The research literature is awash in alarming statistics about the current achievement levels of America's minority children. In this ocean of bad news, a couple of findings bob to the surface as extra disturbing— the kind of information that makes you catch your breath for a second and then reread the words just to be sure you didn't get it wrong. One of these items is from the front end of the system, when children first take their seats in the classroom for their educational voyage: Disadvantaged kids, especially boys, who enter school as high achievers start to disengage from school in the first grade. The other piece of startling news comes from the back end of the system, when youths leave the schoolhouse behind: More black men today are in prison than in college.
These two facts—one reported in August by the Justice Policy Institute and the other in 2000 by the National Task Force on Minority High Achievement—form the sad bookends on the school careers of too many minority children.
But the research is clear: It doesn't have to be this way. In spite of tough odds at home—rough neighborhood, empty bookshelves, sparsely stocked fridge—children can learn. And despite the uphill climb facing struggling schools—embattled budget, distracted parents, ethnic and linguistic diversity—teachers can teach. A number of recent studies from prestigious research groups have uncovered abundant evidence that all sorts of schools in all sorts of neighborhoods can, in fact, educate all sorts of kids at high levels. And do. In releasing the results of a 2001 study showing that several thousand mostly minority schools are meeting and exceeding standards in their states, Kati Haycock of the Education Trust is unflinching in her remarks. "Those who didn't believe in the educability of all children could dismiss [high-performing, high-minority] schools as exceptions, as freaks, as outliers," she told Education Daily in December of last year. "Well, that is about to change."
Calling the problem a "gap" understates its depth and severity in U.S. schools. Secretary of Education Rod Paige characterizes it more graphically as a "gaping separation" in student achievement. Robert Slavin of Johns Hopkins University asserts that Americans face nothing less than a "crisis of equity" in their educational system.
The facts bear out these charges to a staggering degree. Consider this litany of statistics from various sources, including the National Center for Education Statistics, the National Task Force on Minority High Achievement, the Education Trust, the National Educational Goals Panel, and the National Assessment of Educational Progress:
Slavin is blunt in his indictment of this dire picture and insistent on immediate action. "As educators, we cannot wait for U.S. society to solve its problems of racism and economic inequity," says the researcher, who earned his undergraduate degree at Portland's Reed College. "We can and must take action now to prepare all children to achieve their full potential."
The reasons for the lagging performance of minority students are complex. But a recent study commissioned by the College Board was able to tease out "at least five factors" that help account for the gap, Education Daily reported in 1999. They are: (1) poverty, (2) schools with inadequate resources, (3) racial and ethnic prejudice resulting in low expectations for minority children, (4) limited educational resources of minority families, and (5) cultural differences of certain ethnic and racial groups toward learning.
Clearly, some of these factors are woven into the social fabric beyond the reach of schools. This leads many people to "assume that there is an inextricable relationship between poverty, ethnicity, and academic achievement," notes Douglas Reeves of the Center for Performance Assessment in the 2000 publication, Accountability in Action: A Blueprint for Learning Organizations.
But research is beginning to cut holes in long-held notions that schools have no power to overcome the disadvantages of home and neighborhood. The new thinking holds that students should be viewed not as burdened by deficiencies but as blessed by possibilities—that all children possess cultural, familial, and personal strengths upon which schools can build.
"A decade ago," says Haycock, "we believed that what students learned was largely a factor of their family income or parental education, not of what schools did. But recent research has turned these assumptions upside down. What schools do matters enormously."
As executive director of the Education Trust, a nonpartisan organization advocating for poor and minority kids, Haycock oversaw a 2001 study to find high-performing schools in traditionally low-performing neighborhoods. The nationwide analysis, Dispelling the Myth Revisited, turned up 2,305 schools with at least 50 percent black or Hispanic students that scored among the top one-third of schools on statewide math and reading tests.
Other research endeavors reinforce the finding that minority students, and the schools they attend, can and do excel. A U.S. Department of Education study in 1999, for example, closely examined nine urban elementary schools serving kids of color in poor neighborhoods that are achieving impressive results—schools that are, in fact, reaching higher levels of achievement than most schools in their states or in the nation. Another study, this one conducted by the Center for Performance Assessment, looked at 135 "90/90/90 schools"—those with the following characteristics: More than 90 percent of the students receive free or reduced-price lunch, are ethnic minorities, and achieve high academic standards.
These studies, Haycock says, shatter the "creeping malaise" that has infected the educational system.
