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May 19, 2005
Education expert links race and class in achievement gap
Jeremy Schwab
At the beginning of the school year, Boston Public
Schools Superintendent Thomas Payzant announced a campaign to
reduce the achievement gap between black and Latino students and
their white and Asian classmates.
While the plan calls for some major changes, such as a move toward
all-day pre-school, it mainly expands existing programs, such
as teacher training and tutoring, to better target struggling
populations.
Longtime New York Times national education columnist Richard Rothstein,
addressing a forum on educational achievement at the Boston Foundation
Monday, offered a very different vision of how society could reduce
the racial and economic achievement gaps.
Because the racial gap is rooted in class differences, says Rothstein,
it cannot be reduced by school administrators’ efforts alone.
Local, state and federal governments must be willing to spend
more money for everything from dentists and opticians to check
up on children at school to high-quality day care facilities that
give children of working-class parents the motor and language
skills they do not learn enough of at home, says Rothstein.
In his book Class and Schools, published last May by Teachers
College Press, Rothstein emphasizes that different home environments
contribute significantly to the achievement gap.
For instance, compared to working-class parents, middle-class
parents tend to have much larger vocabularies and, when their
children are faced with a problem to solve, they have a greater
tendency to ask them to weigh different courses of action and
use reason to find a solution rather than simply barking orders,
said Rothstein.
Working-class parents, in turn, have much larger vocabularies
than parents on welfare and a greater tendency to ask their children
to reason through problems, he said.
“By age three, middle-class children had vocabularies twice
the size as those on welfare,” he told the crowd of over
100 at Monday’s forum. “It is completely unrealistic
that this gap that already is there by age three is going to be
closed.”
Other factors that have to do with children’s upbringing
contribute to the gap. Black children watch far more television
per day than white children, according to Rothstein.
“Watching television does not produce the kind of eye-muscle
conversion that playing with toys does,” he said.
Health factors, such as higher risks for asthma, untreated cavities
and vision problems, lead to working-class children missing 30
percent more school days than middle-class children, said Rothstein.
“I don’t care how high-quality your curriculum,”
he said. “Children are not going to benefit because they’re
not in school.”
Rothstein believes that government agencies, after-school programming
providers, healthcare institutions, educators and activists of
all stripes must coordinate their efforts to reduce the gap.
He panned the narrow focus of standards-based testing, which has
become the main measuring stick that guides education reform.
Rothstein took a shot at President George W. Bush’s No Child
Left Behind Act, which requires stricter standards-based testing
in English and math and punishes schools whose students’
performance does not improve steadily. The law has not coincided
with the level of funding increase for which Democratic supporters
initially hoped.
“We have a national goal which says we can create a class-less
atmosphere for young people,” said Rothstein. “But
at the same time, we have national policies that further the class
differences for adults. I disagree that we are living through
tough economic times. We have created tough economic times with
our tax-cut policy.”
Payzant, one of five panelists at the Boston Foundation event,
defended standards-based testing and argued that Rothstein’s
approach assumes that working-class children are doomed for failure.
“The aspirations for students in K-12 has to be meeting
higher standards,” he said. “Therefore, I am a proponent
of standards-based assessments. In this city, many people associate
social class and low-income with a sense of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Payzant and other panelists agreed with Rothstein about the need
to take a more coordinated, holistic approach to dealing with
the achievement gap.
“[Public policy] is not aligned, not coherent, and funding
streams are often at cross-purposes,” said Payzant. “We
need the alignment of public policy in a very strategic way, so
that families can be dealt with as a whole, not just this health
need, that housing need.”
Moderator Blenda Wilson, president of the Nellie Mae Education
Foundation, noted that many of the public policy advocates, educators
and social service workers who made up the bulk of the audience
do not have much extra time to launch the type of broad-based
campaign for which Rothstein is calling.
“We are not unwilling to be advocates on public policy,
but day in and day out we are doing something specific on behalf
of these populations that takes up a lot of our energy,”
she said.
But Rothstein was adamant that those who care about young people
and work with them must be the ones to change public policy.
“If the people in this room don’t speak up on these
issues, who else will?” he asked.
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