As a charter school leader in the South Bronx for the past decade, Rowe has seen what happens when resources are forcibly removed from the “privileged” and given to the “unprivileged” in the pursuit of “equity” over “equality”—with little regard for students’ uniqueness, humanity, or agency. Better is to teach disadvantaged children to defy, rather than confirm, diminished expectations.
As a charter school leader in the South Bronx for the past decade, I’ve seen what happens when resources are forcibly removed from the “privileged” and given to the “unprivileged” in the pursuit of “equity” over “equality.”
The problem with equity—defined as equal outcomes for students from varied identity groups—is that it inevitably denies the role of individuality. Rather than support students’ assets and abilities, “equity” limits them by race and opportunity.
Proponents of equity over equality view this status quo as a struggle between the inherently advantaged and the inherently disadvantaged, the “marginalized” and the “non-marginalized,” the victimizers and their victims.
What’s missing here, however, are the students themselves. Rather than focus on individual needs and outcomes, equity advocates merely count and sort—with little regard for uniqueness, humanity, or agency. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the pursuit of racial equity.
A bill signed last year by Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, for instance, suspended reading, writing, and math proficiency requirements for graduating high-school students. By lowering standards, the governor’s office said the law would help Oregon’s “Black, Latino, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color.”
The Oregon effort is but one example of wrong-headed “antiracist thinking” in education. Take the Evanston school district outside of Chicago. Over the past few years, the district implemented a long list of discriminatory “antiracist” policies, including reopening schools for in-person learning to students of color before White students. While intended to improve minority outcomes, it was actually an example of the exact type of race-based—if not racist—decision-making we should all be working against.
As one mother of a Black Evanston student said: “My son has wanted to be a lawyer since he was eleven. Then one day he came home and told me, ‘But Mommy, there are these systems put in place that prevent Black people from accomplishing anything.’”
A similar sense of defeat can be reinforced by antiracist curricula. Research by Eric Kauffman, professor of politics at the University of London, for instance, found that reading even a brief passage from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Letter to my Son”—which paints America as a nation built on a history of oppression—“was enough to reduce Black respondents’ sense of control over their lives.” And this lack of control can easily extend far beyond the classroom.
Similarly, David Quinn at the University of Southern California found that content emphasizing the achievement gap between Black and White students caused many adults to underestimate the capabilities of Black students. Rather than boost minority outcomes, the focus on “gaps”—instead of potential or achievement—actually reinforced the notion that individual effort cannot compete against systemic barriers.
Educators often have both high expectations and deep empathy for students whose home life or economic status infiltrate the classroom. Which is why in the schools I run—many in low-income communities—these students are being equipped to defy, rather than confirm, diminished expectations. We refuse to believe these kids lack opportunity, nor do we want them to believe this themselves. The whole reason to run schools, especially in lower-income communities, is to help students triumph from victimhood to victory. At our Vertex Partnership Academies high school opening in August in The Bronx, for instance, students will be able choose either a traditional college pathway or a two-year careers course offering industry credentials in computer science, health care, construction/architecture, or media. Tailoring education opportunities to student needs better positions them for successful careers.
Across America, parents need to fully understand what’s at stake when antiracist dogma enters the classroom. Rather than expand opportunities, it almost inevitably leads to two potential outcomes: 1) Black students must equal the performance of White students, or (2) Black success equals the percent of Black representation in the population. While both may sound logical, they actually place a ceiling on Black potential.
I am against racism, but I am not “antiracist”—at least not the way “antiracist” is defined in mainstream progressive circles. I also believe that the most effective way to confront bigotry is not with more bigotry. Yet this is exactly what happens every time we reduce students and faculty to their race or gender. We focus on the insurmountability of systemic racism rather than empower young people to believe that they possess the power—and, yes, agency—to surmount it.
Editor’s note: This was first published by the New York Post.
Covid “learning loss” has two causes: the loss of in-person instruction in the spring of 2020 and the reliance on remote learning thereafter (which Tom Kane and colleagues quantify in an article in The Atlantic).
As a result, many experts expect 2022 NAEP declines versus, say, 2019 NAEP.