"Somewhere along the line somebody decided that poor kids couldn't learn, or, at least, not at a very high level—and everybody fell in line," she says. "But the truth is actually quite different. Some poor children have always learned to high levels, and some whole schools get all of their children to levels reached by only a few students in other schools."
The evidence is in—it can be done. The question is, How? There is no easy answer to this most critical of questions—no silver bullet, no one-shot training, no canned curriculum, no proven formula. But in a survey exploring the strategies of 366 top-notch schools from 21 states that had bucked conventional wisdom, Haycock's think tank found one dominant theme: an intense focus on "high academic expectations" for their students. In Dispelling the Myth: High Poverty Schools Exceeding Expectations, the Education Trust and the Council of Chief State School Officers report that these exemplary schools succeeded, despite poverty, by:
The elements on this list, it turns out, capture many of the key factors that are emerging in the literature about equity and excellence among underserved populations. These factors are not separate and distinct; they merge and overlap. Still, it's possible to lay down some broad brush strokes for the critical elements in successfully educating minority students. Each school or district will then fill in the details from its own pallet of local needs and priorities. Research suggests that the following factors are absolutely essential to closing the achievement gap:
Research shows that disproportionate numbers of minority students have been shunted off to special education classes, sidelined on compensatory education tracks, or saddled with watered-down curriculum. Underlying these practices, often, is a pernicious belief that minority kids aren't up to tackling challenging material.
"Teachers underestimate the intelligence of their black students, contributing to the test-score gap," Education Week notes in a 1998 article about the release of The Black-White Test Score Gap published by the Brookings Institution Press.
Researchers have found that teachers, especially white teachers, "held more negative expectations" for African American and Mexican American students than for white students, Geoffrey Borman and his colleagues report in the 2000 College Board study, Advancing Minority Achievement: National Trends and Promising Programs and Practices. For example, researchers have found that teachers who view Black English negatively rate kids significantly lower in reading comprehension if they speak Black English.
"All teachers tend to communicate their expectations to students in either subtle or overt ways," Borman writes. When teachers hold low expectations for certain kids, Borman says, they call on them less often, give them less time to respond, or provide the answer rather than help them solve the problem themselves. Teachers may also criticize these students more, praise them less, discipline them more strictly, and in general pay less positive attention to them. These kinds of negative or dismissive behaviors, the researcher notes, fuel the "disengagement and underachievement" of students who experience them.
Observing classrooms in high-poverty communities over a six-year period, Haycock and her colleagues at the Education Trust have "come away stunned" at how little is expected of students and by the low level of assignments they get. In August 2001, The New York Times reported that Jack Jennings, director of the nonprofit Center on Education Policy, charges impoverished schools with a "general lack of rigor."
"Ask little of children in the way of academic achievement and little is what you tend to get," Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom note in their 1997 book, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible. "If the bar is raised, children work harder, and hard work is the road to success."
Recent findings show that all kinds of kids respond to challenging material that requires them to contemplate and cogitate. Borman cites research by M.S. Knapp in racially diverse, high-poverty schools showing that the more classrooms focused on teaching for meaning—"that is, geared mathematics instruction to conceptual understanding and problem solving, reading instruction to comprehension, and writing instruction to composing extended text"—the more likely students were to attain proficiency in higher-order areas. And they mastered basic skills, to boot!
Top-performing schools, researchers say, tie their rigorous curriculum tightly to district and state standards. "Clear and public standards for what students should learn at benchmark grade levels are a crucial part of solving the problem," Haycock says. "They are a guide—for teachers, administrators, parents, and students themselves—to what knowledge and skills students must master."
Haycock stresses, however, that many kids will need a leg up to meet those high standards and master that beefed-up curriculum. She says: "Ample evidence shows that almost all students can achieve at high levels if they are taught at high levels. But equally clear is that some students require more time and more instruction. It won't do, in other words, just to throw students into a high-level course if they can't read the textbook..."
Haycock is clear about what's required.
"One of the most frequent questions we are asked by stressed-out middle and high school teachers is, 'How am I supposed to get my students ready to pass the (fill-in-the-blank) grade test when they enter with third-grade reading skills and I have only my 35-minute period each day?'" she says. "The answer, of course, is, 'You can't.' Especially when students are behind in foundational skills like reading and mathematics, we need to double or even triple the amount and quality of instruction that they get."
