Michael J. Petrilli writes to Deborah Meier once again today.

Dear Deborah,

I want to say more about a topic that interests us both: How to create an accountability system that empowers excellent educators to create top-notch schools while ensuring a basic level of quality for everyone.

It's a real dilemma, because what might work in a hothouse setting (especially lots of professional autonomy) has tended to disappoint when taken to scale.

That's not easy for me to admit. My first education enthusiasm was the notion of autonomy and uber-local control, as epitomized in Chicago's "local school councils" of the early 1990s. I wrote my college thesis on the topic (with the help of the University of Michigan's great David Cohen), and came away convinced that educator autonomy, plus parental choice, would lead us to the Promised Land. (Professor Cohen knew better!)

A few years later, I landed at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, where we embraced the "let a thousand flowers bloom" mantra of the early charter schools movement. I helped plant a few of said flowers in our hometown of Dayton, Ohio—flowers that turned out to be, err, more like skunk cabbage.

It was a disaster. Well, not a total disaster. A few of those charter schools (in Ohio and elsewhere) turned out to be quite good. KIPP. Amistad Academy. The Met. High Tech High.

But many, many more turned out mediocre, or worse.

What was the problem? We'd cleared away the soul-sucking union contracts and much of the mindless bureaucracy. We'd empowered educators to do their thing and let the magic happen. Yet many flopped.

It wasn't just the test scores—though those were often pretty pitiful. Anyone who visited the schools could see with their own eyes that there wasn't much there there—the curriculum (if they had one) was disorganized or incoherent, the teaching was inconsistent (at best) and nonexistent (at worse), the culture was weak. The schools were often small, safe, and welcoming—virtues, all—but you couldn't say much more about them without wanting to cry.

This period of the charter movement yielded difficult lessons—but which lessons is still debated. Did it just show that nothing works—that poverty is too much of a barrier for anyone to overcome? (Most of these early charters in most states were serving overwhelmingly poor students.) Were the charters simply underfunded—money matters after all!—and just needed more resources to succeed? Did it prove that "decentralization" and "professional autonomy" are misguided—and that what we need is more centralization and control, like some systems overseas?

My own take is that freedom—for educators to do their work and for parents to choose an environment that's right for their children—is necessary, but not sufficient, for the creation of excellent schools. That it's "necessary" is obvious by looking at what happens in highly controlled, regimented systems in the United States or around the world. These systems can bring a certain degree of quality control to the task and make sure that outright failures (educational, fiscal, or otherwise) don't happen. But it's hard to find an "excellent" school in a command-and-control system. That's because of a simple fact of human psychology: We hate being told what to do.

But removing all strings isn't sufficient to get you excellence, either. You can't just empower anyone—you have to empower a team of people who actually know what they are doing. And these people, collectively, must have the capacity to run a great school. They need to have a coherent pedagogical vision, know how to build a curriculum, know how to create a positive school culture, know how to build and follow a sensible budget, know how to put reasonable "internal controls" in place, know how to recruit a great staff, and on and on. These people, it turns out, are scarcer than I had realized at age 22.

And then you have to hold these schools accountable for getting strong results with kids. That brings us back to the question of measurements. I think the charter movement had it right from the get-go: Each school would have its own "charter" spelling out the results that it would be responsible for achieving, and these metrics could be customized to the school. More traditional schools might have been happy to use test scores, but more progressive ones might use something else—say, their graduates' success at the next level of schooling. (Deborah, how do you think about this for a school like Mission Hill, whose test scores are pretty mediocre? Is it how well their students do in high school?)

Then came the modern standards-testing-accountability movement with its emphasis on uniform achievement measures, culminating in No Child Left Behind. Here those of us in the charter movement made a mistake. We quickly agreed to be part of the "same accountability system" as other public schools, which meant that those customized "charters" mostly went out the window; the measures that mattered were the test scores and nothing but. We did this for understandable and strategic reasons—imagine the outcry from charter opponents if charters didn't have to sweat the tests!—but it was a step backward nonetheless. And it led, predictably, to less pedagogical diversity in the charter movement, which came to be increasingly dominated by "traditional" models of schools.

So now what? Let me make a modest proposal for how to design an accountability system going forward; I think you might actually like it!

