Joy Resmovits, the education reporter for Huffington Post, is usually a sharp and thoughtful reporter, but she had a bad day today.
Today she posted an article blaming “bad” teachers for the achievement gap between black and white students.
Along the way, she makes some factual errors. For example, she states that the achievement gap in ninth grade reading narrowed from 1994-2012, from 33 points to 13.
But that is wrong, for two reasons.
First, NAEP doesn’t test ninth grade. It tests fourth and eighth grades.
Second, the achievement gap for eighth grade shrank during that period from 30 points to 25 points.
She says the achievement gap persists because black students get less experienced teachers (Teach for America?) and have less success in raising test scores (tautology, anyone?).
Joy should know that the achievement gap exists before the first day of school in kindergarten.
It is nourished by large socioeconomic differences.
The achievement gap is an opportunity gap.
Black students are far likelier than white students to live in poverty, to miss school because of illness, to live in bad housing, to be homeless, to have less access to medical care, to live with tremendous economic insecurity.
Their families have fewer resources to invest in them.
The fact that there is an achievement gap is not prima facie evidence that those who teach black students are not good teachers.
Frankly, it is not like Joy to sound like Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, and Arne Duncan.
Joy Resmovits owes an apology to the many thousands of urban teachers who are hard-working, dedicated to their students, and determined to educate them despite the insults hurled their way by politicians and the media.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The local police department held a community meeting recently and sited several problems they cannot “arrest their way out of.” Those problems include poverty-related issues, graffiti and domestic turmoil related to crowded housing. We can’t test or micro-plan our lessons out of these problems either.
LikeLike
“You can have whatever your daddy can pay for.”
LikeLike
The current education reform movement further segregates an already-segregated population, and bad policies (vouchers, test score-based teacher evaluation) further cripple public schools and their teachers and divert funds and attention from the children who need them the most:
http://wp.me/p3DCs2-es
“Public schools and their teachers teachers do not cause failures of society that drive parents to pursue private education options for their children, nor do public school teachers have the means, power, or resources to fix many of these failures. Until policymakers (many of whom send their own children to private schools) acknowledge this and give teachers the credit and authority they deserve, the restrictions, and funding/program/personnel cuts, and regulations to which public schools are subject will continue to cripple the institution and drive privileged children to private options.
But maybe that’s the point.”
LikeLike
Why do people think private is automatically better?
LikeLike
Link above (http://wp.me/p3DCs2-es) cites an article that lists reasons people choose private schools. Generally, people assume private schools are subject to fewer limiting restrictions (standardized testing mandates, etc) and boast smaller class sizes and more rounded programs (especially as public schools continue to be forced to cut arts, music programs). But for many parents, the “calibur” of students enrolled in private schools is attractive because, often, those students’ families are more involved, stress academics, etc. Typically no mention of teachers being superior in private schools; in fact, the opposite is sometimes true–especially in schools that don’t require teachers to be credentialed, participate in ongoing professional development, etc. Urban public school teachers have the odds stacked so against them (funding cuts, program cuts, policies that are bad for students) that their jobs can be nearly impossible. Shame on Joy Resmovitz for publishing such an insulting and narrowly-focused representation of urban teachers.
LikeLike
Teacherbiz, I participate in ongoing professional development by going to work every day;o) We never stop learning and sometimes we find out that what we learned a ways back isn’t true any more. That’s life!
LikeLike
But are the students in private schools truly better students and better citizens?
LikeLike
Better? No.
More advantaged? Yes.
99% of them rested, fed, have glasses, get regular dental work, supervised when out of school, enriched during the summers, given top priority by parents? Yes.
If you want to see dozens of high-needs students in the same grade who are generally ignored/merely dropped off/routinely exposed to drug abuse and domestic violence, then go to a public school where the system also ignores them and blames the teachers instead.
LikeLike
“Students” and “citizens” are two very different measures. I don’t believe private school students are any “better” than their public-school counterparts, but I do believe the idea that they are is a common public perception. However, to blindly label private schools (or their students, or their programs, or their teachers) as being “better” in any way is unreasonable, as it is a generalization.
There is much documentation of the connection between family income and student achievement, and since there are far fewer low-income families who send their children to private schools, private school demographics can lead people to assume private schools are “better.”
