The Achievement Gap | Eastern North Carolina Now

    George Will, writing in Sunday's (8-29-10) Washington Post highlights one of the most vexing problems our nation faces…the waste of human capital. Put another way, the ruin of human lives that causes other human lives to be wasted. Will's column has all the numbers. We've all heard some version of this before, many times over. The label most frequently put on it is "The Achievement Gap."

    While that term is a real misnomer, it does suffice to focus attention on the problem. The problem is the lack of achievement by a tremendous segment of our population. The "gap" being referred to is the difference in performance of the average black child and the average white child. More specifically in Beaufort County Schools (because it is a product of the North Carolina public education system) the "achievement gap" is really that difference between the percentage of white students and black students who achieve bare minimum performance.

    If we were really interested in the "real achievement gap" we would be looking at all students, not just the minimally proficient, and we would especially be concerned about the top students…or our best and brightest. But the dirty little secret is that in most schools the "gap" exists throughout the achievement spectrum.

    But there is one thing to be said about being concerned about the minimally proficient. That is that these are the ones the producers will have to support over their lifetimes, often "support" means bear the burden of incarceration of a large percentage of the minimally proficient males. That is not a prejudicial statement, but one based on statistical fact. Any way you want to measure it, black males tend to commit more crime and end up in prison more than any other demographic. And there is bound to be a reason for that statistic.

    Will cites the seminal academic work on the topic: The Black-White Achievement Gap: When Progress Stopped written by Paul E. Barton and Richard J. Coley. Barton and Coley identified five factors they say causes The Gap: school attendance (number of days absent), hours watching TV (and video games, social networking etc.), number of pages read (for homework), the quantity and quality of the reading material in the home and the incidence of two parents in the home.

    These factors Barton identified are the result of "lazy academic research." They were selected because they correlate highly with academic proficiency in school, as measured by bubble sheet tests. But parents, teachers and school officials err if they try to "fix" these variables. That is true because they are dependent variables or symptoms rather than causes.

    Having said that the reader is probably braced for a pronouncement of what the "real factors" are. It's not that simple.

    What causes achievement, whether minimally proficient or exceptional excellence is a confluence of many factors far too numerous to boil down to even a template, much less as few factors that can be numbered and short enough for a column such as this.

    But after thirty-eight years in this business I have, for myself, decided what I think is the most important of those factors that determine achievement. That is, in a word, expectations. You can just as easily call it "standards." But it is much more than we usually mean when educators talk about "standards." It is the expectation that a student has of himself/herself, and from about 10 years of age until mature adulthood the expectation the closest peers have of their group. Parents are important all along the way, in setting high expectations, but are most effective in the early childhood years (before middle school) and often by fourth grade. Society becomes more and more important after high school because most of us are motivated by money. And society pays more money for higher achievement than it does for minimal performance after college.

    To the extent any of the above is true, our schools need desperately to adapt their organizational structures to not only recognize the motivation of students but to take advantage of it.

    The first re-organization should be based on the concept that "one size does not fit all" and one approach is not going to be as effective for some students as other approaches. That's just a vague way of saying that organizing schools along the lines of thinking that heterogeneity is somehow more "democratic" or egalitarian—and thus more desirable--than homogeneity in setting standards, selecting content and methodology and the reward system has got to change. I fully realize it sounds bad but the truth is that not all students are created equal and the become more unequal as they get older, up to adulthood.

    The debate now going on in Wake County over their student assignment policy is a prime example of the foolishness that educators have imposed on schools since the Progressive Era of John Dewey that "all students should be treated equally." It is nothing but a perverse system of holding back the best and brightest and hiding the non-performance of the low achievers in the average scores skewed by the higher performing students.

    The chief cause of the "dropout problem" is that we homogenize low performing students in with higher performers and proceed as if the low performers are achieving when really they are not. Then they come to realize that and drop out because they a bright enough to know the correct answer to the question: "what's the use?"

    It is just this foolish thinking that resulted in august school boards believing they know better than do the parents where a child should go to school. It is this foolish thinking that led to "heterogeneous grouping" and the decades old attempt to repeal human nature by forcing teachers to teach as though all children can be taught individually, in groups. (You have to ponder that oxymoron to get its full effect.)

    I realize, as I approach a thousand words in this piece, that most readers are expecting a silver bullet.

    Well, there are no silver bullets. But having said that, I would suggest that the most effective thing our schools could do to "close the achievement gap" is to group low performing students together, high performing students together and let the middle performers go whichever way their parents choose. This radical notion is predicated on a strong belief that most humans are motivated to achieve and will do so if allowed to and rewarded for having done so. Genuine rewards, not trinkets like most school use. And the most powerful reward should be to learn "more." But that's a topic for another day.

    Parents need to be the focus of the educational system in the elementary grades. In the middle years the focus should be on using peer group motivation and in high school the focus should shift to monetary rewards (get into a good college or job so you will make more money). And that one too is a topic for another day.

    But from top to bottom, we need to deal with the achievement gap, not in terms of closing it, but in terms of moving the top part of the gap much higher and helping those in the middle group to move up to the top group. Then get those in the lower group to move to the middle group. Well, you get the picture. So will that eliminate the "gap"? Of course not. But so what.

    More later, maybe.

    Delma Blinson writes the "Teacher's Desk" column for our friend in the local publishing business: The Beaufort Observer. His concentration is in the area of his expertise - the education of our youth. He is a former teacher, principal, superintendent and university professor.
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