1. First, as the default system, we keep something like we have today, but with better standards and tests. (Yes, common-core standards and tests.) Students are tested annually; schools are held accountable for making solid progress from September to June, with greater progress expected for students who are further behind. States and districts give these schools lots of assistance—with curriculum development, teacher training, and the like. Such a default system won't lead to widespread excellence, but it will continue to raise the floor so that the "typical" school in America becomes better than it is today. (NB: I'd scrap any state-prescribed "accountability" below the level of the school. In other words, no more rigid teacher evaluation systems; leave personnel issues to the principals.) And it would provide taxpayers an assurance that they are getting a "public good" from their investment in public education (namely, a reasonably educated citizenry).
2. Then we offer all public schools—district and charter—an opt-out alternative. They can propose to the state or its surrogate that they be held accountable to a different set of measures. My preferences would be those related to the long-term success of their graduates. School "inspections" could be part of the picture, too. These evaluation metrics would be rigorous, but designed to be supportive of, rather than oppositional to, the cause of excellent schools. And they might be particularly important to educators of a more progressive, anti-testing bent.

How about it, Deborah? The "default" system would keep schools from being bad, and might even help most schools be good. And the "alternative" system would unleash our best educators to go for great.

Deal?

Mike

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:09 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Mike,

Let me begin by addressing your underlying question as to whether what you and I are proposing is part of the cure or the disease. The belief that the most promising way to tackle poverty requires frequent standardized tests for all students, breaking up the public school monopoly, imposing accountability measures on teachers, and more "efficient" delivery systems is, in my view, "part of the disease." But let's lower the tone by changing the dichotomy to a contrast between being "part of the solution" or "part of the problem."

Thus, the first series of my responses below are an attempt to answer your question about how your views (and mine) stack up on the "problem/solution" continuum. The second part of my response goes a wee bit deeper into some underlying issues that divide us.

Thus:

• To the extent that we both want schools to improve—above all for poor and minority children, we are inclined to be "a part of the solution"—provided we do something useful to schools and do no great harm in the process. Hard to measure.
• To the extent that we both believe that good teachers can make a significant difference in the lives of all children, and especially poor children, and that helping teachers become better able to do this, we are "a part of the solution." Except that ...
• To the extent that you see focusing heavily and frequently on high-stakes testing to improve learning and teaching I see you as part of the problem—just as you suggest the reverse.
• To the extent that I appear to expect that improving the conditions of poverty will make schools places of productive learning, I would add myself to those who are "part of the problem." Schools need to get a lot better at educating all children; communities need to get better at providing a basic foundation of support; but neither approach, exclusive of the other, will do the job. And none has. It's well to remember that when I was born a minority of children even dropped into high school.
• To the extent that you think it's acceptable for intelligent representatives of America's comfortable classes to point a finger at our public schools in the war of the 1 percent against everyone else makes you "part of the problem." But maybe you don't think it's acceptable. The 1 percent know what children need for a good education, but apply these criteria only to their own.

To the extent that I, along with other reformers right and left, insist there's only one best practice we are "part of the problem." We need a diversity of attempted solutions—mistakes must be honored, not attacked. We need the patience it takes to turn a "draft" into a final product.

You are incorrect to assume that my basic position is that, as you put it, "test-based reform is reducing opportunity for America's neediest children." While I believe this to be true, my most critical point is that it's a distraction. To ignore the widening gap in wealth alongside of the increasing abandonment of the most basic services for the poor is appalling.

To claim that to be poor is due to genetic weakness, bad parenting, bad teaching, or bad choices is shameful. William Ryan, in his 1971 book Blaming the Victim, calls that "the art of savage discovery."

Restoring the more equitable sharing of wealth and opportunity that America enjoyed in the post-WWII years—and not just for white working- and middle-class men—is our challenge. And to argue (as many do) that the realities of a world economy oblige us to compete for jobs that offer a continuously declining package of wages and benefits is akin to declaring the end of democracy, which depends on a relatively large middle class.

If we can agree that improving schools is one important way to beat the stacked deck 22 percent of our children face daily, then let's not pretend it can overcome all the other vast differences (e.g., good healthcare). But let's not cheat them of the "real thing." Let us aspire to a lofty view of what being well-educated means for all our children.