LikeLike
I wish somebody who has the time and the resources would once and for all publish the REAL statistics about everything having to do with Education. A few years back, a reporter from the New York Times was on C-Span claiming that the lowest-score kids in non-white (actually black America specifically) were now doing as well as the top white students had 20 years before. But the Achievement Gap still existed since the white students had also raised their reading, writing & math skills. But albeit tragic that the gap still exists, but it’s hard to argue that it exists because of Teachers’ failings if all students in America are gradually doing better? Isn’t this a testament TO the American Teacher Force? We keep getting so many stats–the bad ones are sprayed all over the place, the good ones are hidden behind a rock.
LikeLike
Lynne, I promise you will find all the data you need in my new book.
LikeLike
Yet you complain when charters throw money that the public schools cant at educating these students
LikeLike
That’s often public money the charters are “throwing” at students, but with considerably diminished regulatory and academic standards.
LikeLike
Because that money is paid for by the public. It should go to public schools.
LikeLike
If the charters become non-profit and put all the money into education and not take a profit for the corporation I might believe them.
LikeLike
Okay. So there are charters that do have large numbers of students ‘scoring’ at proficient or above, the same students in the same building where the public board didn’t oversee that kind of success.
So because they still use public money also to pay teachers and feed and house students those schools should be forced to stop or find alternate sources of funding? We already have private schools, and they’re part of the problem as to why public schools in poor neighborhoods had trouble educating their students.
If something is working, why change the whole system?
LikeLike
Can’t change poverty, can change practice
LikeLike
Yeah, right. So what’s the proper “practice” for 1/3rd of your class with no breakfast?
LikeLike
What do you mean we can’t change poverty? The country made serious efforts to do so before the Vietnam War and the results were noticeable. Then a lot of that funding got pulled for Vietnam and the results weren’t quite as noticeable. Then Reagan came along and the results were reversed because the war on poverty became the war against poor people, which is the way it is to this day.
LikeLike
Can’t change it tomorrow is what I mean.
LikeLike
Why can’t we change poverty? It is a huge problem that our government chooses to ignore. We could START by providing more resources in our inner city schools. Help the kids learn to help themselves. Instead, Obama turns his back on them.
LikeLike
Once again social ills cannot be blamed on teachers. I am training a student teacher (I am in the room at all times) this summer from a prestigious institution in the Houston area. She is white, as am I. She comes from an upper middle class family, while I grew up poor and on welfare for six years of my young life.
The school district is in an urban area of the city. There are only two white students in a class of 23, along with an even mixture of black and Hispanic students. The first semester of summer school not one student failed the course, even though we had many at-risk along with a few special needs students in the class room. The students come from many socioeconomic backgrounds. Some work until 2 am to help support their families. Some are from middle class families, while others live in poverty. They are all capable, some are just a little further behind academically than others, because of their at birth starting point. This should be an expectation any one with common sense would have.
We don’t care what color they are. We treat them all the same. We may use difference learning approaches with each individual student, but the class room is a dynamic student friendly environment that allows all students to be successful. Some students are further behind other students in knowledge and other educational attributes, but that would be expected, even in an all white small town, where there are trailer homes, modest homes and mansions. No one would say teachers are responsible for failing those children from the trailer park, now would they? Most smart people would understand that children who come from affluent households have better educational opportunities from birth than do those from the poor side of town.
In this class room we can and have been able to take whatever baseline a student of any color starts from and show them a successful educational path. Student’s who start out further behind their cohorts may have to work a little harder to catch up, but just because they start out at a different baseline doesn’t mean they aren’t capable. However, ultimately it is the student’s early upbringing that establishes that baseline that all teachers must work from. Teacher’s don’t fail black students, our government and politicians do (Isn’t this the group edrefomers come from?).
With pre-kindergarten for all, especially those with the highest economic need we wouldn’t have this problem to begin with. Will health care for all we wouldn’t have undiagnosed health issues that directly affect student learning. With free educational opportunities for the parents of these low socioeconomic students we wouldn’t have this issue. With an major increase in the minimum wage (you know one that actually kept up with inflation) those jobs they are working at now would pay $22.50 an hour, instead of the below poverty level $7.50 an hour we currently have. Wouldn’t just those four things alone set up these students on a more equal educational baseline?
