For the past several months, Petrilli been pumping out posts about “doing educational equity right.” This series concludes with a twist by looking at three ways that schools are doing educational equity wrong: by engaging in the soft bigotry of low expectations, tying teachers’ hands without good reason, and acting like equity isn’t just an important thing, but the only thing.
This is the final article in a series on doing educational equity right. See the introductory post, as well as essays on school finance, student discipline, advanced education, school closures, homework, grading, and effective teachers.
For the past several months, I’ve been pumping out posts about “doing educational equity right.” Given that Eight is Enough, it’s time to wrap things up. Let’s conclude with a twist and look at three ways that schools are doing educational equity wrong:
Equity as an excuse for the soft bigotry of low expectations
A recurring theme of this series is how misguided it is for schools to lower expectations for students “because equity.” Of course, the schools and the elected officials, advocates, and journalists who embrace these practices don’t say they are expecting less from students, but that’s precisely what’s happening.
It’s most obvious in the world of advanced education, such as when districts refuse to let anyone take Algebra in middle school because not everyone is ready for Algebra in middle school. The backlash to this mindset is growing, thank goodness.
But other examples abound and unfortunately continue to be lauded in polite company. For instance, the notion that it’s inequitable and unfair to grade, or even assign, homework because some kids don’t have a quiet place to complete assignments away from school. Just examine this idea for a moment. Do we really believe that lots of American families are so dysfunctional that they can’t figure out a way to clear a space for their kids to do their math problems? Or that teenagers can’t find a place—a community library, the school library, even a McDonald’s—where they could get homework done? Why are we infantilizing kids and their parents like this?
Same goes with policies that allow students to turn in assignments late without penalty. Are we trying to teach kids to procrastinate? To teach them that real life doesn’t deal in accountability and consequences?
Or take school discipline. Plenty of well-meaning people who would never say “we can’t expect poor kids and kids of color to learn fractions—it’s just too hard” are more than happy to argue that we must accept all manner of student misbehavior because of poverty or systemic racism. Journalists might be the worst at this. Just last week, a major article from the Hechinger Report decried the use of suspensions and the like for “subjective infractions like defiance and disorderly conduct.” It’s one thing to be concerned about bias in meting out penalties for disruptive behavior. But as my colleague Daniel Buck wrote, in the real world of classrooms, this leads to paralysis from officials in the face of flagrant, over-the-top, disrespectful behavior by kids. And to misery for their teachers.
Permitting low-level defiance—defining deviancy down in this way—facilitates and fosters more severe misbehavior. If a student comes to learn that adults can be ignored and rules flaunted, behavior escalates. A balled piece of paper is thrown, a teacher asks the offender to move seats, but he refuses. The next day, he’s wandering around the classroom singing. The teacher asks him to sit, but he refuses. Eventually, he’s wandering the halls, telling teachers to “fuck off” if they ask him to return to class, so most don’t. Many other students have joined in the fun, and now there’s cacophony in the halls. Students in class question why they must listen to adults if they don’t want to when other kids get to flaunt the rules. Rowdy, unmonitored halls mean more chances for student conflict and fights.
Surely we can agree that all students, regardless of the challenges they face due to poverty or racism, should be expected to treat their teachers respectfully and comport themselves in a reasonable manner. Teachers in other nations would be aghast if told they had to accept this sort of treatment as part of the job. Indeed, I bet 99 percent of these kids’ parents would be alarmed, if not angry, to learn that their kids were being allowed to behave so atrociously in school.
“Defining deviancy down”—whether in academics, homework, grading, or behavior—will only let our students down. We should stop doing it.
Tying teachers’ hands
Another big mistake some equity advocates make is reducing teacher authority and autonomy for no good reason. To be sure, educators shouldn’t always have carte blanche to do whatever they like; bias is real and it’s one reason we’ve worked to get high, consistent academic standards in place and required teachers to follow them—ideally with the help of well-aligned, high-quality instructional materials. Again, to push back against the soft bigotry of low expectations.