If the leaders of our nation—who are alas mostly rich—send their children and grandchildren to schools with class sizes of 10-15, where the intellectual fare is rich and varied and includes the arts and never stints on first-hand experience, then let it be that all children might go to such schools, be they public, private, charter, or magnet.

Some other quick points; since you raise so many I'll have to be choosy.

1. "Undergirding much of the reform movement" you suggest is improving math and reading skills "as measured by standardized attests." I disagree. Such tests are the poorest of possible measures of the kind of skills needed in math and reading to "make it" in yesterday's world, not to mention tomorrow's. (Get hold of Part II of In Schools We Trust, in which I present the evidence.)



2. You underestimate the richness of the vocabulary and cognitive skills that children bring with them, including the poorest of the poor. The first discovery I made when I became a kindergarten and then Head Start teacher in the early 1960s was that "these children" were not "without language." Some lack the same vocabulary as their more middle-class peers, but the reason is not because their families don't talk to them with words—but because they do.

   There's a reason they don't talk like the radio, TV, and Internet speakers do, but instead like their parents and relatives and neighbors. We grow up to be more like those we admire, love, and imagine we could become. Schools don't offer such settings. Thus the young often appear speechless to strangers—until they reach adolescence when we complain that they talk too much. Did rap arise from communities that "lacked vocabulary"? More vocabulary tests will do precisely what my "pass-the-test course" in French at the U of Chicago did for my French vocabulary. It got me through the required test.




3. If we focused not on something arbitrarily called "8th grade reading," but on engaged readers, we might have a better chance at turning nonreaders into voracious readers. There are enough great adult books written on an 8th grade level to expand their written and oral language! Keep in mind—in addition—that the idea of "8th grade level" is either a construct of the testing industry or an arbitrary mark set by "experts" who think it's what they "should" be reading (norm-based vs. criterion-based tests.)

   Reminder: High school graduates are never tested on the same instrument used to test 8th graders—it was a term invented to mark a statistical point on the scale of reading test scores with grade level the mid-point. Ditto for 4th graders who score on a 12th grade level: They are not therefore "college ready."




4. There is sufficient evidence that, in our focus on improving test scores, we have—whether necessary or not—decreased the already under teaching of topics that have the best shot of engaging young people's minds, that stimulate the thirst for "more, more, more teacher!"

   It's that hunger for more that is such a pleasure at the end of a good staff meeting, where we acknowledge that it's time to go home, but hate to leave each other's company because it has been so satisfying and stimulating to work out our ideas together. So it is when you and your students have had a good day—no one is rushing out, and most are lingering, hating to break the spell. It's dealing with how to increase this phenomenon after kids leave kindergarten that I've spent 50 years working on. Instead we've removed it from too many kindergartens!




5. Also troubling to me is the realization that we are claiming that being "college ready" will bring the poor into a middle class that is itself disappearing. Yes, higher test scores correlate with more years of schooling and more credentials, and more credentials correlate with more pay. But it takes longer and longer years of increasingly expensive schooling to get you into the middle class—if ever. For most, the pay scale won't be what we once thought of as "middle class," meaning having enough to feel you and your family are "safe." For the families who just made it into the middle class in the past 50 years, most of their safety net was shattered in the last financial collapse. False promises are shaky motivators.

Yes, it's "the system" that's at fault. But we disagree about what aspects of the "system" and what we'd replace it with. We might agree that the absence of much-needed time and autonomy at the local level to work on, think about, and build better practice is a systemic fault.

Where we may disagree is on the need for more competition, more small stores (schools) opening and closing under the pressure of "competitors." It's a marketplace solution, based on a view that democracy is mostly about being able to vote with your feet and your money. Not mine. I still think we need a society that acknowledges that we aren't in a "fair" competition and is prepared to systematically work at removing the obstacles—one by one.

Since a better world will not happen overnight, there is nothing we can do that's more likely to be part of the cure than to work on all fronts together, and nothing more likely to spread more disease than accepting the myth that this is a "crisis" of bad teaching rather than a broader crisis of democracy.

