Superintendents Around the Nation
Discuss
Education Isssues At Teachers College
by Dorothy Davis
If the school is failing,
call in an ophthalmologist. This is what Professor
Gary Orfield of the Harvard Graduate School of Education,
and Co-Director of The Civil Rights Project (www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu)
did for a poverty-stricken school in the Boston area,
which was threatened with closure because too many
students were failing their reading tests. His wife,
the ophthalmologist, examined the children, whose vision
had never been tested, and found that “about half of them had vision problems,
couldn’t even see the blackboard or books. One
of the children in Special Education turned out to be
gifted. He had a vision problem so he couldn’t
see.” How could these children pass their tests?
Of course they couldn’t and they weren’t.
They were given prescriptions for glasses, which in a
middle class school would have done the trick. But the
prescriptions were not filled—the children’s
families could not afford to do so, and they could not
get help. The bureaucratic paperwork maze of Medicaid
was too complicated for them to negotiate and, if they
somehow managed it, they would only get clunky plastic
glasses, which no child would wear. “We are the
only advanced society,” said Orfield, “that
doesn’t have decent healthcare for poor kids. Our
system spends huge amounts on emergency care, but there
is no diagnostic, preventive care.”
This is a dramatic illustration
of what research at The Civil Rights Project shows—that a school’s
lack of achievement, as shown on test scores, correlates
nearly exactly with poverty and racial segregation. In
New York State in the late 1990s, for example, the percentage
of students reading above grade level equaled the percentage
not eligible for free lunch. Schools may spend a lot
of money trying to upgrade, but the adverse effects of
poverty will still outweigh these attempts at improvement.
Yet schools in poverty-stricken,
segregated and immigrant areas are held accountable
under No Child Left Behind in the same way as wealthy
suburban schools. “Does
it make any sense to compare these schools and hold them
equally accountable?” asked Orfield. “In
no place do you have the same achievement level in immigrant
and poor schools as in wealthier schools where everyone
is a native. This is true around the world. If we don’t
have a place in the world where all schools can perform
at the same level, what are we talking about with No
Child Left Behind?” According to this law, schools
that don’t perform at these same high levels are
subject to funding set-asides and sanctions.
Over emphasis on test scores
is not helping. The achievement gap is widening. This
was not always so. After the 1964 Civil Rights Act
and the advances of the 1960s and 1970s including Head
Start, for preschool education, the achievement gap
significantly narrowed. Since the 1980s and the rollback
of these measures and the substitution of testing and
sanctions the gap has grown substantially, beginning
in the 1990s. “Dropout trends” said Orfield, “have
followed a similar pattern. They went down and then up
again in the 1990s. In 1988 we had the lowest level of
segregation, then three decisions by the Supreme Court
lead to resegregation, inequality and the kind of conditions
that caused the gap to widen during this period, when
reforms using testing based policies were supposed to
close it. … Something very troubling is going
on. We had a positive trend and now it’s negative.” He
compared our current testing and punitive policies to
the field of corn that the University of Illinois has
been measuring over the last 100 years to help agriculture
in the state. “If you think a crop can grow by
measuring it and hitting it you are mistaking measurement
for treatment. Measurement and sanctions cannot grow
a healthy crop. It doesn’t work that way.”
No educators were consulted
in the drafting of No Child Left Behind. One of the
positive outcomes of the discussion following Orfield’s address may be the determination
of some of these leading U. S. educators to make their
voices heard after the November elections, when this
law can hopefully be revised. As Orfield pointed out, “Any
of us who are educators can make a difference. It is
time to have a sensible discussion and not a simple minded
one. Most of the problems encountered derive entirely
from the fact that people went ahead with legislation
without understanding exactly what they were doing.”
The Superintendents Conference
included talks and discussions on the Achievement Gap
from many perspectives over a three day period. According
to Dr. Tom Sobol, Chairman of the Conference and the
Christian A. Johnson Professor for Outstanding Educational
Practice at Teachers College, Columbia University, “Superintendents from every
part of the country including Alaska, California and
Florida attended. They are a national group and this
is a wonderful opportunity for people to examine ideas
with each other, to find out what’s working and
what’s not working.”
“One of the likely outcomes is an ongoing initiative
to stay in touch electronically and personally,” added
Dr. Gibran Majdalany, Deputy Chairman of the Conference. “One
of the things we have discovered in exchanges this week
is that there is much more to get accomplished than we
can get done in the time allotted.”
Superintendents were enthusiastic.
Said Carol Franks-Randall of Elmsford, New York, “It’s been a wonderful
opportunity for learning and for networking with colleagues.
We learned how to address the achievement gap—some
practical suggestions as well as some theory behind it.”#
For further information about the conference and
its 63-year history visit http://conference.tc.columbia.edu.
