Urban Schools Need Better Teachers, Not Excuses, to Close the Education Gap
The truth is that America will never fix poverty until it fixes its urban schools
Yet the response to no-excuses schools has been to make excuses about why these gap-closing schools don't really matter. These high-performing schools succeed, skeptics contend, only because the schools "cream" off the best and brightest students or have exceptionally motivated two-parent families that push kids to succeed. The first in-depth examination of these inner-city secondary schools, David Whitman's recent book, Sweating the Small Stuff, debunks these claims. He finds that students at no-excuses schools are typically one to two grade levels behind when they arrive and that they are not from two-parent superstriver families.
Still, in the absence of controlled experiments with random assignment of students, skeptics of high-performing schools could continue to maintain that an unknown demographic X factor explains their success—until now. A new study by Harvard Prof. Thomas Kane and a team of researchers for the Boston Foundation shows that popular charter schools in Boston do in fact rapidly narrow the achievement gap, even after taking account of the characteristics of the students attending the charters.
The Boston Foundation study compares the growth in academic achievement of students who won charter school lotteries and enrolled in charter schools with that of lottery losers who had to remain in traditional public schools in Boston. The results suggest that the freedom conferred on charters to hire teachers and principals and to shape school culture made a huge difference in subsequent student performance. The students stuck in traditional public schools did only marginally better than their peers, but students enrolled in charter schools saw their achievement shoot up, especially in math. In a single year in a charter middle school, minority students closed half of the black-white achievement gap in math. According to Kane, charter school eighth graders' math scores were "very close" to the scores of eighth graders in Brookline, a wealthy Boston suburb.
While a demanding school culture can powerfully advance minority learning, boosting the number of top-notch teachers in inner-city schools is also critical to closing the achievement gap. As President Obama has stated, "The single most important factor in determining [student] achievement is not the color of their skin or where they come from. It's not who their parents are or how much money they have—it's who their teacher is." The impact of a bad teacher is hard to overcome by good parenting alone. One study of 9,400 math classrooms in Los Angeles in grades three through five projects that if low-income minority students could be assured of having teachers who fell in the top 25 percent of effective teachers four years in a row (in lieu of a subpar instructor), those students could close the achievement gap altogether.
School improvement may not be the only route to narrowing the achievement gap, but it is the royal road to success. Putting more resources into antipoverty initiatives with a demonstrable link to student achievement, like providing after-school tutoring and extended learning time or offering eye exams and free eyeglasses to needy students with vision problems, is a good idea. So, too, is expanding high-quality early childhood education programs, particularly as policymakers identify ways to duplicate the enduring learning gains achieved in a number of model preschool initiatives.
Still, once children reach school age, no antipoverty initiative has an impact on the achievement gap that even compares to the power of better schools. That does not mean that programs like housing vouchers or expanding the earned-income tax credit are not important or vital to reducing poverty among needy families. But the evidence shows that it is the good teacher who holds the most promise for significantly reducing the achievement gap.
More than a decade ago, education historian Diane Ravitch warned that "we must take care not to build into public policy a sense of resignation that children's socioeconomic status determines their destiny. Public policy must relentlessly seek to replicate schools that demonstrate the ability to educate children from impoverished backgrounds instead of perpetuating (and rewarding) those that use the pupil's circumstances as a rationale for failure."
Reader Comments
Response to Joel Klein
Urban Schools Need Better Teachers, Not Excuses, to Close the Education Gap
The truth is that America will never fix poverty until it fixes its urban schools
By Joel I. Klein
Posted May 4, 2009
I had a disagreement in a statement made by Joel Klein in his article. His insight was very interesting and good points were addressed. He starts to say that singer mother and grandmothers on food stamps no longer qualifies as a educational handicap. However, the statement on which he says that "..and more the now that we have an African American president who was raised by his single mother and grandparents and whos family was forced to go on food stamps on several occasions. Neither resources nor demography is destiny in the classroom.." Granted, blacks and other minorities ARE evolving and have greater opportunity than ever before. But I think it is unfair to use Barack Obama as the posterchild of eliminating minority poverty and educational gaps. He doesnt once even take into account that Barack Obama's mother was a white woman in addition to his grandparents. Sorry, Mr Klein..but race and generations of unemployment, abuse, discrimination, broken families, etc. will not be FULLY solved by just having an example such as Barack. If you dont incorporate race/culture in addition to disparities/inequities of this to the slightest degree in your Urban school planning...you have a problem that wont be solved.
Sabrina Kinsella
Arizona State Univerity
Grad Student
school and home
I speak as a former teacher and a parent. As a teacher, I saw exactly what everyone is talking about: a home culture that believes education is a waste of time and that belittles the child who wishes to pursue it. Many of the middle schoolers I taught had plans to be drug dealers, etc., as soon as the law released them from mandatory education. I have to say that, for these students, algebra and Shakespeare held no relevance. I also suspect that, given the chance to attend a charter school (which do not exist in this area), I don't believe these families would accept the priviledge for their child, because it would have no value for them. So there is perhaps some truth to the belief that the students in a charter school have a different background than many in public school. I could take a serious detour about the negative effects of mandatory education with no relevance to the lives of students, but will desist.
I should like to add, though, that I am a single parent with two children that I have raised entirely on my own since my younger child's birth eleven years ago. I returned to work when he was 3 weeks old. We have never lived above the poverty level for a family of three. My children are half hispanic, half white, so they are technically in the minority. We live in possibly the poorest state in the nation, where the only way the schools achieve the results demanded by the politicians is to teach the test year round, with no material not on the test. Despite this, my kids are intelligent, well-spoken, educated people with exceptionally large vocabularies and a knowledge base that continually surprises their teachers and other adults. Parents can overcome poor teachers, even while coping with more responsibilities than one person can handle, even while living in poverty. My children have had plenty of poor teachers, adults who can't speak correctly, who don't know basic facts, who are racist and closed-minded and simply self-centered and immature. That will never be an excuse for them not to excell.
Which just goes to show that it isn't all of one or the other - there are no simple, generalized fixes to education. Our nation continues to try to takea "one size fits all" approach to coping with highly individualized human beings. We want a political answer that leaves everyone with the money to spend on sports and entertainment. We think we should pay the people we expect to control and educate our children less than we'd pay a mechanic to repair our car. And we want to shrug off our own responsibilities for our children onto someone else. There will never be a political solution to awakening the intellect and spirit of our kids.
Finnish Model
If tax payers are ready to pay for it. Teachers are ready to proceed withe the Finnish Model.
Two teachers per classroom and smaller class sizes.
No more excuses.
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