I see that bet, and raise. I expect that in the next two school years, even without much Covid-related closure or remote learning, we’ll see even greater declines. That is, rather than bouncing back, NAEP 2024 scores will be even lower than 2022. People are trying to solve “pandemic learning loss” as if that loss has stopped because remote learning and school closures have stopped.
But I believe the boat is still taking on water and still leaking.
1. Student “agency” has declined
Kids who are supposedly back to normal, in-person schooling describe a lower bar, less effort, and more goofing around. The in-person experience has changed. It’s hard to quantify, but local news stories about this are not uncommon.
Students are inclined to do less, to be on their screens instead. Moreover, the students are nudged, encouraged, cajoled, and chased less by the adults, by both parents and teachers—who are more likely to be on their screens. That was true pre-Covid, and now it’s accelerated.
2. The four horsemen of the labor shortage apocalypse
Support positions like bus drivers, nurses, and substitute teachers are in really short supply. This means school principals are troubleshooting urgent stuff, like “Mrs. Jones’s classroom has no adult in it” or, in some places, “nobody picked up the five kids on Madison Street.”
Some places have teacher shortages—of course—so not only are some shaky teachers likely getting jobs who would normally be rejected by hiring committees, but principals are probably afraid to critique teachers for fear they may go elsewhere. Professional expectations have fallen in many sectors, and there’s little reason to believe that K–12 is exempt.
All the factors above demoralize good teachers and make them more likely to leave. This only worsens the cycle.
Finally, educators look at the cost-benefit tradeoff of being a principal versus “staying a teacher”—and it has pointedly moved against leadership. Controversies surrounding critical race theory and social-emotional learning feel unwinnable to many leaders. Some who felt underappreciated in normal times now feel completely overwhelmed. And unlike for-profit companies that pay leaders a large premium for putting up with stuff, K–12 does not do that; the hourly wage gain to leave teaching and become a principal is small.
3. The breakdown of order in some schools
Even before the pandemic, well-intentioned but poorly-executed behavior management systems like “restorative justice” eroded the structure of some schools. Fixing that was on the to-do list of many school leaders circa 2019. It’s still undone. Now in 2022, add in rising crime outside schools, plus key staff turnover, and we should expect more culture challenges inside schools.
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Against these three obstacles, one might say, “Yes, but schools will have billions in federal ESSER funds. We’ve taken a pandemic hit that will show up on NAEP. But now Covid is endemic. Schools will mostly be back to normal. Surely the big money will help right the ship in 2023 and 2024.”
I’ll bet against that, and very much hope to be wrong. (A prediction market would be very helpful in this instance.)
Yes, schools will have nice new HVAC systems. And broadband. But I don’t think that will drive learning gains. Teachers will yawn their way through all the PD. Do we really need another 500 studies showing that this stuff does not work? The tutoring—goodness, the vaunted tutoring in real life is not going well, with some notable exceptions. And the “Build Back Better” buzz of 2021, where the Covid interruption would unleash a wave of school redesign that leads to achievement gains for kids? That has died down.
I don’t have any easy answers. But, folks, we have to stop hiding from what so many teachers and students are saying and seeing: The ship is taking on more water.
Every teacher of struggling readers has experienced the moment when a student says, “I read it, but I didn’t get it.” It can be a bewildering experience. Why don’t they get it?
For several decades, elementary schools in New York City and across the country have turned to Columbia University education professor and acclaimed reading guru Lucy Calkins to answer that question. But in recent years, her influential and best-selling “Units of Study” curriculum has faced an intense barrage of criticism from experts who complain that its “balanced literacy” approach is ineffective and gives short shrift to phonics—teaching children to look at pictures and guess words, for example, instead of sounding them out.
Schools Chancellor David Banks has announced plans to move literacy instruction in New York City away from Calkins’s curriculum in favor of approaches based on the “science of reading,” including phonics. Perhaps as a result, Calkins now appears to have conceded the argument, promising in a lengthy New York Times article to include “daily structured phonics lessons” in her program. That’s welcome news, but it’s not enough.
