Achievement Gap: Addressing classism will improve school performance

This is a thoughtful piece. I agree that more holistic approach that addresses environmental circumstances that children find themselves in is what would improve the achievement gap. -Angela

Wed, Dec. 28, 2005
ACHIEVEMENT GAP
Addressing classism will improve school performance

By Lewis Diuguid The Kansas City Star

Richard Rothstein offers the best thoughts I’ve heard on narrowing the black/white achievement gap.

Lawmakers just have to listen. “I don’t have a strategy to get politicians to do something different except to keep on emphasizing what the social and economic realities are,” Rothstein told me.

Rothstein is a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and a visiting professor at Teachers College at Columbia University. His thoughts are in a past issue of Educational Leadership magazine.

The education system is less to blame for the achievement gap than society’s ills. Yet, the No Child Left Behind law would have people think the schools are totally at fault. America’s sicknesses include racism and classism.

Rothstein describes how upper-middle class parents with jobs in which they collaborate with others are more likely to show their young children how to figure out answers for themselves. The children of people with professional careers are generally more inquisitive and take a more active approach to learning than children of working-class parents.

Parents whose jobs require “creativity and decision-making were less likely to punish their children for actions in which the children’s intentions were desirable, even if matters did not work out as intended. Parents who were closely supervised at work were more likely to base punishment on their children’s actions, regardless of the children’s intentions.”

Rothstein added that parents in professional jobs generally spoke more than 2,000 words per hour to their children compared with 1,300 for working-class parents and 600 for welfare mothers. “Toddlers of professionals received an average of six encouragements per reprimand,” he said.

“Working-class children got two. For welfare children the ration was reversed: They received an average of one encouragement for every two scoldings,” he noted. “It seems reasonable to expect that when these children eventually go to school, their teachers will not be able to fully offset such differences in early interactions.”

The underfunded No Child Left Behind law doesn’t address that.

“You can’t fix it with school reform,” Rothstein told me. “The biggest improvements will come when you address social and economic inequality.”

Narrowing the achievement gap isn’t an impossible dream. “If you want to improve the achievement of low-income children, one thing you can do is improve their health,” Rothstein said. New money for area schools from the Bill & Melinda Gates and other foundations should focus on this.

He wrote that vision and dental problems impede learning. Poor kids have twice the average rate of severe vision impairment.

“The disproportionate assignment of low-income black students to special education may partly reflect a failure to correct their vision,” he wrote.

“Untreated cavities are nearly three times as prevalent among poor children as among middle-class children,” Rothstein notes. “Students with toothaches, even minor ones, will tend to pay less attention in class and be more distracted during tests than will students with healthy teeth.”

Low-income children are five times as likely as middle-income kids to have high lead levels in their blood, “diminishing their cognitive ability,” Rothstein wrote. “Asthma is the single largest cause of chronic absenteeism,” he said.

Students can’t benefit from good instruction if they are at home sick, he said. “Middle-class children typically get treatment for asthma symptoms; low-income children often do not.”

Lawmakers can address the achievement gap with affordable housing for low- and moderate-income families. “Urban rents have risen faster than working-class incomes have, forcing many families to move frequently because they fall behind in rent payments,” Rothstein wrote.

“In some schools in minority neighborhoods, mobility rates are above 100 percent: For every seat in the school, two children were enrolled at some time during the school year,” he wrote.

Rothstein told me that teaching becomes almost impossible if the children have no stability because “the families are always moving.”

Rothstein advocates state and federal social and economic policies to improve health care, provide stable housing, boost incomes for working parents, end discrimination and lift the fates of low-income children so they, too, can achieve academically.

The political will, however, needs to equal the massive effort required for change to occur.

Lewis W. Diuguid is a member of The Star’s Editorial Board. To reach him, call (816) 234-4723 or send e-mail to Ldiuguid@kcstar.com.

© 2005 Kansas City Star and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.