Education and Class

My students would tell you that I can be a bit obsessive about building a case with data. I can (and do) make them trudge with me though charts and graphs and tables until their eyeballs begin to glaze over.

Thus, I am happy to find Lane Kenworthy’s new blog Consider the Evidence, in he’ll write about ” how available evidence helps — or fails to help — answer interesting questions about political, economic, and social issues.”

In one of his early posts, he analyzes the declining “wiggle room” in many household budgets. He writes:

We may be embarking on a period in which sour economic turns — an increase in unemployment, a rise in interest rates, a significant jump in gas or food prices — create substantial financial difficulty for a larger share of households than has previously been the case. …

Households now appear to be more sensitive to serious short-run financial strains — job loss, a medical problem that results in significant cost (due to lack of health insurance or inadequate coverage), a hike in rent, a rise in mortgage payments (as a low-interest-rate adjustable mortgage rolls over). A generation ago a household could adjust to this type of event by having the second adult take a temporary job to provide extra income. During the economic boom of the late 1990s they might have been able to switch jobs in order to get a pay increase. In the past ten years they could run up credit card debt or take out a home equity loan.

For many households with moderate or low incomes, these strategies are now foreclosed.

And thus, I would add, many household are less able to save to send the next generation to college, less able to absorb rising tuition, less likely to forgo hours at work for school, even as public discourse maintains that education is key to success in the new economy.

Though mired in side arguments about whether curriculum should be controlled at the state or local level (a fascinating objection, given state level standards and testing), I’m intrigued by a proposal in Wisconsin to mandate the teaching of collective bargaining an labor history. I’m particularly intrigued by how much support the proposed legislation has among teacher unions and the State Department of Education.

Taking the high road of advocacy for local control, rather than directly opposing the legislation, a spokesperson for a Republican legislator argues:

In a time when we’re having trouble teaching our kids the basic of history, is this really the time to be putting another mandate on when we’re not even doing the current stuff well?

In this volatile economy, teaching the history of the labor movement and about worker rights is something other than “basic”?

Two studies on education and poverty are getting press this week.

In the first, the Educational Testing Service reports that a state’s performance on federal 8th grade reading tests can be accurately predicted by only four factors, none of which can be controlled by schools: The percentage of children living in single parent homes; the percentage of eighth graders who miss at least three days of school a month; the percentage of children 5 or younger read to by their parents every day; and the percentage of eighth graders reporting that they watch at least five hours of TV a day.

Reporting on the study, Michael Winerup of the NYT advises caution. The child watching hours of TV, for example, may have parents who have too little time at home because they are working two jobs. The study notes significant gaps in the quality of day care available to poor and privileged children. In other developed countries, the NYT article reminds us, mothers have paid leave after their babies are born.

It’s curious, then, that the title of study (The Family: America’s Smallest School”) and the NYT article’s headline, (”In Gaps in School, Weighing Family Life”), make no mention of these policy factors, as if this were all simply a matter of parenting style.

Meanwhile, the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment reports that students’ socio-economic background affects achievement more profoundly in the United States than in other high- achieving countries. Education Week ’s (you may need to register ) Sean Cavanagh reports:

The exam’s results are not surprising, given research showing that the U.S. system tends to provide underprivileged students with less demanding curricula, poorer-quality teachers, and fewer educational resources than their peers in wealthier U.S. communities, said Ross Wiener, the vice president of program and policy for the Education Trust, a research and advocacy group in Washington.

“We give students less of everything that makes a difference in school,” Mr.Wiener said. If the public is inclined to believe “we’re doing as well as we can for these students,” he added, the international data “demonstrates we’re simply not.”

Both studies challenge NCLB’s assertions that we can close achievement gaps primarily within classrooms decontextualized from their communities.

Both negate NCLB’s promise that the best that we can offer children left behind by regressive social policies are underpaid teachers, toiling away in poorly-funded schools.

I’ve read academic analyses of the effects of No Child Left Behind; I’ve read political arguments for and against re-authorization of the bill. Every year, I read the ambiguously optimistic statements of local and state education officials as they explain annual scores to the public. I’ve listened to teachers grumble; I’ve commiserated with colleagues who struggle to convince our students that history and the arts still matter.

But I’d never choked up over anything NCLB related until reading Linda Perlstein’s Tested, an eloquent book about a year in the life of a low-income school with exceptionally high test scores. The teachers in this school are required to teach strictly to the script; the children write endless formulaic paragraphs. They’re subjected to frequent benchmark tests and practice tests and are sent home for the summer with fat notebooks full of yet more test prep worksheets. For their tenacity in putting up with all of this, they come to expect that they’ll be rewarded with pop tarts, pizza and popcorn. They beg to be allowed access to the science kits in the back of the room, but science is never included in the detailed, jargonistic learning objectives that teachers must write on the board each day.

For generations, we relegated poor children to a mindless curriculum that prepared them for little of value in the world beyond low-wage jobs.

Public celebrations of test scores attained only by relegating these children to more of the same are insidious at best. When these children stumble in an adult world in which their skill at formulaic writing on contrived topics holds no value whatsoever, they, of course will blamed for their own persistent poverty. Their test scores prove, after all, that the schools have done their part.

It’s an incredibly disturbing and important book.

Perlstein, L. (2007). Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade. New York: Henry Holt.