Teachers don’t determine their wages. Teachers don’t determine governmental programs. Teachers don’t decide what a failing school is. Ed-reformers, some of whom are really hedge funders in disguise, along with the help of the DOE (Arne Duncan= hedge funder) and politicians are making sure inner city students, especially black students, are appearing to be failing with smoke and mirrors. The true failure is underfunding of public education and the diverting of those funds to the ed-reformers to start for profit schools, which in reality fail all kids, not just those of color. Teach For America is also to blame for many inexperienced teachers (5 weeks of training before teaching, really?) being in the those inner city class rooms and hurting those children even more.
Teachers do a hell of a job considering the circumstances they find themselves in. How many in the corporate world use their own money for supplies that students need. How many in the corporate world take items from home and use them to help those who have little. How many in the corporate world have put their arm around a crying child to let them know someone is there for them. The people who blame teachers for black students failing or public school issues in general are part of the problem.
LikeLike
Joy,
Your narrative is so plausible, but it’s wrong. I only know this because I’ve taught for 16 years and have read and digested the work of E.D. Hirsch, who gives an alternative and very compelling explanation of the achievement gap: upper class parents flood their kids’ minds with didactic instruction 24/7. The accumulated world and word knowledge enables their kids to readily grasp lectures and readings that befuddle knowledge-poor kids. By age 6, upper class kids have heard more than 30 million more words that lower class kids. The importance of this fact cannot be overstated. It explains 90% of the achievement gap. It runs contrary to the progressivist orthodoxies of the education world which hold that facts aren’t important, but, as cognitive science now showing, it’s true nonetheless. I urge you to read Hirsch’s The Knowledge Deficit.
If your thesis were correct (that weak teachers cause the achievement gap) then the achievement gap would disappear in diverse districts like South Orange/Maplewood, NJ: Shaker Heights, OH; and Berkeley, CA. Brilliant teachers in each of those districts; yet most of the black kids still lag far behind the white kids. Please cogitate on this fact, and please read Hirsch. If you really want to do an accurate job of reporting on education, you might also do the paperwork to become a substitute teacher and spend some time subbing in an urban district (it’s the only way to get past the administration’s filters). In this way you may come to wonder why more teachers have not been demolished by the psychologically punishing conditions. I once worked in a diverse suburban HS outside NYC. An idealistic, smart Jewish woman from the advertising world switched careers and joined the English department there, determined to raise the bar in particular for the black kids. Scales fell from her eyes; I wish you could talk with her.
Hirsch’s prescription is the best one I’ve seen: super-charge the curriculum: flood disadvantaged kids’ brains with core knowledge and they’ll become much more able readers and writers. If he’s right, the best way to mitigate the achievement gap is to replace our current narrow and content-poor curricula with far richer ones. Scapegoating beleaguered urban teachers won’t help one bit.
LikeLike
I am also a fan of E.D. Hirsch. Here’s a link for readers who want a little background without reading the book The Knowledge Deficit.
http://www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/ae/spring2006/hirsch.cfm
LikeLike
E.D. Hirsch? Please.
Read Cultural Literacy, and tell me where the research is in that book.
LikeLike
The problem I have always had with Hirsch (and I like his curriculum) is that his whole theory is based upon the presumption that if we give poor kids the same secret knowledge that rich kids have then they will succeed. It totally ignores and absolves institutional racism, poverty, and historical discrimination and I think that’s what appeals to so many of his disciples — they don’t have to do any of the heavy lifting of dealing with those issues because they can just teach facts instead.
Knowing Greek philosophy and Baroque music is wonderful knowledge in and of itself. It won’t provide for your family while your wealthy white counterpart does his unpaid internship at a high flying corporate launching pad while you have to work a paying job to keep from starving and becoming homeless.
Hirsch’s theory would be great if the USA were really a meritocracy, as conservatives and libertarians like to claim it is. It is not, however, true. Try applying for jobs with a “black” sounding name or renting an apartment or even hailing a cab to get to an interview while black. You may obtain the cultural literacy Hirsch admires so much but it won’t open many doors of opportunity for you or prevent you from being discriminated against because you know the secret passwords,
LikeLike
Chris,
Not sure Hirsch guarantees success. What the CK curriculum (preK-8) can do, is provide the opportunity for success for all kids. It can give all students the background knowledge so necessary to succeed in our society. Poor/minority youngsters not possessing such backgrounds, indeed have reduced/minimal opportunity at the American Dream.
I believe Diane Ravitch still supports the CK program. She can attest to its strengths as she was once on one of their boards.