Could Central Park East et al have "paved the way" rather than being an "exception"? Between 1974 and 1990 the number of small and outstanding K-8 schools increased about 50-fold in New York City. Choice became the norm. Superintendent Anthony Alvarado turned a sub-city of 20,000 K-8 students in East Harlem into a system of public choice that attracted thousands of wealthier families and useful attention.

But if he had had the support that charters now have amongst the rich and powerful and if the system had had the courage it needed in the early 1990s to accept Annenberg's challenge (see In Schools We Trust on this too), we might have thousands today. Without more tests. Without privatizing. They wouldn't all look or act like Central Park East or Mission Hill, but they'd offer a way to move forward that we could all join hands over.

We were never perfect, nor were we aspiring for perfection. Our goals were pretty "mundane" and down-to-earth, and we even accepted severe financial limitations. But they moved us in directions that we wanted for our own children and grandchildren.

One other point: Like most teachers, I didn't join up to save the world. In fact, I had largely given up on spending all my time "saving the world"—at least until my kids grew up. I became a teacher because, to my surprise, it offered me an exciting, fulfilling, and joyful education—for pay. I loved that feeling that we all had after a good day of schooling. So I put up with the not-infrequent "bad days." And since our good and bad days as teachers didn't all fall on the same day, I counted on the affection and support of a community I was a part of—making the odds better that tomorrow would be a better day.

That's what we need for all teachers, schools, and above all our students, and their families: good reasons to keep hope alive. Is that being part of the solution or of the problem, Michael?

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:20 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Michael J. Petrilli posts his second entry in Bridging Differences today.

"Confusion never stops
Closing walls and ticking clocks
Gonna come back and take you home
I could not stop that you now know, singing

Come out upon my seas
Cursed missed opportunities
Am I a part of the cure?
Or am I part of the disease?"
-Coldplay, "Clocks," A Rush of Blood to the Head, 2002

Dear Deborah,

I am haunted by the title of your post:
"The Testing Obsession Widens the Gap" Could this possibly be true? Is test-based school reform reducing opportunity for America's neediest children? Is everything for which we school reformers fight actually making things worse? Am I a part of the cure, or am I part of the disease?

###

"It's OK to ask: 'What if I'm wrong?'" you wrote last week. So let me ask it. It wouldn't be the first time. A year ago, for example, I explored the "test score hypothesis"—a line of reasoning, undergirding much of the reform movement, that says that if we can significantly improve low-income students' math and reading skills, as measured by standardized tests, we can significantly increase their chances of escaping poverty.

Let's unpack this hypothesis a bit.

As it stands now, children born into poverty come into kindergarten with massive deficits—in terms of vocabulary, content knowledge, and non-cognitive skills. And if they make it to high school graduation 13 years later (and many will not), they will leave, on average, reading and doing math at an 8th-grade level. Of the low-income teens that give higher education a shot, the vast majority of will end up in remedial education and then wash out. More than half of poor children will become poor adults, with poor children of their own. The cycle will repeat. Our hope is that by improving our schools (and, yes, other things too), we can change this narrative.

Let's imagine that our schools can help the average child born into poverty do somewhat better. Let's say that with a combination of talented and well-trained teachers, a rich and rigorous curriculum, lots of supports, and strong leadership, we're able to get poor students, on average, to a 10th-grade level by the time they graduate high school. Suddenly they can attend a community college, or even a four-year university, without starting in remedial education. They are much more likely to graduate, at least with an associate's degree or a technical credential. Rather than making minimum wage, they will make a living wage.

They are less likely to get pregnant as teens, or end up in prison, or drop out of the workforce. Their children wouldn't be born poor—they would be born middle class. This would be transformative.

Notice the key assumption built into this "theory of action": reading and math matter a lot. Getting to the 10th-grade level instead of the 8th-grade level (even as measured by rinky-dinky standardized tests) would make a meaningful difference in real lives. With that assumption in place, it's not crazy—in fact, it's perfectly rational—to hold schools accountable for helping their students make progress every year with their reading and math skills. It's smart to put in place clear, high standards—let's call them common-core standards—that will delineate the path from poverty to prosperity, that will help schools and teachers focus on the knowledge and skills that matter most, and will get students to true readiness for college and career by the age of 18.

So Deborah, are you ready for the big question, the kicker, the heart of the matter?