But too often advocates force educators to teach with one or both hands tied behind their backs—refusing to let them use time-tested, effective practices because they conflict with recent preachings of the high church of educational equity.
For example, some districts don’t allow elementary teachers to group students by achievement levels when teaching reading or math, and many more have moved to “de-track” middle school and high school courses, getting rid of “on-level” courses and putting everyone into (wink-wink) “honors” ones. Now imagine you’re a seventh-grade teacher. If your class is typical, your students enter your classroom at achievement levels ranging from third through eleventh grades. So your helpful district-provided instructional coach suggests that you cope by “differentiating instruction.” You might as well ask them for some magic beans so you can grow a sky-high beanstalk while you’re at it. Certainly they’re guilty of magical thinking.
Most research finds that grouping students by achievement tends to help everyone learn more, especially if those groups are flexible and continuously re-mixed. But because progressive education dogma declares any form of grouping or “tracking” to be suspect, we make life dramatically harder for teachers and make learning dramatically less effective for kids.
There are plenty of other examples. Telling teachers they can’t send disruptive students to the office and making them engage in lengthy “restorative justice” circles instead. Mandating minimum grades of 50 percent even when kids don’t turn in research papers or show up for tests. Not letting teachers dock students for missed homework assignments or refusing to participate in class discussions.
Constrained teachers are disgruntled teachers—which is bad for everyone and bad for equity.
Is equity like winning—the only thing that counts?
Finally, some educators and advocates act as if equity were the one and only value in education worth pursuing. I think this comes from a good place; no doubt our system has a long and sordid history of mistreating poor kids and kids of color. A swing of the pendulum was long overdue, and erring in the direction of equity is no terrible crime. But policies and practices that ignore everything else—and everyone else—will prove harmful and unsustainable.
So what are the other values that matter—or should, in our universal public education system? I would put excellence at the top of the list. That means doing right by our high-achievers, who hold particularly great potential for solving our world’s problems and boosting our economy someday. But it also means striving for excellence in everything that schools do, from the basics of teaching and learning, to tutoring and counseling, to extra-curricular activities and more.
A commitment to excellence need not conflict with a drive for equity. Indeed, as I wrote last year, excellence is not the enemy of equity. It’s mediocrity that is the enemy of equity as well as excellence. So we must raise the alarm when “equitable practices” promote mediocrity instead.
Another important value is efficiency. Even America’s relatively well-funded public education system doesn’t have unlimited resources. Trade-offs are inescapable. But we’ll be more likely to land on effective approaches if we look for practices that promote equity and excellence and efficiency. When it comes to discipline and student behavior, for example, it’s not enough to come up with strategies that might be ideal for the disruptive kids. We also must protect the learning environment of their peers and consider the demands on teachers’ limited time.
So it is with the difficult issue of under-enrolled schools. Equity advocates may want districts to avoid closing schools with high proportions of poor kids and kids of color. But if those are the schools with dwindling student populations, such an outcome may be unavoidable—again, because excellence (getting kids into better schools) and efficiency (not wasting money on tiny campuses) matter, too.
Equity advocates shouldn’t be myopic. Balancing their impulse for fairness with concerns for excellence and efficiency will make it more, not less, likely that they will achieve their goals.
—
I don’t want to end on a sour note. These many months (and words) spent digging into educational equity make me optimistic that common ground can be found, even on contentious issues. If we assume positive intent, look for practical answers, and avoid getting hung up on culture-war fights over language, we can move beyond the squabbles and toward solutions. Let’s do educational equity right—and let’s do it now!
Last weekend, I gave a talk at the U.S. ResearchEd conference in Greenwich, Connecticut, on “The Case for Curriculum,” based on a paper I wrote for Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, which was published this week at The 74. But truth in advertising forced me to come clean with my audience: The case for curriculum is in equal measure the case for making the classroom job doable by the teachers we have—not, as Donald Rumsfeld might have put it, the teachers we wish we had or hope to have someday.