LikeLike
Chris, a Core Knowledge curriculum is not a matter of transmitting secret passwords –code that you hear at the Hasty Pudding Club (at Harvard) that conveys you’re “one of us”. What the core knowledge (I prefer this term to “cultural literacy”) does is unlock the meaning of books, lectures and other media. ONE CANNOT BE A GOOD READER without giant stores of general background knowledge –not just knowledge about Baroque music, but about tax code, politics, economics, how electricity is made, cell biology, etc. The current orthodoxy says reading is simply a matter of imparting a few reading skills, like making inferences. This is mostly BS. One cannot make inferences about a topic you know nothing about. (Likewise another favorite reading strategy is “activate your background knowledge” –but what if there’s no background knowledge to activate? And doesn’t the brain automatically activate it if it’s there. The prompting is superfluous –the pedagogy is snake oil). Highly-educated parents install vast libraries of background knowledge (e.g. “this is a STATE part, Johnny, not a FEDERAL park”) without even realizing it. Then Johnny goes off to kindergarten and wows his teachers because he’s already reading at a fifth grade level. It’s not Johnny’s raw cognitive capacity on display, it’s that background knowledge at work. Hirsch’s curriculum aims to install this BK in all kids’ minds. His mantra, “Teaching content IS teaching reading.” There’s no way around this fact.
LikeLike
No. They are not responsible for the black/white achievement gap.
LikeLike
Our lack of ability to measure what students of color know and can do is as much to blame as corporate take-overs, TFA, and all the other profiteers in our communities.
LikeLike
You’re right! My students all knew “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, a song I really didn’t know. What a beautiful song- I’m grateful they shared their knowledge with me.
LikeLike
So if teachers are responsible for the gap between black & white students, should we assume that teachers are also responsible for the achievement gap white and asian students?
LikeLike
Michael Brocoum: or if teachers were responsible for falling behind in the space race with the [now non-existent] Soviet Union when Sputnik was launched, and were responsible for various economic and national security calamities during the last forty years—
When did they ever get credit for winning the space race or for even one economic uptick or for even one national security crisis averted? Never.
Why?
The official answer: bad = teachers take the blame; good = everyone but teachers get the credit.
Just remember that the edubullies, like all self-serving politicians, follow the Marxist playbook: “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.” [Groucho Marx]
🙂
LikeLike
Teachers get blamed for student failure but bureaucrats take credit for student success. Totally agree.
LikeLike
Before going off on E.D. Hirsch, it’s only fair to state that it’s what a teacher does with Hirsch or any other researcher’s work. However, if you are going to cite Hirsch and the schools that take his work and treat kids like computers to be programmed, well, I hope you have a tall stack of flash cards, school uniforms, and test prep assemblies to complement the work. And, if you are going to cite Hirsch, I hope you will take the time to read Meaningful Differences. Similar in that it is language exposure and vocabulary development of kids living in different class situation; the difference is they introduce language exposure and experience!
This line from Good Will Hunting pretty much says it all:
“So if I asked you about art, you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientations, the whole works, right? But I’ll bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that.”
LikeLike
“f you are going to cite Hirsch and the schools that take his work and treat kids like computers to be programmed, well, I hope you have a tall stack of flash cards, school uniforms, and test prep assemblies to complement the work.”
Absolutely. And the upper income parents studied by Hart and Risley did NOT use “didactic instruction 24/7.” Rather than drill and kill, they regularly engaged their children in discussions and used rich language in everyday conversations, providing synonyms, brief definitions and the use of body language, which are called comprehension asides, to help their children understand new vocabulary. They also provided a high rate of encouragement to their children, while low income kids received twice as much discouragement as encouragement from their parents.
LikeLike
For years, those of us who continued teaching in inner city schools out of concern for those students were at least respected. Everyone knew that our jobs were much more complicated than those who “escaped” the hard core schools — either by transferring within a district (like Chicago) or heading to the suburbs (during those first few years, when the suburbs would take you before you became tainted by Chicago).
And we all knew that all we had to do to go from being a “bad teacher” to being a “good teacher” (and relieving most of our stress in the process) was to transfer from a hard core inner city school to a better school. Within Chicago, this happened regularly. I remember two very good English teachers who worked with us at Collins High School, in the heart of the North Lawndale ghetto. They transferred to Lane Tech one summer, and never again had to worry about being labeled “failures.” One guy who was a union militant at Chicago’s Kelvyn Park High School cashed in his privilege chips and took a job back “home” at New Trier. Suddenly he went from being a “bad teacher” (and at risk of losing his job during a “turnaround” or something else like that) to being one of the best teachers in Illinois.
