Achieving High Educational Standards for All Conference Summary (2002) / Chapter Skim
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Education Reform in Context: Research, Politics, and Civil Rights
Education Reform in Context: Research, Politics, and Civil Rights
Pages 123-146
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From page 123... ...
Political tides notwithstanding, the moral claim has grown stronger with time, not weaker. And now the structural changes in the economy combine with inexorable, almost breathtaking demographic changes to add a material urgency making that moral claim an imperative for all.
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From page 124... ...
The consequences are evident in learning outcomes, but also in such broader societal outcomes as shared community and intercultural competence in the workplace, the political arena, and the civic sphere generally. Nonwhite students already constitute majorities in California, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Hawaii, and New Mexico and make up 67 percent of all students in the nation's 100 largest school districts.
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From page 125... ...
The prototype Republican plan tends toward block grants with few federal requirements apart from intensive state-defined testing programs for public disclosure and accountability purposes, and perhaps augmented by encouragement for private school vouchers. The prototype Democratic plan tends toward substantial additional funding for more specific needs widely thought to be critical ingredients for school improvement, including more and better-trained teachers, capital investments in facilities and technology, and smaller class size in the early grades.
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From page 126... ...
There is a growing consensus within that community that equal education opportunity and the elimination of disparities in achievement and attainment must be the number one agenda item for the civil rights movement in the decade ahead.8 As some have put it, algebra is a civil right.9 While liberals stress the mantra that "every child can learn,"~° conservatives argue that poor and minority families deserve private school vouchers so that they will supposedly have choices like other families to escape failing schools, and people across the spectrum proclaim that we must "leave no child behind." Another aspect of the civil rights context, however, is less about the rekindled aspirations for educational successes than about insistence that the antidiscrimination and equality norms familiar to civil rights law be given their appropriate, contemporary interpretation and aggressively enforced. One prominent example concerns testing.
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From page 127... ...
President Clinton and Secretary Riley reacted to such civil rights concerns rather dismissively, suggesting privately that perhaps these leaders were not committed to excellence or high standards.~3 This charge was, of course, utterly false. The civil rights claim has three central components.
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From page 128... ...
High-stakes testing is also problematic from a civil rights perspective if curriculum is not aligned with the test, or if instruction is not aligned with the curriculum.~9 The simple insight, reflected in both case law and professional testing standards, is that it is a denial of due process to punish a student when he or she has not even had a chance to prepare for the exam. This is the most pointed form of a general concern about providing adequate and equitable opportunity to students before imposing on them a potentially devastating decision about tracking, retention in grade (with, many believe, resulting increases in the risk of dropping out)
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From page 129... ...
Failure to do so is a denial of rights. I would add that, given this right under state law, it therefore because a denial of federal constitutional due process rights to deprive a child of that right, and a violation of federal civil rights statutes as well.22 Indeed, there are at least two major strands of civil rights claims being pursued under various state constitutional law theories: failure to provide disadvantaged students with a minimally adequate basic education, and failure to assure some rough comparability in education finances or services across school districts.
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From page 130... ...
It seems likely, however, that the erosion of this commitment will accelerate unless leaders and their constituents see substantial gains in minority achievement and reductions in disparities within the next few years. There has been too little attention in policy and political debates to the rate of school improvement, as though truly modest movement in the right direction is cause for celebration and selfsatisfied media events by officials from the White House to the school house.27 The linchpin of federal accountability imposed on the states, in fact, has been the requirement that states adopt some kind of assessment system and demonstrate "adequate yearly progress." To any dispassionate observer of such policy outputs, this is all but laughable: "progress" has only the thinnest of statutory definitions, and "adequate" has no definition whatsoever.28 Surely, the findings surveyed in this volume suggest that the dismaying disparities along lines of color and class are too dangerous for half measure or slow cures.
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From page 131... ...
Pollsters drive the policy choices, rather than research evidence. My favorite example is the early Clinton administration, strapped for cash, touting school uniforms as though it were a central component for bold federal leadership on school improvement.
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From page 132... ...
One of these topics, choice in its various forms sparked little discussion, perhaps because from a research perspective it is speculative. Indeed, much of the school choice debate has long struck me as an ideological matter in a central sense, in particular those species of "choice" embodied in private school vouchers and in large-scale public school choice.