It’s a simple fact that we’ve seemed determined to ignore for decades: We need nearly four million women and men to staff America’s classrooms. A number that large means teachers will be, by definition, people of average abilities. In no field of human endeavor from the performing arts and athletics to science and business do we look at the most gifted practitioners as proof points. Yet this is the mindset we apply, at least tacitly, to teachers. What the most talented and driven can accomplish with children is what we expect from all teachers. We expect them to both design and deliver lessons at an expert level when doing either is a challenge, while also “differentiating instruction” in classes with wildly divergent student skill levels. Increasingly we expect them to master the arcana of the “science of reading” and to play a quasi-therapeutic role under the banner of “social emotional learning”—if not also practitioners of mental health.
We have fresh data that speak to the impossibility of these demands. The vast majority of teachers surveyed in a new Pew Center report say there’s not enough time in the workday to accomplish all that’s expected of them. Eighty-four percent say they “don’t have enough time during their regular work hours to do tasks like grading, lesson planning, paperwork, and answering emails.”
Teachers cite a broad range of thing that bleed away their time, according to Pew, from noninstructional work such as hallway monitoring or lunch duty (24 percent); helping students outside class time (22 percent); and being asked to cover other teachers’ classes (16 percent). But the biggest one by far, cited by 81 percent of teachers as a “major reason” they can’t get all their work done (and a minor reason by nearly all the rest), is that they “just have too much work.” To be sure, many other issues compound teacher stress these days, including students distracted by cell phones, chronic absenteeism, behavior problems, and verbal abuse from students. But if you’re one of those who thinks teaching is easy because of summers off and school days that end in mid-afternoon, the Pew survey is a sobering read. The bottom line is that it’s time to take a clear-eyed look at the ever-spiraling demand we place upon teachers and talk seriously about taking things off their plate and making the job doable by the workforce we have.
To my mind, the most obvious target is curriculum. We know from various RAND surveys that nearly all teachers draw upon “materials I developed and/or selected myself” to teach English language arts, for example. Those materials don’t create themselves. An MDR study shows that teachers spend seven hours per week searching for instructional resources and another five hours  creating their own classroom materials. That’s twelve hours not spent reviewing student work, giving feedback, building relationships with students and parents, and many other potentially higher value activities that a classroom teacher is literally the only person positioned to perform. Curriculum materials can be created or selected by someone else.
If the effort it takes to find and create materials could be shown to enhance student outcomes, it would be time well spent. But Fordham’s own report, The Supplemental Curriculum Bazaar, showed “a major mismatch between what content experts think educators should (and shouldn’t) use in classrooms and what teachers, hungry for instructional resources, are choosing to download.”
On Twitter, Mike Petrilli took warm notice of my Hoover report, which is flattering, but noted “it’s too glum” to say curriculum reform is one approach to raising student achievement that hasn’t been tried. He cited the launch of the EngageNY website and “a huge uptick in adoption of [high-quality instructional materials,] especially in math.” Joanne Weiss also chided me for not citing the Council of Chief State School Officers’ Instructional Materials and Professional Development (IMPD) Network, which has worked since 2017 to get HQIM in the hands of teachers in more than a dozen states and ensure professional development grounded in their use.
These are fair criticisms from respected colleagues. The turn, however, will come when we see more crucial time devoted to diagnosis, intervention, and feedback; evidence—in what people do, not what they say—that curriculum is central to teaching; and a shift in the culture of teaching away from teacher-as-lesson-designer-and-deliverer. When Tom Kane of Harvard looked at math textbook adoptions in six states over three years, he found “little evidence of differences in average math achievement growth in schools using different elementary math curricula.” But he also found few teachers using official curricula exclusively and, more tellingly, only “modest” amounts of teacher professional development on the adopted textbooks and curriculum. This suggests either a naïve “magic bullet” faith in curriculum as a difference maker—just get it in teachers’ hands and they’ll do the rest!—or evidence of its second-class status: If curriculum was central to school improvement plans, implementing it well would be a primary focus of teacher training and professional development, not an afterthought.