The reason why half the black teachers in Chicago have been purged thanks to corporate “school reform” since the late 1990s (when Paul Vallas began reconstitution based on test scores) is that it was mainly (not all; I stayed until purged and blacklisted) the black teachers who remained teaching in the ruthlessly segregated all-black all-poor ghetto schools out of commitment to those children.
One of the ugliest things about corporate “school reform” the past decade has been the racism of all this. We didn’t create the segregation and heart-rending poverty that our children faced in the schools we stayed and taught at. I myself taught at Chicago’s Manley, Marshall, Tilden, DuSable, Gage Park, Collins, and Bowen high schools during my Chicago odyssey. The idea that we (teachers) were “failures” because our kids’ test scores were low at first seemed impossible for the ruling class to get away with. But by the late 1990s, the din of lies surrounding corporate “reform” and the careers of guys like Paul Vallas (and the dozens of clones who have followed), the New Jim Crow was locked into the public consciousness, and like other “separate but equal” lies of U.S. history, it has been taking an ugly toll since.
LikeLike
Just talked to some teachers from urban areas who say they have protocols at school to deal with bedbugs, sometimes daily. They can’t take papers home to grade because they will get bedbugs in their houses. Every day the kids put their coats and bookbags in large plastic trash bags to prevent bedbugs from spreading to other kids’ stuff.
Point? How does THIS, on top of poverty, impact learning? Does anyone ever consider all this when they evaluate teachers and schools? I wonder how Bill Gates or Michelle Rhee would “identify”?
LikeLike
Joy’s article is an old chestnut. In NYC public schools about 40 some odd years ago my district was instrumental in creating a change from a central board to community districts. Community leaders and parents felt that they needed more local control. Many believed that their children were not learning because they did not have teachers of color. My district, while making great strides, is still a very low economic area. Many white teachers left the district as a result of pressure. It was not a good time. Today, in my district the majority of teachers are teachers of color and still we are very low performing. It isn’t the color or the exceptional skill of a teacher-it’s the grinding poverty and lack of resources. We are overrun with charters and many of our schools have been closed. Until children are not coming to school hungry or tired or worried about issues that would overwhelm adults, it is going to be the same problem.
Granted that a few children beat the odds. But they are the exception, not the rule.
Joy has it all wrong as do the deformers.
Privilege of any ethnicity makes a difference.
LikeLike
So true. I know urban teachers who deal with threats and disruptions, tardiness, absenteeism, children not turning in assignments or studying, etc. It is shameful to blame the urban teachers who actually show-up and care about their students. I’m tired of teachers being scapegoats of urban ills. The whole idea that good teachers are in the suburbs and poor ones in the urban schools is ridiculous. Often getting a job is about who you know not what you know.
LikeLike
How come a certain group of people blame individuals for all of their problems, except when it comes to education, they dump it all on the teachers?
LikeLike
No one dares to talk about the actual problems, they just find a scapegoat.
LikeLike
Thank you Diane. I’ll check out your book. On another thought, if education is the key out of poverty and all of its attendant impacts, then why aren’t teachers being paid more than all of the politicians put together? After all, we are essentially being charged with the task of ridding the world of an economic trend which has plagued the human race since the beginnings of agriculture. That makes us quite valuable since we allegedly have THE answer. Since the leaders of our government have handed over this monumental task, we should definitely get paid more–much, much more.
LikeLike
About the article:
The photograph alone is terribly predjudicial.
Urban schools are not the only ones with high poverty levels and largely minority student bodies. Just come to a Southern small town. Title I anybody?
To follow the writer’s premise one would have to believe that all teachers are essentially “bad” because who knows when a black child may somehow burst into their classrooms and underachieve? Oh the horror!!
LikeLike
Great read today on all comments.
LikeLike
Is it possible that she didn’t just “have a bad day”? Is it possible that she too, like so many others, has sold out? This is an incredibly bad piece of writing for someone who is usually “thoughtful” and “sharp”. Makes me suspicious.