How sure are we that it's literacy and numeracy, and related academic knowledge and skills, that are the most important precursors to success in college, career, and life? What if something else is just as important, or even more important, like "non-cognitive skills" or personal relationships? (Or perhaps the habit of "serious intellectual inquiry," as you put it?)

And what if our "testing obsession" is crowding these other things out?

These are critical questions, but here's what gives me solace.

First, the evidence is quite strong that reading and math achievement are critical tickets to the middle class. Look, for example, at the blockbuster study from Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff that examined the impact of teachers on students' long-term outcomes. As Kevin Carey explained at the time,

If you believe standardized tests are worthless or highly flawed or deeply inadequate or even troublingly limited in accuracy and scope-and many reasonable people believe these things-then you could dismiss or downplay value-added measures of teacher effectiveness, by definition. ... But now the CFR study says that teachers who are unusually good at helping students score high on standardized tests today aren't just unusually good at helping students score high on standardized tests tomorrow. They also have an unusual effect on the likelihood of students going to college, going to a good college, earning a good living, living in a nice place, and saving for retirement. In other words, whatever the limitations of standardized tests may be, test-based value-added scores do, in fact, provide valuable information about the things most people care most about.

Or look at the evidence that E.D. Hirsch cites about the impact of teenagers' vocabulary on their long-term prospects, such as a 1999 study that shows that "a gain of one standard deviation on the Armed Forces Qualification Test raises one's annual income by nearly $10,000 (in 2012 dollars)."

Or a brand-new study from the United Kingdom (flagged by Joanne Jacobs ) that finds that "math skills at 7 predict earnings at 42."

Surely reading and math aren't all that matters. Paul Tough makes a good case for non-cognitive skills. Others, yourself included, point to the importance of strong personal relationships with mentors. We could name more. But reading and math skills are at least necessary, if not sufficient.

On the other hand, there's little evidence that the "testing obsession" is systematically getting in the way of good teaching and learning in high-poverty schools. That's not because an obsession with testing isn't a problem. It surely is, with its temptations of cheating, narrowing of the curriculum, and the culture of fear that it often perpetuates.

But here's the rub, Deborah: Studies of high-poverty schools in America have demonstrated for decades that great teaching and learning have always been the exception, not the norm. To believe that testing is making these schools worse, you have to believe that they were once pretty good, or at least better than they are now. I just don't see it. Do you? Where's the evidence of that?

Furthermore, think back to Kevin Carey's comments on the Chetty study. If an obsession with reading and math was crowding out more important tasks, why would students with stronger reading and math gains do better long-term than their peers?

Here's what your readers need to remember: The choice today is not between 100,000 Central Park Easts or Mission Hills and 100,000 test-prep factories. If it were, I'd pick the Deborah Meier schools in a heartbeat. But let's face it: There aren't more than a handful of Deborah Meier schools out there. (The same goes with Don Hirsch schools or Mike Feinberg/Dave Levin schools, or any other brand you want to name.)

The typical high-poverty school is, and has always been, pretty mediocre. That's not an indictment of the people who work in these schools; the problem is the system. And it's not unique to education. Any big, bureaucratic government agency is going to struggle to achieve effectiveness, much less excellence. (Think the DMV.) Heck, even most large, private-sector companies are pretty lame, especially ones that don't face much competition. (Think the electric company.) Layer on top of that all of the distracting demands placed upon schools, the fragmented nature of education governance, and, in some places at least, too few resources, and it would be a miracle if the typical high-poverty public school were good, much less great.

###

So do I think testing and accountability make matters worse? No. In fact, based on the studies cited above, I think they will make matters marginally better. I also think stronger standards and tests (a la common core) will make things better still.

What about you, Deborah? Are you willing to ask "What if I'm wrong?" What if it's true that reading and math skills are hugely related to opportunities in life, and indeed are malleable? What if "direct instruction," which you say isn't needed, really is the most effective method for helping children in poverty develop those skills? What if it's patently untrue that children learn "vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and spelling ... the same way we learn everything else that matters," as you stated last week, but instead have to be taught systematically? What if the perfect for which you have spent decades championing really is the enemy of the good—and the greater good, for millions of boys and girls throughout America?

Deborah, with all due respect, I ask you to ask yourself: Am I a part of the cure, or am I part of the disease?

