Raising Standards for Poor Children

At her session "Achievement in America--Can We Close the Gap?," Katy Haycock, director of the Education Trust in Washington, D.C., described "the three most devastating ways in which [U.S. schools] are systematically shortchanging some of our kids."

First, Haycock said, U.S. schools "are teaching different kids different things, with poor and minority kids disproportionately less likely to be taught rigorous, challenging subject matter." Second, U.S. schools are giving some students lower-quality instruction. "In every subject area, poor children are more likely to be taught by underqualified teachers," Haycock said, and "minority youngsters are vastly less likely to be taught by well-educated teachers."

The third reason for the achievement gap "socks you in the face when you spend as much time in classrooms as my staff and I do," Haycock said. "I can only summarize what we've found by saying we've been stunned at how little [schools] expect of poor children"--stunned by how few assignments poor children get during a given week, but also by "the miserably low level" of the assignments they do get.

Fortunately, Haycock said, a growing number of communities around the country are proving that the achievement gap doesn't need to exist. "If we set clear and high standards for all kids, if we make very sure that all kids--not just some--are in a curriculum that lines up with those standards, and if we make sure that teachers master the skills they need, then no matter how poor the kids are, no matter what kinds of neighborhoods they live in, they absolutely can meet those standards," she said.

*******************************************************The Dark Side of Standards

Writer and activist Alfie Kohn, noting that more than 1,200 educators had chosen to attend his session "The Deadly Effects of Tougher Standards," remarked, "That in itself is a message, at least as I see it."

Kohn said he doesn't oppose horizontal standards, which are guidelines for changing the way we do teaching and learning, such as the NCTM mathematics standards. Vertical (or "tougher") standards, on the other hand, call for us to take the existing approach to education and do it more intensely.

Kohn outlined "five fatal flaws" of the tougher standards movement: . It gets motivation wrong. "When you get kids too focused on how well they're doing, they tend to lose interest in what they're doing," he said. 2. It gets improvement wrong. "The emphasis placed on difficulty is out of proportion to its actual significance in judging how good a classroom, school, or district is," Kohn said. 3. It gets teaching and learning wrong. Kohn criticized the standards' "implicit assumption that all kids should be able to do the same things at the same rate. Any practice that requires marching in lockstep is bound to leave a lot of failures in its wake." 4. It gets assessment wrong. "When districts teach to the test in order to raise test scores, this typically means worse teaching is going on," Kohn said. 5. It gets school reform wrong. "Right now accountability is just a code word for more control over what happens in classrooms by people who are not in > classrooms," Kohn said, "and it has essentially the same effect on learning that a noose has on breathing."

At the end of the session, Kohn recruited members for a new organization opposed to the tougher standards movement. For more information, visit http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/standards.htm