It is unlikely and not even desirable that teachers will cease their efforts to customize lessons and even occasionally prepare them from scratch. But hard evidence of a shift in practice will look like teachers spending fewer hours creating or curating curricular materials and more hours wielding them. Until that evidence emerges, the “case for curriculum” still needs to be made as a means of making education coherent, raising student achievement—and making teachers’ jobs a little closer to manageable.
In the mid-1970s, Ference Marton and Roger Säljö of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden noticed that their students took different approaches to learning. Some focused on remembering information, others on understanding it: connecting it to other information, figuring out when it might be useful, and so on. Marton and Säljö christened the former surface learning and the latter deep learning.
Reading the last paragraph, you may have already formed the opinion that surface learning is bad and deep learning is good. But it’s not that simple. Not all content is deep. Knowing your multiplication facts, for example, does not require much conceptual depth, it’s all surface. And deep learning relies on knowledge of surface details. You can’t construct an argument integrating multiple causes of World War II if you can’t remember any of them.
So you need both; problems arise if surface learning is all you do. If math instruction consists of tips and tricks such as dividing fractions by flipping and multiplying, students will gain only a surface-level understanding. Conceptual understanding is harder to serve up, with the result that it may simply be absent for several grades. And so, if and when you at last arrive at calculus, the wheels come off.
This isn’t just a concern in mathematics. Whatever the topic, traveling beyond beginner levels and into the realm of experts requires depth. It has, though, proven difficult to induce students to take a deep approach. For instance, since the majority of assessments operate at a surface level, the prospect of being tested signals to students that they only need to memorize rather than to understand.
Changes, therefore, are needed. Deeper learning requires better teaching—and therefore better teacher training, better curriculum, and higher standards. But that’s a heavy and long lift, and in the meantime, tutoring may offer a solution.
We know tutoring works, but does it work for both surface- and deep-level understanding? Micki Chi, a professor at the Institute for the Science of Teaching and Learning who has studied tutoring closely, designed an experiment to find out. In particular, she wanted to know what kinds of tutor moves produced deep learning.
In her experiment, tutors taught the human circulatory system. Students then answered questions such as “What does the heart do?” which requires only surface learning, since the topic was explicitly covered by the tutor. But to answer “Why is your right ventricle less muscular than your left ventricle?” requires deep learning because students have to connect the question to information about where left and right ventricles pump blood. That information was covered by the tutor but not linked to ventricle size.
Chi found that there was far less deep learning than surface, and that what deep learning there was could be explained almost entirely by a student’s prior knowledge and reading ability. In other words, tutoring rarely produces deep learning for those who need it most.
Why? One answer may be that tutors often focus on stepping through a problem, so that the learner will be able to repeat the performance on a similar problem, but may gain little insight into what is actually going on. Another possibility is tutors’ tendency to jump, at the first sign of student missteps, into long, unsolicited explanations that, the literature shows, don’t reliably lead to learning. “Most tutors,” says Chi, “just won’t shut up.”
It’s also likely that tutors just don't know how to induce deep learning. Indeed, researchers have been unable to find a reliable method for inducing deep learning—until recently. It came from a surprising finding. When researchers tracked tutee emotional states during tutoring, the most common emotion displayed was confusion. Sidney D’Mello, a professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who has studied people working on complex scientific concepts, says “confusion reigns supreme during deep learning activities.” And confusion was the only emotion that significantly predicted learning. Not even student engagement could match it.
This led to a deep tutoring method that would be familiar to any Hollywood screenplay writer. The secret to deep learning, like the secret to a good story, is (1) a conflict or impasse resulting in confusion, followed by (2) a resolution. In learning, as in a good story, you do not want to rush either of them. The impasse has to feel like a genuine impasse, which it won’t if it is not properly established or if, from an abundance of eagerness, it gets resolved too quickly. The resolution, when it comes, has to come from the actions of the main character. In learning, the main character is the student.
Here is an example. A student is trying to make sense of a graph of a bicycle journey on a chart of distance versus time. At one part of the chart, the line is horizontal before climbing again.