Mike

Michael J. Petrilli is executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy think tank based in Washington, where he writes for the award-winning Flypaper blog. He is also an executive editor of Education Next and research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Follow him on Twitter @MichaelPetrilli.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 8:51 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Deborah Meier responds to Fordham Institute's Michael J. Petrilli today.

Dear Mike,

The data you present re. the "achievement gap" is consistent with an argument I made against using standardized testing as a barometer 50 years ago. I said (and wrote) that as long as our testing system requires us to rank order we will be tracking income (and wealth), not education. As one becomes less equal, so will the other. Anything else would not meet psychometric standards! The tests are designed by test publishers who, by pre-testing items, can be sure that they've got the "right"—reliable and credible—rank order.

Once one concludes, as I did through 50 years of close observation, that the tests are measuring something other than "reading" skill—decoding and restating—our problem looks different. Yes, E.D. Hirsch is right: You can't measure reading qua reading. I not merely observed but ran little mini-focus groups to understand why some kids got "right" answers and others "wrong" ones. It had little to do with their reading skill.

Read Part 2 of In Schools We Trust and you'll learn what I discovered was happening. It's partly a question of vocabulary, but more importantly it is in their "interpretations" that the poor and rich (and probably black and white) differ in significant ways. The same "experience" (whether in the text or life itself) is not "read" the same way. It's easier to guess the right answer if your perspective is similar to what the test-makers expect it to be, just as their forebears did when they invented IQ tests a century ago. We don't all have the same "common experience" upon which the tests are normed. Their "wrong" answers, in fact, were often far more logical and sensible than the "right" ones.

These facts also remind me of why teachers can be more powerful than TV or online schools if they use their time to build authentic relationships with their students—and join with rather than dictate to them. It's for the same reason that studies of how children learn their native language demonstrate that, even if kids spend far more time listening to TV than listening to the talk of adults at home, they will speak like their families. Schools must become second homes.

But where you and I perhaps most clearly differ is in our recipes for turning this situation around. Yours: Focus on vocabulary and a common curriculum that goes with it. I appreciate your emphasis on "curriculum"—subject matter, the stuff itself. But it does NOT require a common curriculum. As with our first language we need to rely on building vocabulary by: (1) having a more diverse student body (racial and class integration); (2) having a lot of adults around to interact with and smaller class sizes (like good private schools do); (3) engaging in studies that require collaboration between students and students, and students and adults—including adult-written texts; (4) encouraging reading in settings that are designed to naturally arouse interest—motivate—or that answer questions youngsters really want to know; and (5) remembering that vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and spelling are most efficiently learned the same way we learn everything else that matters. We learn to drive by driving and to cook by cooking, which means allowing 6- to 12-year-olds to read (and listen to) repetitive and engaging books which do not present too much of a "cognitive" or empathy challenge. These are the years when voracious middle-class readers read boys' and girls' adventure series (Nancy Drew?) about people they imagine they could become—and want to become. That's harder for some kids than others. Boys vs. girls, for example. It always takes a leap of empathy to imagine oneself as the "other," even more so if one is uncomfortable in the skin of the author's characters. You can begin to see what I'm getting at? If in doubt, take a look at the biweekly Internet videos of students working in Mission Hill classrooms.

Progressive preschools never rejected a rich reading culture or knowing facts as "developmentally inappropriate." They just didn't think you needed direct instruction to kick in this love of reading, of hobbies, of facts, of curiosity, of indefatigable and repetitive practice in subjects and skills they were fascinated by. The kids come to us with curiosity—and our job is to extend it. Progressives understood that the playful mindset that serious learning depends on is too often silenced in school. For example, I frequently step into classrooms where well-meaning teachers are doing as they are told: stopping at the end of every paragraph or page to ask didactic questions that turn great stories into "lessons" with "objectives" that can be "measured." That's hardly likely to whet children's appetite for "more, more."

Even "guided" discussions—another fad—at best lead the more teacher-pleasing kids to try to read what the teacher wants them to say, rather than discuss, argue, and maybe act out their own interpretations for each other. And indeed, you are also right that it was in low-poverty and "minority" schools like those I got to know so well in Chicago in the 1950s and 60s that the least "progressive" strategies have always been applied—even by educators who thought of themselves as "progressives." (Richer kids are sometimes getting some of this too now, under pressure to do well on tests.)