In its 2000 report, Honor in the Boxcar: Equalizing Teacher Quality, the Education Trust bemoans the "pervasive, almost chilling" disparity in the quality and qualifications of teachers across neighborhoods. Analyzing data from several studies, the group found that kids enrolled in schools with high numbers of minority students are twice as likely to have teachers who lack state certification in their fields. In California, for example, 20 percent of teachers at high-poverty schools are not fully credentialed, compared with only 4 percent at other schools. In mainly minority high schools, the numbers are even bleaker. Only about half the teachers in high schools with 90 percent or greater minority enrollment meet even the minimum requirements in their states to teach math or science. Teachers at high-poverty schools are also less likely to have a college major—or even a minor—in their teaching field or classroom experience. And they bring weaker math and verbal skills to their jobs.
A 1998 Boston study of how teachers affect learning are typical of other findings. In one year, the top third of teachers produced as much as six times the learning growth as the bottom third of teachers. Tenth-graders taught by the least effective teachers made nearly no gains in reading and even lost ground in math.
"We take the students who most depend on their teachers for subject-matter learning and assign them teachers with the weakest academic foundations," Haycock laments in Education Leadership.
Providing well-qualified teachers is one of the top recommendations in a report released last year by the 600 members of the National Black Caucus of State Legislators. The report, Closing the Achievement Gap, urges states and districts to increase teacher pay, provide alternative routes to teacher certification, develop induction and retention programs for new teachers, and come up with incentives to recruit more male and minority candidates into teaching. Minority teachers really do make a difference for minority kids, researchers are finding. Thomas Dee, a professor at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, found that kids with teachers of their own race scored three to four points higher on standardized tests than kids with teachers of other races.
When it comes to education, there is no such thing as too soon to start. The importance of early intervention cannot be underestimated. About half the gap between black 12th-graders and their white peers might be closed by "eliminating the differences that exist before their children enter first grade," asserts The Black-White Test Score Gap, edited by Christopher Jencks and Meridith Phillips.
Past findings on the impact of early childhood programs have been mixed. A couple of new studies, however, have gone a long way toward proving the power of well-designed programs for preschoolers.
One is the Abecedarian Project (named for a student who is learning the alphabet). This widely cited 20-year study, conducted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, found all kinds of promising outcomes among children who participated in an intensive, year-round child-care program from infancy through kindergarten. Funded jointly by the U.S. Education Department's Office of Educational Research and Improvement, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the study showed that participating kids were twice as likely to go to college as other kids. They scored much better on tests of intelligence, reading, and math all the way through young adulthood. They also tended to delay parenting.
Another key piece of research, the Chicago Early Childhood Study, achieved similar results. Financed by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Education, the study followed graduates of urban preschools for 15 years. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin tracking 1,500 Chicago children from age 5 until after age 20 concluded that "programs like Head Start could pay dividends long after children had learned to read—provided the programs are highly structured," Jacques Steinberg of The New York Times reports in May 2001. Funded by Title I, the programs under study "adhere to rigorous reading lessons," Steinberg notes, as well as requiring parents to work with their kids on homework and helping families arrange medical care and social services.
In an editorial accompanying findings from the Chicago study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in May 2001, Edward Zigler, one of the creators of Head Start in the 1960s, argued that the results of the program could be replicated. The findings, he writes with co-author Sally Styfco, "contradict the naysayers who believe that public schools cannot be fixed or that poor children cannot be helped because of nature or nurture."
The Department of Education-sponsored study of nine top-performing urban schools found that success crystallized around one key component: staff commitment. "The true catalyst (of the change effort) was the strong desire of educators to ensure the academic success of the children they served," the Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas concluded in its 1999 report, Hope for Urban Education: A Study of Nine High-Performing, High-Poverty, Urban Elementary Schools. All nine used federal Title I dollars to create Title I schoolwide programs. All the programs differed. But what stuck out was their uniform passion for the work at hand.
In their report, the researchers laud the tenacity of these dedicated professionals:
"None of the principals and none of the teachers interviewed reported that the transformation of their school was easy. In fact, there were many reports of difficulties, challenges, and frustrations. Perhaps, a key difference between these schools and other less successful schools is that educators in these schools persisted. They refused to give up the dream of academic success... Perhaps, the persistence of school leaders was influenced primarily by their deep commitment to the students and families they served. They perceived their work, less as a job, more as a mission. They persisted because they believed in themselves, they believed in their school staffs, and they believed in the ability of the children to succeed."
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