I wrote a blog critical of the race-based, ethnicity-based, income-based targets for student achievement in Alabama’s Plan 2020, which many other states have adopted.
I received the following critique from Melissa Shields, who teaches in Alabama:
As a nationally board certified teacher in Alabama of more than 20 years, I have long admired Dr. Diane Ravitch and read her blog regularly. She often says what I’m thinking and seems to “get” what’s really happening in education. However, my admiration took a jolt when I read the recent post, “Alabama Sets Un-American Goals for Students.”
She was referring to our Alabama PLAN 2020. Unfortunately she relied on one newspaper article that focused on one narrow area of this plan. Since she is one of the country’s best-known education researchers, it is regretful she didn’t try to learn more. She would have discovered that rather than being vilified as a race biased effort to set lower expectations for certain groups of students, PLAN 2020 should be applauded (and I wonder why Dr. Ravitch ignored comments in the article by a local superintendent and the dean of the College of Education at the University of Alabama defending PLAN 2020).
Plan 2020 looks at individual students and groups of students, determines baselines as to where they are functioning, acknowledging the fact that some students and groups of students are not on a positive trajectory for success and follows with an individualized and differentiated trajectory of improvement to address those gaps. The entire system is based on a goal of ALL students reaching 100% proficiency while at the same time understanding that everyone may not get there on the same day at the same time which was perceived as failure under NCLB.
Dr. Ravitch states in her piece about Alabama using subgroups to better determine how instruction should be individualized, “the state of Alabama should ditch the race-based, economic-based, disability-based goals and focus on one center American idea” equality of educational opportunity for every child.”
But I would remind her that this is not the fantasy world of Lake Wobegon where “all the children are above average.” Instead, the real world is one where at-risk and poor children often do not perform as was as their wealthier and/or gifted counterparts. I have been fortunate to have taught in a thriving Christian private school, affluent public schools, and rural lower-income public schools. I know what it takes to help children believe in themselves, often when no one else does. I also know it takes to help our “at-risk” students find academic success, even surpassing the successes of their wealthier grade-level peers. If the truth be known, those successes are my proudest moments in the classroom. Teaching children who want to learn is easy; teaching those who don’t think they do is a challenge, one we teachers embrace with vigor. It didn’t matter if these students were black, white, or purple (or what NCLB projected their success rate should be), I wanted to help each of them find growth in my classroom…..and they did.
As a side note, I’m an English teacher. I taught 150-170 students a day (6 classes). Boys do not typically perform as well in English as the girls. I often wished I could receive more data on how well my male students were doing in relation to the females. Because I did not have that data, I gathered it myself, reflecting on how I might better meet the boys’ needs and interests to improve their performance in language arts disciplines. My point is, if we don’t follow students’ progress per subgroup, how can we ensure growth? The percentages in PLAN 2020 are actually higher than we’ve had before, which of course means we’re trying to raise the bar of expectation for them—not lower it.
The fact that we have publicly owned the fact that black/EL/poverty students (as a whole) are achieving at a lesser level than many their peers is the first and most important step to change this unacceptable reality. Regretfully sharing these facts and acknowledging that a HIGHER expectation must be put in place to remove this gap is being portrayed as racist. Would Dr. Ravitch prefer that we have this knowledge and not aggressively address it? I find it hard to believe that she would. </em
This is my response to Melissa:
I am sorry for singling out Alabama since many other states, encouraged by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, are doing the very same things.
But I do not withdraw my distaste for setting goals by race, ethnicity, and income.
I wrote to Melissa that this approach represents stale NCLB thinking. Every child is a unique individual, and knowing his or her skin color or heritage or parental income should not be the basis for goal-setting.
There is a reason that Moses spent 40 years wandering in the desert before he was able to bring his people to the promised land. They had to learn to think like free men, not slaves.
We have to learn to think again like educators, not data hounds or accountants meeting arbitrary targets.