Tutor: What is going on in this flat part?
Student: I think it means the road flattened out a bit. Then they went up another hill.
The student is reading the line as an illustration, not a graph. This is a common misconception. Most tutors would launch into an explanation of the correct reading. That may lead to surface learning—“flat means no distance traveled”—but without deeper understanding, that approach will draw the student into trouble when they read other graphs, such as those that plot velocity versus time.
Stop reading for a moment and think what you might do instead if you were the tutor. How can you create an impasse here—a way for the student to realize their answer cannot be true.
Here’s one possibility:
T: Can you tell me from the graph how far they travel between those two points?
Even if the student needs help reading the distance axis to answer that, they will realize something is amiss with their earlier answer. The tutor will be tempted to jump in again with an explanation, but it’s far more powerful to let the student find their own resolution and congratulate them when they do.
S: OK… So from here to here…that’s zero distance.
T: (Silence)
S: So…they didn’t move.
T: Right. So what do you think is happening?
S: They stopped, I guess. Maybe they went to the bathroom?
T: Awesome! Who knew these charts could tell you about a bathroom visit?
You can feel the new insight scratching like a pet at the door. Do we have deep learning here? Not yet. The student doesn’t truly understand what the graph is telling them about this journey in a way that would allow them to read other graphs. They may stumble with the very next graph they see. But a new track has been etched in their brain, ready to be deepened.
Coming up with impasse-generating questions in the moment is challenging. A good fallback that works in almost every case is to say “Are you sure?” In fact, that’s a good move even when the student is correct.
Perhaps this approach—what D’Mello calls “intentionally perplexing learners”—feels uncomfortable. And tutors may find the resulting conversation takes them way off their plan for the session. But that would be to miss the true value of tutoring. The goal is not covering—moving diligently through a set course of material—but uncovering—creating moments that reveal a student’s thinking and where it can be advanced.
Editor's note: This article is based on The Science of Tutoring.
The Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO) began in the mid-1960s as a direct result of school desegregation efforts in Boston. Originally christened “Operation Exodus,” 400 Black students from the Roxbury neighborhood whose families were fed up with foot-dragging from desegregation opponents enrolled themselves in mostly White schools with surplus capacity in surrounding suburbs. The entire history is worth reading, but the upshot is that the protest action eventually became a formal, structured voluntary interdistrict school choice program. Today, it serves 3,150 Boston students—nearly all of them Black or Hispanic—who attend 190 schools in thirty-three suburban districts. A January report from Tufts University researcher Elizabeth Setren examines the long-term impacts of METCO participation on student academic and behavioral outcomes.
METCO supplied application and award data for K–12 students between the 2002–03 and 2019–20 school years. Applicants were matched to Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s administrative data for school enrollment, demographics, and K–12 outcomes (MCAS test scores, attendance, suspensions, etc.) through the 2022-23 school year. The National Student Clearinghouse provided college outcomes data, which include any matched applicants who were eighteen to twenty-two years old between 2002 and 2022. Earnings and unemployment data from the Massachusetts Department of Unemployment Assistance cover 2010 to 2023 and exclude individuals with federal and military jobs, those who are self-employed, and those in jobs located outside of Massachusetts. Additional applicant demographic data come from the Massachusetts Department of Vital Records. The sample includes approximately 20,000 students who applied to METCO and entered first grade in the state between 2002–03 and 2016–17.
Frustratingly, no specific number of accepted or non-accepted students is provided for either comparison group. However, Setren does give us lots of details on how she set up the comparisons between applicants who were offered a spot in a suburban school via lottery and those who were not. These include using a two-stage least squares analysis to estimate the effect of actual METCO participation (versus simply an intent-to-treat effect) and controls to adjust for the fact that some suburban schools pause acceptance in certain years which could limit the comparability of participant and non-participant cohorts in and after those pause years.
