Obama Effect on Education Will Be a Mirage Without Real Change
Feel-good story about making education cool is a dead end without pathways for minorities and the poor
By Richard Whitmire
Starting Inauguration Day, and pretty much every day since, I've been hearing about the wondrous "Obama effect." The essence appears to be this: The Barack Obama story, complete with a single-parent, tough-love mom who rousted him early each day to study, will inspire a generation of young people not previously disposed to believe that education is cool.
Teachers are working the Obama effect into their lessons to motivate their reluctant learners. Parents are all over it (we parents have always excelled at guilt). The Obama effect is not unknown to the new president, who recently told the Washington Post: "There is an entire generation that will grow up taking for granted that the highest office in the land is filled by an African-American.... It changes how black children look at themselves. It also changes how white children look at black children. And I wouldn't underestimate the force of that."
Even the New York Times weighed in with a story that made the Obama effect appear based on science (relying on a single study; am I alone in thinking that was sub-NYT standards?) by writing up a study claiming that black test takers upped their scores post-Inauguration Day, apparently the dividend of a "Yes we can" self-esteem movement.
I would like to join in the enthusiasm with no reservations, but as a veteran education reporter who spends a lot of time in classrooms, I see events that indicate the Obama education halo could tarnish early. And if that happens, the letdown will be a lot less fun than the buildup. Inspiration is great, but inspiration needs pathways to success. What I see developing for lower income and minority students are pathways closing up.
For the Obama effect to take hold and boost education equity, these developments would need to unfold:
College must become more accessible. If anything, events are headed south on this indicator. The beacons of hope for first-generation collegegoers are the big state universities, such as the 450,000-student California State University system. Budget cuts, however, forced Cal State to deny admissions to about 10,000 students. Georgia's state colleges are looking at similar cuts. Community colleges, which attract many of these first-generation collegegoers, are seeing a surge in enrollments while getting their budgets pinched.
Bottom line: The stimulus bill emerging from Congress might counteract some state cuts. At best: status quo.
High schools would need to improve dramatically. The stimulus bill proposed by the House would bump up Pell grants for poor students to make college more affordable, but that does not solve the biggest problem faced by these students: As a result of attending subpar high schools, they are not ready for college work. At Cal State, 6 in 10 students must take noncredit, remedial classes.
Bottom line: School reformers have been working on elementary schools for years, with some success. Middle schools and high schools, at least in the "Obama effect" neighborhoods, continue to be daunting challenges.
Literacy rates would need to soar. National education reforms have pushed curriculum demands lower into the grades, handing kindergartners the verbal tasks that two decades ago confronted second graders. Most hurt are those likeliest to have grown up in homes with few books, always-turned-on TVs and little conversation. Poor literacy skills explain the poor college readiness seen among these students.
President Bush's promising federal program to turn this around, Reading First, fell into disrepute over questions of effectiveness. Instead of patching it up, Congress seems inclined to turn the money for reading programs back to school districts to spend as they see fit. Given the districts' past track record in designing reading programs, that's not promising.
Bottom line: Expect more bad news.
Black boys would need a major rescue. Everyone knows black men face huge problems: Twice as many black women as men earn college degrees. But seeing the brainy Obama sinking those three-pointers will inspire b-ball-motivated teens, right? Actually, the debate over the decline in boys' school performance—and not just black boyshas sunk into ideological mire. As a result, most educators ignore the issue.
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Reader Comments
Education Reform
I think Berry Stern's insights are valid. I am 27 years-old and finishing my third year of teaching art to 9th graders in a Houston public school. I was an "exceeds" teacher my first year after a very good graduate program and a determination to do well. Each year I am declining in quality as I get more and more tired between students I am informed I must constantly control and poor administrators who run the school like a military jail combination. Trying to standardize education is a huge mistake. Our students are much more talented and creative then we give them credit and I'm all for making education more organic. Please stop blaming teachers and start listening to them. Listen to students too.