They've forgotten. Children are BORN experts at learning. Poor and rich. They couldn't survive a week if they weren't born intellectuals. They experiment over and over, until they find a pattern that "works." And then they find out that it's more complicated than that and start over again! In the first three years of life they are learning at a pace we never again achieve—unless we are, as you note, under so much stress and physical deprivation not typical of most of "the poor." Statistically, of course, it's more likely to impact those with the fewest resources—as you acknowledged.

But, Mike, it cannot be fixed by the common core. It can only be fixed by teachers who know how to join the "common core" of the children and the families they first meet, when children are 4 or 5, and use it wisely and creatively ever after.

We need to spend more time teasing this out. Until we tackle this, poor children will leave the best of themselves at the door until they are big enough to be less physically afraid of their teachers or parents, precisely when adults become afraid of them! Neither form of fear is healthy for teachers or kids! Too many families with the best intentions send their children to school with a message: Beware, they don't respect you or me; Be quiet, behave; Don't count on me to rescue you; and, Don't volunteer information." The message is meant well, and we too often encourage it. It takes time—which we never provide teachers or parents enough of—to build the trust needed between family, teacher, child, and school.

It's OK to ask: "What if I'm wrong?" As long as one can answer: Then I can change my mind! Ditto for all teachers and schools. Unless they can't. I want schools (and schools of education) to provide "boot camps" for the development of democratic habits of association (Dewey's term). Boot camps for adults as well as the young—where serious intellectual inquiry can become a habit. We have only a dozen years or so before these youngsters will make decisions that affect the planet, sit on the juries when I'm on trial (and innocent). We can't afford to waste time on test prep. We need efficiency, but not machine efficiency. We need to use children's and families' strengths efficiently. We need teachers who can think on their feet because they have the right to use their minds well, too. We need to be debating about the habits that underlie democracy—not mandating them. How I'd like young people to witness such debates, and over time, join in. But that can only happen if we are free to say no as well as yes, and learn from our mistakes.

It is our job to use our precious public funds to increase the odds that democracy won't have to be reinvented. If the poor were less poor, their schools less poor, and bigotry less a part of our culture—it would be easier. But still not inevitable.

Deborah

P.S. Maybe read Mike Rose's blog post on Sean Reardon's New York Times piece "No Rich Child Left Behind"; or, Closing the Opportunity Gap, edited by Prudence Carter and Kevin Welner, or the 2009 issue of Education Next where I debated with Checker Finn on a national curriculum to see where we can take this next.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Today, Michael J. Petrilli, the executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, joins Deborah Meier. He will blog with her for the next month.

Dear Deborah,

Thanks for inviting me to join you on your blog. Even though we disagree on many issues, I have great respect for you and the work you've done in your career.

As I write this, I'm returning from the Education Writers Association annual conference, held this year at Stanford. I spoke on a panel about the "opportunity gap" with professors Sean Reardon and Prudence Carter. Reardon, as you know, recently published a fascinating but sobering study about the growing income achievement gap. (ASCD's Educational Leadership has an accessible version of the study available online.) And Carter co-edited the new volume, Closing the Opportunity Gap.

What Professor Reardon's research shows is that, over the last 60 years, the achievement gap between the nation's poorest and richest students has widened dramatically. That's true of both test scores and college attainment.

This finding is not surprising for people who have been paying attention, but what is surprising is where the gap lies. It's not that poor children are falling behind the middle class—they're not. It's that the richest students are breaking away from everybody else.

Why is this happening? Here Reardon has to speculate. He considers whether it's simply the result of America's growing income inequality, and concludes that yes, that's part of the story. Rich parents have more time and money to put into their children's cognitive development because, well, they're rich. But that doesn't come close to a full explanation.

He offers a thesis that rich parents are behaving differently today—differently than they used to, and differently than middle-class and low-income parents. Rich parents are obsessed with their children's social and intellectual development. They are spending dramatically more time parenting. And they are getting and staying married. (Forty percent of U.S. children today are born to single mothers; almost none of the richest children are.)

