NCLB: The Good Of The Few Vs. The Good Of The Many

Check out the breakdown of kids taking AP and honors courses at Evanston Township High School just outside Chicago -- supposedly one of the best schools in the nation.  Then tell me that the achievement gap isn't important and that NCLB hasn't done an important duty with its subgroup reporting requirements.  To its credit, ETHS is one of the most diverse schools in the state, and has been working on the achievement gap for a long time now.  But schools had this data for years but never reported it until NCLB made them.  Now, parents are suing to prevent elementary schools from sharing information used to track students with high schools and white parents are fighting like mad (Tribune) to prevent ETHS from getting rid of its honors English track.  As it often is in education and other endeavors, it's the good of the few vs. the good of the many.

Comments

[Alan]

Russo's comments are one of many similar comments from folks who know nothing of education but think they do. Student achievement depends on a myriad of factors, most of which are not under the control of the school or the teacher. Ridiculous graphs like these only further deepen the misunderstanding. While it is true that minority students score lower than whites, it is not because of the school, it is how the child is raised. Did the child get proper medical care while growing up?, did the child attend pre-school, did the child have two parents at home, did the child live in poverty, did the child's parents attend any teacher/parent meetings, school events or involve their child in athletics, did the child move often....you get the point. Further, why shouldn't parents of high achieving students demand rigorous curriculum for the child? Should we dumb down the curriculum to meet the lowest common denominator?
The truth is that we don't want to look at the real reasons for low student achievement because they are too hard to solve. Society needs a restructuring that promotes family values rather than materialism. Parents need good-paying middle class employment with health benefits rather than stagnant wages and zero health. Tax laws should favor poor-middle class families so they too may share in this country's wealth, not just the to 5% who own 80% of the wealth.
Schools are a reflection of society; if we don't like what we see then we need to change our society not the school. Teaching is not really all that complicated...lots of hard work, but not too complicated. The complications come when people like the writer write inflammatory articles that serve only to make a splash and do more harm than good.

[Doctorjuris]

Gee Mr Russo, why not just come right out and say "for the good of the white majority, the pesky, under-acheiving black and latino students should just take their lumps and accept their status as lesser people. No more spending hard earned, middle class white tax dollars are inherently inferior minorities."

For a closeted social darwinist, Mr. Russo's clever "vulcanesque" argument still does not hold water against the ideals of the overwhelming majority of educational scholars, teachers, researchers and administrators focused on changing the achievement gap.

In short, I should say "nice try".

[CarolineSF]

This comment assumes that the premise depicted in "Waiting for Superman" is accurate -- that tracking dooms all but the students on the high academic track to mediocrity. WFS depicts this in its ham-handed, simplistic and uninformed manner by showing students on an assembly line, with a select few being elevated and the rest dumped onto the track to oblivion.

I'm just not sure it's that simple. Every other developed nation that I've heard of -- please speak up if you know otherwise -- does major tracking, far more separate and segregated than the U.S. school system. Those nations include all the ones we hail as so successful -- Finland, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland etc. Other nations track kids at quite an early age onto vocational, academic and sometimes other tracks (the Netherlands has an arts track; others may as well). Those students get entirely different secondary educations and graduate at entirely different times -- the vocational-track students years earlier.

I don't really know if that's the solution, but it's simplistic and uninformed to behave as though this kind of system is an outrage that dooms loser students to failure. You certainly can't do that while also hailing systems like Finland's.

The fact that low-income students of color tend to be lower achievers -- and thus wind up on the lower tracks -- is, of course, the challenge of our educational system. The "education reform" view blames this all on their teachers, while those who in my opinion are better informed, more thoughtful and less simplistic connect it to our nation's high poverty rate and lack of social safety net.

[BE]

There is a real conflict here. When lower-achieving or medium-achieving students dominate a class, it's harder to achieve momentum, engagement, and that ineffable spark that all good teachers are aiming for. There are exceptions, of course, but statistically, it's harder and often impossible. So, of course we want to spread the high achieving students around to help create that momentum in all classes. But beyond a certain point, the honors curriculum gets watered down; the teacher may be trying to duplicate the experience that they can create in an old-style honors or AP class, but there can't be the level of rigor that there was before because the less-able students can't keep up with large amounts of out-of-class reading; the classroom discussion is different; more time has to be spent on classroom management; and so on. We may choose to do this anyway, but please do not fault the parents of high achievers for feeling that their children are being denied something they worked for all through grade school and middle school.

[Martha]

Why should any parent of any race sacrifice the education of their children for anyone else's children? Is education a zero sum game? Tracking only hurts students if the tracks are rigid and don't allow students to move flexibly between them. Educators have no problem with "ability grouping" within a classroom but the minute you group by ability in separate classrooms people start saying there is some form of discrimination going on.

The biggest problem with education in the country isn't tracking by ability, it's age stratification. If we grouped our children by their ability to do the work and not just by chronological age, maybe more kids would be getting more appropriate educations.