Needs of secondary students neglected nationwide.
Richard Whitmire has hit the literacy nail on the head for secondary students. That is only half the picture. The other half of the story is the need for remedial/developmental math in combination with reading instruction for secondary students. Half the students should be secondary. We cannot give up on teaching them what they need.
There is great emphasis nationwide on pre-school education. This is all well and good. The only problem is that nationwide the public schools have essentially given up on helping those secondary students who need to read/cipher better. Secondary students who need special help do not get better with no focus on their problems, and they do not even stay the same. What they do is regress in reading/math.
So with the lack of emphasis on remedial reading/math at the secondary level, the extra help given to students in preschool programs becomes less beneficial. In other words, an emphasis/focus on preschool education is almost useless if there is no emphasis/focus on remedial reading/math for those secondary students who need it. All the work on getting students ready to read when they enter kindergarten is lost if there is not continued help for many of these students who need it in the secondary levels of education.
Adults can be taught to read/cipher better. So can secondary students. It will be costly to educate enough college teachers to do the job in a reduced teacher/pupil setting at the secondary schools. Then it will be costly for the school districts to hire these specialists to teach secondary students and provide them with the materials and low teacher/pupil ratios that are needed for them to be successful. But it is absolutely essential to do so to meet the needs of the secondary students. Many students need an emphasis on reading/math year after year after year with no stop when they reach the secondary grade levels.
Take a good look at the disparity between the test scores of black/white students. The disparity in test scores gets larger as the students get older and into the secondary schools because there is a lack of emphasis on reading remediation at the secondary level. In the early 1970s this disparity was near 30 percentile. But since the lack of focus on remedial reading in secondary schools year after year the disparity is currently between 45 and 50 percentile.
Also take a look at the remediation percentage of freshmen students at the colleges/universities. There is one college in the country where over 94 percent of the freshmen have to take remedial courses before they can take college courses for credit. The average percentage for remedial classes for all the freshmen students who go to public colleges/universities in some states is over 50 percent. These numbers are horrible.
Perhaps going to an extended day calendar or a year-round calendar might be beneficial to the students. Year-round or extended day calendars do cost a district more money, but it might be worth it
Obama Effect
Whitmire is on the mark, particularly about the high schools. If we could get the high schools and middle schools right, the other issues of college accessibility,literacy rates, and rescuing black boys would likely take care of themselves.
High schools, and to a lesser extent middle schools, are unlikely to improve with the century-old structure of six-period days where students change what they do and with whom every 50 minutes in response to a bell. Too many students get lost in this chaos. Certainly, industry doesn't educate that way, nor does the military, nor do most of our competitors around the globe who bring teachers to where the students are rather than have students dash from class to class. Even in its best days, the "assembly line" comprehensive high school hasn't worked for half the students, including those who graduate yet need remediation when they get to college.
There are other approaches that seem to engage students more and make them want to get what their teachers can offer -- for example, intense, courseware-assisted, cross-disciplinary, team taught courses that use technology to save time and accelerate learning while emphasizing career guidance, workplace discipline and time management and blend the "soft" teamwork, customer service and interpersonal skills with the "hard" reading and math skills. In such programs students and faculty form a high performance work team that stays together for most of the school day and requires members to improve their collective as well as individual performance.
Certainly, teachers would need to be retrained to work in these computer-assisted, team-oriented, multi-disciplinary,continual feedback environments where they would work closely with other teachers to blend their curricula and talents(just as they would at top performing companies in industry). Yet converting schools into high performing work organizations is the key to engaging students and attracting and keeping the best teachers. To achieve high performance, high schools must replace linear assembly-line thinking with whole child thinking that integrates minds and bodies, academic and technical disciplines, multiple types of intelligence – in other words, our beings--with the way the world really is. When we are willing to embrace such changes, we will create a new generation of students who will want to expend their best efforts to get what their teachers can offer.
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