Another commenter talked about how it’s getting to be like a bad vampire horror movie – everywhere you run to get away from the hoards of vampires on the streets, the person you thought was safe turns around and has fangs growing out of there mouth. I can’t remember who said it, but it was spot-on. Is there anyone left to trust, besides a handful of “electronic graffiti” writers like Diane?
LikeLike
Dienne, do not despair. I like your metaphor of the bad vampire horror movie, but I promise you that there are many more of us than of them. We will prevail because their policies are so misguided, so punitive, and so failed that they won’t be able to maintain the charade of “reform” much longer. I cut Joy some slack because she is very young. She is only a couple of years out of college. I hold out hope that she will learn and grow wise. It can happen.
LikeLike
Oh, but it is so easy to judge from atop the ivory towers. These ” reporters” are doing just that… Reporting, I mean repeating, the same Edudeformer messages they hear from their peers. Until they come down to the trenches they will continue to be misinformed and believe what the hedge funder, corporate business, Jim Jones’ of the Edudeformer world want everyone to believe. Stand in line to drink your koolaid…
I too believe you are correct Diane. Their house of cards will some day come tumbling down. But what damage is being done to children and their teachers will be difficult to undo. I often wonder how history will judge this era of education “reform”. I think I know the answer. We will one day have conversations about this, and judge the players on their actions, or inactions. Think back on how we now judge events of our nation’s past.
LikeLike
I suppose Joy Resmovits means well, and wants to a good job reporting on education for the Huffington Post. But she comes to it from a rather narrow background.
She is a recent (2010) graduate of a little, private, selective, expensive, single-sex college in New York that touts its ” small, intimate classes” and its exclusivity (“we are the most sought-after liberal arts college for women in the United States”).
She wrote a fairly recent piece on cheating in the DC schools (which wasn’t terribly good), and she made this stunning error:
“Concerns about inflated test scores and cheating in D.C. first cropped up in 2008 and exploded in 2011, when USA Today published an investigation showing a high number of right-to-wrong erasures on D.C.’s exams.”
Clearly there would have been no cheating scandal in DC (or elsewhere) if students were overwhelmingly changing “right” answers to “wrong” ones.
In fact, the cheating scandal in DC (and in Atlanta, an elsewhere) occurred for precisely the opposite reason: test score answers were changed from “wrong” to “right.” And in DC (under MIchelle Rhee), more than half of all D.C. schools had irregular erasure answer patterns on tests, and for a school to be “flagged” for possible cheating a “classroom had to have so many wrong-to-right erasures that the average for each student was 4 standard deviations higher than the average for all D.C. students in that grade on that test, meaning that ” a classroom corrected its answers so much more often than the rest of the district that it could have occurred roughly one in 30,000 times by chance. D.C. classrooms corrected answers much more often.”
In her HuffPost piece titled “Dream Deferred: Are We Leaving Black Students Behind?,” Resmovits suggests that even though black students “have made great strides in closing the so-called achievement gap,” the fact that an achievement gap persists is the fault of teachers….”ineffective” ones.
To prove this point, she turns to the College Board’s Amy WIlkins. formerly a vice president for disinformation at the Education Trust (whose funders include the Broad, Gates, and Walton foundations). The same Amy Wilkins who helped to craft No Cilld Left Behind, and called it “a good thing,” and who said that “a simple, clean accountability and assessment system is what is required for the law.” Uh huh.
This is the same Amy Wilkins who said, in response to questions and concerns that NCLB – through its massive testing requirements –– narrows the curriculum, that “I think it’s very sad if people believe that it has sort of narrowed the
curriculum…this test should be like sort of a bug on the windshield of a great teacher who’s, you know, driving her kids fast forward.” You know how all that – bugs and windshields and tests and stuff – works right?
Wilkins and people like her keep advocating “for a value-added approach” to teacher effectiveness, despite the fact that value-added measures are notoriously volatile and unreliable. I suppose that now she’s ensconced at the College Board, Wilkins will be pimping for the SAT and Advanced Placement program, all in the name of “equity.” Research fails to support the efficacy of either one; shoe size predicts college success as well (or better) than the SAT, and once student characteristics are controlled for statistically, the claims made for AP disappear.