The South Bronx elementary school where I taught fifth grade for several years was a proponent of Calkins’s approach. We adopted her teaching methods and employed her literacy coaches for years, to very little effect. Her greatest sin against literacy comes after kids learn to “decode” the written word, whether or not they are taught with phonics, which is just the starting line for reading.
Calkins’s literacy philosophy is aimed at children developing a “lifelong love of reading” and discovering the intoxicating power of their own voices as writers. This mostly entails kids reading books they chose themselves and writing about their own experiences and interests. That may sound engaging and fun for kids (and it often is), but it can be fatal to sophisticated adult literacy, particularly for disadvantaged children.
Here’s why: Reading feels like riding a bike to good readers. Once you learn how to pedal and balance, you can ride nearly any bike. Reading may feel the same way; reading comprehension, however, is far more complicated. It depends on the reader and writer having in common a lot of background knowledge, vocabulary, and context. Consider the common word “shot.” Phonics instruction can ensure children can read the word, but it means different things on a basketball court, in a doctor’s office, and when the repairman uses it to describe your dishwasher.
Words and the ability to “decode” them are just the tip of the iceberg; comprehension lies beneath. The critical role of shared knowledge to language proficiency is the basic insight of another, less-heralded professor, the University of Virginia’s E.D. Hirsch, Jr. Hirsch is something of the anti-Calkins and preaches a very different message: For education to work as an engine of equity and upward mobility, schools must do everything in their power to expand children’s horizons, ensuring they get a well-rounded education in science, history, literature, and the arts—access to the rich knowledge and vocabulary that undergird literacy.
Calkins’s work mostly disregards this fundamental insight, focusing students’ attention in the mirror instead of out the window. For low-income kids who are less likely to grow up in language-rich homes and don’t have the same opportunities for enrichment as affluent kids, the opportunity costs of Calkins’s “philosophy” are incalculable. Endless hours of class time that could be building knowledge and vocabulary are squandered.
I witnessed this daily in my South Bronx elementary school, where fewer than 20 percent of students passed state reading tests. I never had a single student unable to read words printed on a page. When they were reading and writing about topics they knew—the Calkins method—students did well. But when asked to read about unfamiliar topics on state tests, they often struggled. They read it, but they didn’t get. One principal I worked under attributed our low scores to “test anxiety,” but that wasn’t the problem. Their education was all mirrors and no windows.
It is well that Calkins has finally seen the light on phonics, however begrudgingly. But her approach commits even greater sins, particularly against low-income children, that phonics alone can’t fix.
Editor’s note: This was first published by the New York Post.
The clatter that rose in late 2021 over New York City’s plan to phase out its gifted and talented (G/T) programs had much to do with the presumed negative effects of such programs on racial sorting. Despite the shelving of that ill-conceived plan, hostility to G/T education persists based on the supposed reduction of segregation that would follow their elimination. A working paper from Williams College economist Owen Thompson examines an enormous cache of data investigating whether G/T programs do indeed contribute to racial segregation.
The study encompasses the racial composition of G/T programs at virtually every public elementary school (charter, magnet, and alternative included) in the U.S. over the nine-year period 2009–18. Thompson excludes schools that offered solely a special education curriculum and those not observed in all survey years, resulting in sample of over 46,700 schools that offered any grade from K through 6. It spans all fifty states plus Washington, D.C. He uses multiple waves of the federally mandated Office of Civil Rights Data Collection, which gathers information about whether each elementary school operates a G/T program, as well as the race-specific enrollments of the program and of the entire school.
First, Thompson looks into G/T enrollment and finds, as many other studies have, that such programs disproportionately enroll White and Asian students while Black, Hispanic, and Native American students are under-enrolled.
Analysts use two approaches for measuring within-school and between-school racial segregation—one of which treats G/T programs as separate schools, since many of these programs use pull out classes. The first measure is a dissimilarity index, which is basically the share of students from Group A who would need to move across schools in order to make the racial composition of each school match that of the district. The second measure is an exposure index, which gauges how intensively one group is exposed to another group; it can be understood as the probability that, among members of Group A, a randomly selected peer will be from group B. In general, results from both indices show that students of different racial groups would be more evenly distributed across non-G/T programs in the absence of G/T education, but the magnitudes of these changes are small, and eliminating G/T programs would have essentially no impact on the exposure of underrepresented minority students to White and Asian students.