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From page 133... ...
On the question of teaching, the most important insight is that basic "research" result: In order to improve student achievement, pick better students; failing that, do better and more teaching of the students you are stuck with. The former strategy is illustrated by retention, over-referrals to special education, "push-out" strategies, and choice schemes that involve overt or subtle screening on family, motivational, or academic variables.
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From page 134... ...
And they have to be louder and brighter, because of the imperatives for revolutionary change and coupled with the fairness demands of a civil rights sensibility. Integration With respect to school integration by class and race, the most important point to be gleaned from the conference is that there is far too little attention in political and policy debates to the importance of integration as a tool for improving learning outcomes and, ultimately as important if not more so, as a tool for improving societal outcomes.
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From page 135... ...
The evidence is that the time needed to achieve English proficiency depends on many factors, including age of the child, level and quality of prior schooling of the child, education level obtained by the parents, type of language instruction provided, the child's exposure to English in his or her community, quality of the teachers, and quality of the instruction, including the bilingual education instruction, that a child receives.42 Given all these variables, researchers generally agree that the time it takes to become proficient in English ranges from two to eight years.43 There is no substantial research support for a one- or two-year time limit on bilingual services applicable to all students. The legal principles are simple to state, if not apply: students with limited English proficiency may not be denied access to an education due to failure of the schools to make reasonable accommodations through some form of language or translation assistance.
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From page 136... ...
Implementing strict one-year English immersion programs or mandating three-year time limits on bilingual education instruction would likely violate the rights of many children granted under the Equal Educational Opportunities Act.44 So, interestingly, the antidiscimination legal framework puts the minimal adequacy of policy research directly at issue, at least in principle. (Ultimately, judges tend to defer to government policy makers, rather than make a more independent judgment, based on expert testimony, of which choices the research supports.)
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From page 137... ...
Reconsidering Radical Decentralization A more radical suggestion, perhaps, is that we make a less romantic and more scientific assessment of the decentralization in our 15,000-district education sector. The choice by national and state governments to decentralize should be considered one of several possible "treatments" or engineering strategies in school reform, just as a multinational conglomerate might adopt a strategy concerning centralization versus site-based
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From page 138... ...
Imagine the perspective of a passionate, concerned parent, hearing a claim that school improvement will come from devolving more discretion to principals and teachers.
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From page 139... ...
Now, we stand at the threshold of many tens of billions of dollars of new investments in school improvement, in the teaching profession, and in experimentation and research. A key question, therefore, is whether we are smart enough to make the best possible use of those new investments by devising better strategies and mediating institutions to take the best ideas and implement them.
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From page 140... ...
Sack, "Candidates' K-12 Policies Share Themes," Education Week 9/6/00; David E Rosenbaum, "The 2000 Campaign: The Education Policies; Bush and Gore Stake Claim to the Federal Role in Education," New York Times 8/30/00, A1; Jacques Steinberg, "The 2000 Campaign: Education," New York Times 11/5/00, A44; David E
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From page 141... ...
15. American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, National Council on Measurement in Education, Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing.
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From page 142... ...
More important, there is a strong interaction effect produced by the disproportionate concentration of poverty in heavily minority schools. See, e.g., Gary Orfield, Schools More Separate: Consequences of a Decade of Resegregation at 3940 July 2001, The Civil Rights Project at Harvard)
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From page 143... ...
Campbell, "TestScore Effects of School Vouchers in Dayton, Ohio, New York City, and Washington D.C.: Evidence from Randomized Field Trials." Paper Prepared for the Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association, September 2000; Paul E Peterson and Bryan Hassel, eds., Learning from School Choice (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998~; Cecilia Rouse, "Private School Vouchers and Student Achievement: An Evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program," Quarterly Journal of Economics, v.
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From page 144... ...
41. Kenji Hakuta, Improving Education for All Children: Meeting the Needs of Language Minority Children.
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From page 145... ...
Administrators to Receive Merit Pay for Boosting Scores," Education Week, June 6, 2001.
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From page 146... ...
whereas onlY 14 percent of all white students do so. Although only 14 ~ ~ or ~ 4 - J percent of American Indians live in urban school districts, the vast majority of the remainder attends rural schools rather than higher performing suburban schools where white youth are disproportionately concentrated.
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