The College Board is now “aligning” its products to the Common Core standards. The Common Core standards were funded in large part by the Gates Foundation. Bill Gates wants more H1-B visas for his company despite the fact that American education churns out three times as many STEM graduates as there are jobs. The Common Core is supported by the Business Roundtable and U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who lobbied aggressively for unfunded corporate tax cuts that spawned huge deficits and debt, and for laissez-faire regulatory policies that aided and abetted massive fraud and corruption (especially on Wall Street) and that blew up the economy. Education “reform” is necessary, they say, to restore American “economic competitiveness,” an outright lie that is easily deconstructed.
Just above the title line of Resmovits “Dream Deferred” article is her picture, with a little heart suggesting the reader “Become a fan” of hers.
I think it’s fair to say that she’ll draw a lot more fans when she starts reporting education problems and issues a lot more accurately.
LikeLike
…and wants to do a good job….
LikeLike
You are spot on democracy. Although her writing on education has improved a bit she still completely lacks the experience or any realistic views of what teachers are facing every day in schools, particularly urban areas. The education articles never make an attempt to interview large numbers of teachers. She has often quoted charter CEOs for information in her articles. Of course all of us know how completely laughable that is.
LikeLike
If teachers are responsible for the achievement gap of k-12 students, who is responsible for the gap that exists BEFORE the children enter school? This is the heart of the research in Meaningful Differences by Hart and Risley.
The facts show that the gap exists when children start formal schooling and widens every year. I have seen reports that indicate that while most children do lose ground over the summer, that is not true for the children who are already high achievers. They continue to grow over the long break, mainly due to the experiences that their parents provide for them in the way of camps, travel, and cultural experiences. We have yet to try ensuring that ALL children have high-quality experiential knowledge in the critical preschool years. I’m with E. D. Hirsch on this one.
LikeLike
Wow, this article is way off base. Once again, it is easiest to blame the teachers. “…nationwide trends among black students, a group that often gets shortchanged on teacher quality. As a result, black students, especially older ones, frequently struggle to perform at the same level as their white counterparts.”
Ms. Resmovits says,“Minority students are more likely to have ineffective teachers — by any measure. Federal data shows their educators are less experienced and less likely to have majored in the subject they’re teaching”-totally untrue! I teach in inner city Philly, and I have two Masters degrees, one in the subject area I teach (as well as an undergraduate degree in my content area) and a second in Education. It is easier to blame the teachers for being incompetent.
Does Ms. Resmovits read the papers? Large cities (Chicago and Philly for example) have no money to help children who live in poverty. Poor children need more support because they have less support at home. They are behind because they come from stressful living situations, their parents might be uneducated and struggling financially, or incapable of helping their kids to be successful students. As negative as it sounds, it has been my experience after teaching for 4 years in inner city schools with 90-98% black children, that many children have uninvolved parents. As teachers with limited resources, we do what we can. If you teach a class that has 40% Special Ed kids, (kids with emotional and learning problems) with NO professional support and a principal who tells you to “deal with it,” you do as much as you can by yourself. Resmovits suggests that the “better” teachers go to work in the suburbs. How do you know they are better? Is it because their test scores are higher? Could that be because there is more parental involvement, more stability at home, and no stress from bullets flying past their windows at night?
LikeLike
Operative words for me…no parent involvement. A few years prior to my retirement a new principal in my school invited parents to a special conference she wanted to conduct with parents/guardians to find some way of improving the educational results for the approximately 2000 students enrolled in the school. During that time I was embroiled in a dispute with this new principal that ultimately went to arbitration that ruled in my favor. Despite the palpable hostility between this principal and myself I was the ONLY one who attended this meeting. Not a single parent/guardian of the 2000 invited attended. Nuff said.
LikeLike
“Better” … just watch “The Help” to see how much better anyone really is …
LikeLike
As a non-teacher I would suggest the problem goes well beyond teachers, parents, poverty, access, and anything more.
Perhaps the teachers can join those who look to the US Dept. of Education, which since its inception which may have worsened education in our country.
Teachers know better than others the burden the US DOE places on the public education system They are on the front lines, must adhere to requirements having little to do with teaching and more to do with ‘compliance’ in order to receive Federal funds,
which each state is entitled to…WITHOUT govt. “strings” attached.
The DOE has become a $100 billion behemoth, with a myriad of programs which goes well beyond the limited role of it original mission, which may be a key reason the burden of compliance is detrimental to public education.
The wide array of programs can be found at:
http://www2.ed.gov/policy/policy-by-program.html
Judge for yourself….comments welcome ajbruno14 gmail.com
LikeLike