Almost 50 percent of Black students in Boston applied to METCO during the study period, and about 20 percent of Hispanic students did so, as well. The full sample of applicants is almost evenly split between boys and girls, but slightly more girls than boys ultimately participated. Setren tells us those with and without offers have similar neighborhood characteristics, health at birth, family structure, income status at birth, and parental education level. Most students apply in kindergarten or first grade, with a sharp fall-off after that, despite METCO applications being open to all grades. Just under 50 percent of those who receive K–1 offers remain in METCO schools until graduation.
Setren found substantial positive impacts for METCO participants almost across the board. By tenth grade, participants score 50 percent closer to the state average for math and two-thirds closer to the state average for ELA than their non-participant peers. Participating in METCO increases SAT taking by 30 percent and increases the likelihood of scoring 1000 or higher by 38 percent. Participation also significantly increases the likelihood students meet the state’s Competency Determination graduation requirement. However, students are not more likely to score above a 1200 on the SAT, and METCO participation showed no impact on AP exam taking or scores. Impact patterns are similar in all thirty-three suburban districts that accept Boston students.
As far as non-academic outcomes, the program lowers the likelihood students are suspended by about one-third for middle and high school grades and two-thirds for elementary grades. METCO participation increases attendance by two to four days a year (despite the farther travel distance to school every day), halves the high school dropout rate, and increases on-time high school graduation by 10 percentage points over non-participants. Long-term, attending suburban METCO schools increases four-year college enrollment by 17 percentage points, though it has no impact on enrollment in the most competitive colleges. METCO participation also results in a 6-percentage-point increase in four-year college graduation rates and leads to increased earnings and employment in Massachusetts between ages twenty-five and thirty-five.
Additionally, Setren finds no disruptive effect of having METCO participants in the grade cohort on suburban students’ MCAS test scores, attendance rates, or suspension rates. Having METCO peers does not change the proportion of a suburban student’s classmates that are suspended, regardless of the concentration of METCO students in a given grade or class. These findings are also consistent across all thirty-three suburban districts.
Do these findings indicate that suburban schools are clearly “better” than Boston Public Schools, and that METCO families are accessing “stronger” options outside the city? This and other research show that METCO students are doing far better than their peers who remain in Boston. But they do not appear, as a group, to be reaching the same performance levels as their suburban-resident classmates. Setren doesn’t look into the usual suspects like per-pupil spending, teacher pay, or teacher quality, but she does provide some interesting evidence off the beaten track. She notes that METCO participation moves students from schools where about half of graduates enroll in a four-year college to schools where about three-fourths pursue a four-year degree, and posits that this could be a key mechanism. It is likely that a strong college-going culture permeates these suburban districts—from solid literacy and numeracy foundations in elementary school, to systematic math pathways and strong extracurriculars in middle school, to ACT/SAT prep, transcript burnishing, and FAFSA support in high school. If one or more of these factors is missing or de-emphasized in a non-METCO student’s urban school, this could account for some of the outcome gaps observed.
Even more interestingly, positive outcomes for METCO students—including MCAS performance and college enrollment—occur even though they are more likely to be tracked into lower-performing classes than their non-METCO peers. It seems likely that high expectations for all students, including mastery of lower-level material before moving on to the next academic challenge, is also baked into the culture of these suburban schools. More research is needed to get to the bottom of this, particularly comparisons between METCO students and their suburban-resident classmates as well as the specific school factors that might be at play. But the fact remains that decades after the bold individual action that created METCO, Black and Hispanic parents in Boston are seeking out this systemic option in large numbers today—and students lucky enough to win the lottery are reaping quantifiable rewards.
SOURCE: Elizabeth Setren, “Impacts of the METCO Program,” The Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, and Tufts University (January 2024).
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Derrell Bradford, the president of 50CAN, joins Mike and David to discuss a new coalition called No More Lines that seeks to end residency requirements for public schools. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber reports on a new study examining whether ESSER funding influenced spending on school personnel.
Recommended content:
Feedback Welcome: Have ideas for improving our podcast? Send them to Daniel Buck at [email protected].
Cheers
Jeers
