[Mb-civic] Guess Who's Still Left Behind - Ross Wiener - Washington
Post Op-Ed
William Swiggard
swiggard at comcast.net
Mon Jan 2 05:34:32 PST 2006
Guess Who's Still Left Behind
By Ross Wiener
Monday, January 2, 2006; A13
This past fall new national data were released on the academic
achievement of our young people. In some ways the latest results from
the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as
the Nation's Report Card, were consistent with other recent performance
indicators: There is some progress in math and almost none in reading,
and more progress in elementary schools than in middle schools (where
reading levels actually have declined since 2003).
This modest progress is disappointing. Despite the intense focus on
improving the academic achievement of struggling students since
enactment of the No Child Left Behind law, we have to stop and ask why
more progress has not been made in narrowing the achievement gaps that
separate low-income students and students of color from their peers.
The results are sobering from at least one other perspective: The
knowledge and skills of students of color and those from low-income
families are not just low compared with white and more-affluent
students. They are also low in absolute terms, shutting these students
out from meaningful civic engagement and economic opportunity.
The scores of African American, Latino and low-income fourth-graders
indicate that the average student in these groups demonstrates skills
below the level required to classify numbers as even or odd.
Eighth-grade students from all of these groups on average score far
below the level that would indicate an ability to convert written
numbers into decimals.
One thing put in stark relief is the low level of state standards.
Students who demonstrate proficiency on their own state's tests often
perform far below that level on NAEP, suggesting that the states have
set standards too low to indicate adequate academic preparation. But the
differences are more than a matter of rigor -- they also reflect the
quality of the tests we're using. State tests more often assess basic
skills, whereas demonstrating proficiency on NAEP requires students to
apply knowledge and critical reasoning. If we are going to maintain the
fiction that it is acceptable to have different reading standards in
Mississippi and Maine, then national policy needs to provide some
incentives for states to align their expectations and assessments with
the demands of the real world.
The most important lesson from these results, however, is that we are
not doing enough to improve teaching and learning in our public schools.
There is no question that educators are trying harder to reach students,
especially those students who have struggled, but there is a crippling
lack of intellectual capital in many of our lowest-performing schools.
Instead of confronting this problem, we reward teachers with higher
status and higher pay the farther away they get from the students who
need the most help. This is true across districts, within districts and
even within individual schools, where the most experienced and effective
teachers are assigned to the "best" kids.
After the latest NAEP results, the Education Department finally began
paying attention to the federal law's focus on teacher quality. Just two
days after the national data were released -- after almost four years of
the Bush administration neglecting this issue -- Education Secretary
Margaret Spellings sent a letter to every state superintendent,
ostensibly serving notice that the department was going to ask for more
data on teachers and require states to develop plans for ensuring that
poor and minority students get their fair share of qualified and
experienced teachers. Unfortunately, the letter represents one more
broken promise to poor and minority students: States have already been
told they do not have to report inequality in access to qualified
secondary school teachers, despite the administration's professed
interest in high school reform. Moreover, the states are not being asked
to publicly release their equity plans as the law requires. This is a
shame, because research documents that teachers make a dramatic
difference in how much students learn and also that students who need
the most academic help get the least in terms of teacher talent.
Attention to teacher quality should have been first on the agenda for
leaving no child behind -- not an afterthought.
We don't have the luxury of deciding whether we want to take on the
heartache and hard work of improving public education. Given the rapidly
increasing pressures and demands of the knowledge-based economy, we need
to make sure that we take more students to higher levels of achievement.
That means pegging standards to the real-world challenges our students
will face as adults. But nothing will make up for a lack of commitment
to raising teacher quality.
We will forever consign millions of poor and minority children to the
margins of society if we do not act now to give them the teachers they
need and deserve. The latest test results indicate that we have
maintained and even built a little on recent gains but that the heavy
lifting in education reform is still in our future.
The writer is policy director for the Education Trust, a nonprofit
research and advocacy group.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/01/AR2006010100390.html
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