the quality of instruction or the individualization of instruction.
A labored pace
Wednesday’s all-day conference on educational challenges was convened by the
University of the State of New York and its top educational policy-making body,
the Board of Regents. It actually focused on two overarching achievement gaps in
public education: one separating students and resources along income, race and
ethnicity, language and disability lines. The other: an alarmingly widening gap
between U.S. student achievement and several foreign competitors.
Ironically, the second one — the threat that nations like China and India will
soon eclipse the United States in fully educating their citizenry — may
finally be the propellant to force New York and the rest of this nation to
address the first — the fact that privilege, not equity, still defines
American academics generations after it was acknowledged.
"We’ve got to move from evolution to revolution in public education,"
said summit moderator David Gergen, former four-time White House adviser now at
Harvard University. "I think the critical point is for the leading
educators of New York to come out with a sense of urgency about change.”
Yet how much more urgency is needed? Four major national summits on education
have been held since 1989. New York has been raising its academic standards
since 1998.
Raising
them from where to where? Educators let academic excellence deteriorate to the
point where it became politically intolerable. That standards have been raised
does not mean they’re at or even near the level of excellence of past
generations.
In fact, gains in student achievement by all races and income levels are being
documented.
The
gains are mostly illusory. A consequence of jiggering with exam content and
scoring. See 2005
NAEP and New York Scores Compared and Nine
Commentaries on NY K-12 Exams: Testing to the Results.
It was announced at the summit, for example, that between 1998 and 2005, New
York was third among the 50 states in reading growth among African-American
fourth-graders and second in growth among Latino fourth-graders.
Yet the frightening fact is, the pace of improvement isn’t fast enough — not
for individuals and not for the nation’s future. Gaps remain embedded in
elitism, racism and classism, "isms” we accept and, indeed, are
comfortable with.
The first gap targeted by the summit — shorthanded to the "achievement
gap” between white and nonwhite students — is as familiar as the smell of old
wooden lab tables: By virtually every measure, despite huge efforts and even
some successes, students who are not white, students who are not in
higher-income brackets simply do not reach the level of success in school,
college and the work world that their peers do.
And the fault, keynote speaker Kati Haycock told the attendees, is not solely
that of distant lawmakers doing something with our money. It is, she said, the
"function of choices that we educators make.”
Haycock, president of the Washington-based Education
Trust, a nonpartisan group that advocates for the disadvantaged, said that
"every year, thousands of children head toward school already behind.”
"Sadly,” she insisted, "rather than organizing our educational
system to ameliorate this problem, we organize it to exacerbate the
problem.” We refuse, for example, to fully fund pre-kindergarten and
kindergarten. We allow poorly credentialed or "mis-assigned" teachers
to be directed to the neediest students. Targeting a "perverse” facet of
the teaching profession, she said that "status flows not from how good a
teacher we are, but to the status of the kids.”
To
say that "organizing," or rather "re-organizing" the
educational system is required to correct our problems is a recognition of the
principle that the system produces precisely the results it’s designed to
produce. It’s exactly right. But to continue to insist on 19th century
"solutions" is beyond stupidity. We need schools for The
21st Century Student, not more of the same structures that even when
politically pushed produce mediocrity. Every student should–and can–have an
exceptional teacher every day in every subject when research-verified, high
quality lessons are made available on-demand over the Internet all year long. It
is simply impossible to attain this level of quality by having 3.1 million
teachers attempting to replicate excellence. For students who thrive in
classrooms, they can have them. But the rest need to be freed from these
one-sized, single-paced, distraction-filled "learning environments" to
the greatest extent possible. And it should have happened yesterday!
By the end of high school, Haycock said, "African-American and Latino
17-year-olds read at the same levels as white 13-year-olds.” The patterns are
reflected in high school completion, college entry and college graduation rates.
Foreign competition
The second achievement gap has become particularly worrisome to the business
community trying to operate in a global economy.
"America is being challenged in a way that we have never — underscore
never — been before,” Nicholas Donofrio, executive vice president for
innovation and technology at IBM, said at the summit. Countries to which we paid
little attention 10 years ago, he and state Education Commissioner Richard Mills
said, are expected to overtake the United States educationally. China, Mills
noted, is providing an elite secondary education in math and science, and is on
a path to provide a sound, basic education to all its students by 2020.
It is that "sound, basic education” phrase that should shine the
unflattering light back on this state. Virtually every elected leader will
insist they support an education for all children — as long as they don’t have
to make the hard choices about how to fund it equitably. As long as they don’t
have to explain, for example, why it is perfectly fine for some cities in
Westchester County to spend less than half per student what suburban districts a
drive away spend. As long as student athletes routinely get more opportunities,
and supports, than disabled students.
Equitable
spending is nice. What’s equitable? No one knows. There are numerous ways to
define it.
A "sound, basic education,” of course, is at the heart of a lawsuit that
has preoccupied New York’s education system for more than a decade — with
little impact. An advocacy coalition brought the equity suit on behalf of New
York City school children, and a court finally ordered an additional $5.6
billion over four years in aid to them.
Like
investing $5.6 billion in plow-horses to feed a starving population rather than
investing in tractors, fertilizer and genetically enhanced seeds. It’s not just
a waste, it’s an utter disgrace and tragedy.
Yet Gov. George Pataki and other state leaders have fought the order, with
political impunity. Rest assured, no state incumbent has lost an office on this
issue. And as Haycock of the Education Trust pointed out last week, today there
is a larger gap in spending between poor and rich school districts in New York
than in any other state.
But
even the "rich school districts" aren’t producing the academic
excellence that’s possible and needed. That’s because they’re using the highly
inefficient and somewhat ineffective model of classroom-delivered, mass
instruction. Every other industry in the U.S. has been significantly transformed
by technology except education. It’s pathetic. What we need far more than pre-K,
equitable funding, teacher training and all the rest is parents with the guts to
tell the government to spend more on research and development and, within 5
years, create schools for The
21st Century Student. See S.O.S.
(Save Our Schools).
It is such hypocrisy and political inertia that education leaders and others who
say they are committed to closing identified achievement gaps must find the
courage to revolt against, loudly. Otherwise, academic achievement in New York
is about small gains, and navel-gazing.
Hypocrisy
is not the problem. Attitude
is not the problem. Caring is not the solution. Commitment is not the solution.
The system of classroom-delivered instruction is the problem. If educators were
doctors, they’d still perform surgeries without endoscopes.
Just like surgery, improving education requires a new approach. What passes for
education leadership today is deplorably unimaginative, anachronistic and the
living embodiment of absurdity. The elixirs and potions offered as cures appeal
only to the ignorant and the desperate. They ought to be banned by the FDA.
