At a recent birthday party for an
old friend I met an obviously talented high school history teacher who teaches
at a huge school—it looks to be about the size of the Pentagon—that I used
occasionally to drive by in my suburban expeditions. It is located in a rapidly developing part of
Middlesex County that transitioned from potato farms to tracts of McMansions in
what seemed like a trice, certainly during the active lifetime of one pickup
truck. Even the most casual observer
will note, passing along its freshly landscaped borders, the evidences of a
significant immigration of persons of subcontinental Asian origin—a detail not
without significance to my current musings.
For as the field of competition for the Democratic presidential
nomination takes shape, I have found myself particularly interested in some of the
various ideas concerning education that are beginning to emerge.
As I see it, there are at least two
major questions about our high schools that should greatly concern
Americans. This first is this: do our
schools, in general, set a high enough standard when compared with the schools
in other prosperous nations? The answer
to this is “No”—in my opinion a resounding “No”--but as the question is seldom
so much as asked, I leave it aside from this essay. The second is this: what accounts for the
marked disparity in educational outcomes of our high school students along racial lines. This question is frequently asked, and
frequently answered. But how good are
the answers?
The Federal Government first became
seriously involved in secondary education in 1965, the year I began teaching
college. In connection with the “War on Poverty”, the Johnson administration
commissioned an ambitious sociological survey of American public schools in an
attempt to pinpoint as accurately as possible the facts of the racial
achievement gap and its larger sources.
The so-called Coleman Report of 1966 drew attention to a dramatic chasm
of about a full standard deviation separating the academic achievement of black
and white students in our high schools.
Race itself was an important correlating factor in educational success,
along with levels of parental education and family income. Local budgetary factors—class size, and
per-student expenditure—were relatively minor
factors.
Lots of people saw the Coleman
Report as a wake-up call. Our government
educational experts didn’t wake up, exactly, but they did go on a spending
spree. Over the next half century
per-capita expenditure on the public schools roughly quadrupled. Kids were given head starts. No child was left behind. With
what concrete results? A new major study—we’ll call it Son-of-Coleman—has just summarized the state of the
achievement gap for American children born between 1954 (the year of my graduation from high school, as it
happens) and 2001. Simplifying only
slightly, the needle has barely moved! The efforts of the last fifty years, which
were far from trivial, half-hearted, unimaginative or niggardly—have failed
even to dent the problem of racially disparate educational outcomes in the
public schools. There is still
essentially a full standard deviation separating the performance of black and
white students.
A problem so huge and so persistent
is unlikely to have a single or a simple cause, but there is in my opinion one
major factor that too seldom commands serious discussion because of its
intractability and social sensitivity.
That is the traditional educative role of the family, as opposed to that
of the school. My two Montreal
grandchildren have been with us over Easter, and yesterday my six-year-old
grandson took me for a little walk. We
saw many interesting things to discuss: flowers, birds, the worms that had been
driven to the surface by a heavy rain some hours earlier. Since in his school they speak French as well
as English we tried to identify objects of interest in both languages. We stopped to admire a lush clover patch. He knew about clover, and about the lucky
four-leaf instances thereof. But he
didn’t know the French: trèfle. He repeated the word, amending instinctively
and without comment my lame pronunciation.
How could there be such different words for the same thing? That led me to English trefoil, thence to bibliographical folios, thence to what it might
mean “to turn over a new leaf”.
It is hard not to make this sound
like a philological seminar rather than what it was, a perfectly natural
conversation between a young boy and his old grandfather. Yet, like dozens of other daily exchanges he
has with his parents, it will certainly be a small part of the foundation upon
which the boy’s formal education can be constructed. The schools can do a great deal, but they are
much better at building on a foundation than at laying one. That has since time immemorial been the task
of parents and other familiar elders.
This brings me back to the high school teacher of my first sentence. She teaches elective Advanced Placement
courses in history. Performance in AP
courses (sometimes called “college preparatory” courses) is measured by a
single nationally administered test that aims to establish an objective and
uniform standard. The degree to which
this goal is achievable is not beyond debate, but I know from personal
experience that the College Board, which administers the program, strives
mightily to achieve it. For several
years I was on the committee that makes up the AP exam for English.
Although a quarter of the students
in her school are black, she has no
black students in her classes this term.
She thinks most black students are “lost”—her word—to the aspirations of
AP well before they get to high school.
On the other hand students of Asian background, another sizeable
demographic in the student body, are significantly overrepresented. She told me that AP is nearly the cultural
norm among this broad section of the immigrant community, and one widely
supported by parents “actively involved” in all aspects of their children’s
school careers. That was also her
phrase. She clearly thinks that parental
involvement can be too “active” in monitoring homework and demanding high
grades. She spends a certain amount of
time with pressurized teenagers. But in
terms of outcomes—such as those that are causing such anguish in the New York
City system with regard to the admissions to elite high schools—the heavy
hand seems to triumph over even the most benign neglect every time.