The primary explanation is that G/T programs account for a small overall share of enrollments, and notwithstanding their imbalances, they do enroll substantial numbers of underrepresented students. For instance, in 2017–18, the schools included a total of 23.6 million students, of whom 1.6 million were in G/T programs—a quantitatively modest 6.9 percent share of overall enrollment. Further, 27 percent of total G/T enrollments consisted of underrepresented minority students, which is less than their overall enrollment share (47 percent), but still substantial.
Finally, Thompson examines both the elimination and initiation of G/T programs across the study period and finds no consistent evidence that they impact a school’s race-specific enrollments. For example, there was no apparent break in the trend line for White and Asian enrollment after the elimination or initiation of a G/T program.
The study’s conclusion reads, “On balance, the findings indicate that G/T programs are a small or negligible contributor to racial segregation in U.S. elementary schools. Eliminating all G/T programs nationally would have a minimal estimated impact on standard measures of racial segregation, and the presence of a G/T program does not appear to causally impact the racial composition of enrollments over time.” In short, the evidence seems clear that, despite rhetoric to the contrary, gifted and talented programs are not the cause of racial segregation in schools.
SOURCE: Owen Thompson, “Gifted and Talented Programs and Racial Segregation,” NBER Working Papers (December 2021).
A recent CALDER study examines the effects that earlier-grade teachers have on students’ eighth-grade math outcomes by analyzing Washington State administrative data.
The researchers followed nine cohorts of children who started fourth grade between the 2006–07 and 2014–2015 school years. The study focused on students whose data contained their third-grade standardized math test achievement, who could be tracked through eighth grade, who had background data including variables such as learning disability status and free-and-reduced-price-lunch eligibility, and who could be matched with one math teacher in each grade and school year of their education. With these constraints, the sample contained 173,858 students and 15,981 teachers.
Using a value-added model, the researchers ran two analyses. First, they measured the impact a student’s fourth-grade teacher has on their eighth-grade math achievement—and how that impact compares to that of their eighth-grade teacher. And second, they measured the impact on eighth-grade math achievement of replacing teachers in grades four through eight—so also grades five, six, and seven—whose effectiveness is above the 95th percentile or below the 5th percentile with teachers of median effectiveness. How much, in other words, does losing the best teachers reduce achievement? And how much does removing the worst teachers improve it?
There were three noteworthy findings. First, fourth-grade teachers do impact their former students’ eighth-grade math scores, but not as much as those students’ eighth-grade teachers—0.16 standard deviations versus 0.36. Second, replacing the worst-performing 5 percent of teachers in grades four through eight with median performing teachers raises overall students’ eighth-grade math scores by a whopping 2.5 standard deviations (mirroring past research on the topic). Third, both retaining good fourth- and eighth- grade teachers and replacing bad ones had positive impacts on eight-grade math achievement—but the magnitude of those impacts depended on the grade. Retaining a fourth-grade teacher above the 95th percentile of the value-added distribution, instead of replacing her with one of median effectiveness, had a larger impact on increasing later math achievement, 0.46 standard deviations, than replacing a teacher below the 5th percentile, 0.30 standard deviations. But in eighth grade, the results were opposite, with the replacement of ineffective teachers causing more impact than retaining the good—0.97 versus 0.57 standard deviations.
The policy implications are clear: Teachers matter—and their impacts, be they good or bad, last for years. Leaders should therefore strive to gauge teacher effectiveness in reliable ways, then strive to retain the best teachers and remove the worst. All of that is, of course, easier said than done. But when successful, the efforts would likely bear fruit.
SOURCE: Dan Goldhaber, Zeyu Jin, and Richard Startz “How Much Do Early Teachers Matter?,” National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (2022).
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Tom Kane, Harvard economist and director of its Center for Education Policy Research, explains the latest research on the disastrous—and inequitable—impact of remote learning on America’s students. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber Northern reviews a study on whether Black and Hispanic children with disabilities are placed in special education classrooms at greater rates than their peers.
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