[Mb-civic] Guess Who's Still Left Behind - Ross Wiener - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060102/1a1fac5f/attachment.htm