At a recent school board meeting my local school district reviewed the latest “proficiency” results on federally required measurements of reading, math, attendance, graduation, and participation. The district, with nearly 70% of its students qualified for free or reduced price lunches, missed the benchmarks set by the federal government on reading and math scores. With the exception of two elementary schools, all of the schools did not reach the bar of roughly 81% proficiency according to federal law. A school is given this “mark of shame” if any one of several sub-groups of students fails to reach the proficiency mark. Often, these reports are used to ask “what’s wrong with our schools?” or more recently “what is wrong with our teachers?” But to paraphrase John Donne we should “ask not for whom the bell of achievement scores tolls for, it tolls for all of us”.
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The proficiency report is based on student reading and math test scores from the new Iowa Tests. We can definitely debate the wisdom of tying the rating of student success to one bubble sheet, standardized test but let’s assume the scores on reading and math are to some extent a very crude measure of our students abilities. If so, then these scores are not mainly an indictment of what teachers are doing in their classrooms or if we are using the right programs in our schools, instead they are a stinging indictment of our larger community. The low proficiency scores of our students point toward a failure by our nation, state, and local community to effectively deal with the out of school variables like poverty that have a heavy impact on how students perform in school.
Studies done by respected education researcher David Berliner for the Education and Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado illustrates why the entire community is at fault for the lack of achievement by our kids. (LINK) Berliner’s research tried to pinpoint the effects different variables had on student scores on achievement tests. He looked at in school factors such as quality of teachers, peer group effects, quality of principal leadership, school finances, availability of quality counseling, SPED and ELL services, the number and variety of AP and other rigorous coursework, turnover rates for teachers, among others. Berliner’s research revealed that ALL of those in school factors, of which the quality of the teacher was just one thing, contributed to about 20% of the student’s results on achievement tests. The out of school variables of family income, violence rates, medical and dental care available and used, level of food insecurity, number of times a family has to move, single or two parent families, availability of high quality early childhood programs, the neighborhood’s sense of collective efficacy or hopelessness, and other factors contributed about 60% of the student’s results on achievement tests. To put it bluntly, there is as much and more blame for a student’s educational results on the kind of life we provide them outside of school as there is on what is done inside the schools for the 10% of a child’s life they actually spend there.
How should we react to this kind of information? Many politicians and leaders of education “reform” want to simply ignore it and continue down the path of placing ALL the burden and blame on the backs of the teachers and schools. The accountability movement that drives both political parties into policies like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top are based on a premise that if we just hold teachers more accountable for their students’ test results we can solve the problem (and rid the country of an apparent plague of bad teachers). This accountability scheme has been in effect for more than a decade and yet we still do not see results. Do we need to blame teachers harder and test kids more? Or do we need to instead, take a holistic approach to this problem and do the hard work as a nation, a state, and a community to admit we are not currently providing enough income, good jobs, or effective supports for the children who live in or near poverty? Will we have the guts to do such work or will it be easier to continue to blame and shame teachers and sell off our public schools to ravenous privatizers who want to make a quick buck off of our concerns? This should be the center of our discussion and lead to balanced policies that both ensure quality schools AND take care of the out of school life our students spend 90% of their time from birth to 18 living in.