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May 19, 2005

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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