The first question, Deborah, is whether this behavior of the most affluent parents is even a "problem." I would argue that rich parents are acting virtuously. I don't think we want to tell them, "Stop spending so much time with your kids! Stop spending so much money on their cognitive development! Stop providing them the unfair advantage of two engaged parents!"

Still, their behavior creates a conundrum, because it almost certainly will make our society even more inequitable, as their children get a lot more education than everybody else's and, thus, the best jobs and the related rewards. As Megan McCardle put it, "all the people who are really good at school are marrying the other people who are really good at school, having children who are really, really good at school." And now that "returns to education" are larger than ever, that means they're producing children who are really, really likely to be rich themselves.

The alternative approach is to help low-income and middle-class kids catch up. Carter's book offers some ideas worth trying, especially high-quality preschool for kids in urgent need of it—which, by the way, would be more doable if we stopped spreading the money so thin.

Still, the message that comes through in Professors Reardon's and Carter's work—and from others on the left, including Diane Ravitch and Richard Rothstein—is that there's not much schools can do about these gaps. They are visible before kids even enter kindergarten; they don't grow much, if at all, while children are in the K-12 system; and they are fundamentally related to our country's economic and political system. We'll never make much progress until we get serious about redistributing income, or reviving labor unions, or raising the minimum wage, etc.

And that's where I disagree. We need to stop having these extreme arguments, between "No excuses!" on one side and "It's all about poverty!" on the other. Poverty matters immensely. Schools matter immensely. Let's get on with addressing both.

So Deborah, what could schools be doing that they aren't already trying? Let me offer one idea. (In the coming month, I'll suggest others.) It's simple: Schools could help young children build their vocabularies.

Now, that doesn't sound so controversial. Who would be against that? And indeed, the early-childhood world is increasingly interested in the topic of vocabulary development, in part because of studies showing that poor students enter kindergarten with an enormous vocabulary deficit. Cities are launching new efforts to teach low-income parents to speak to their babies and toddlers more (and more effectively) in an effort to close this deficit.

But what can preschools and elementary schools do to build vocabulary? It's not sitting down with kids and making them memorize flash cards. It's teaching them content. Knowledge. Stuff! History and science, art and music, literature and geography. Yes, to little kids. (You know, the ones who are curious about EVERYTHING. Who can learn a TON just by listening to a good read-aloud story.)

E.D. Hirsch has argued for 30 years that the key to building students' vocabularies, and thus their ability to read and learn, is content knowledge. Once a child learns to decode, her "comprehension" ability mainly comes down to the store of knowledge she's got in her head. If she can sound out words but can't read a passage about dinosaurs, it's not because she hasn't been taught "comprehension skills"—it's probably because she's never been taught anything about dinosaurs.

Yet our preschools and elementary schools systematically reject this obvious approach because they deem it not "developmentally appropriate." Furthermore, they say, why teach all those "facts" when kids can just Google them?

The problem is compounded by a lamentable reaction by many high-poverty schools to testing and No Child Left Behind: They delay teaching social studies and science until 4th or 5th grade so they can focus on teaching reading in the early grades. Which is nuts—teaching content is teaching reading.

I could go on and on about this, as the folks at the Core Knowledge blog and the cognitive scientist Dan Willingham often do. Do you follow their work?

Let me end on a hopeful note: I believe that the Common Core State Standards will help fix this problem. The English/language arts standards were heavily influenced by Hirsch's thinking (which is why he's endorsed them), as they expect students to engage with rich and challenging texts—both fiction and non-fiction in subjects like history, science, and geography—as early as possible.

If schools want to do well on common-core assessments, they had better start teaching their students knowledge. (Using Hirsch's Core Knowledge Language Arts program would be an excellent place to start.)

If the common-core standards help to bring back art and music, science and history, civics and literature to our elementary school classrooms, don't you think it's worth supporting? Given that there is excellent scientific evidence for the role of vocabulary—and thus, knowledge—in academic success, and given that the knowledge gap is clearly a major contributor to the "opportunity gap," and given that you have been a long-time advocate for greater equity, won't you reconsider your position on the common core? I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Mike

Michael J. Petrilli is executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy think tank based in Washington, where he writes for the award-winning Flypaper blog. He is also an executive editor of Education Next and research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Follow him on Twitter @MichaelPetrilli.

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