As war overwhelms the nation’s social
agenda and Illinois political candidates continue to ignore the
state’s failure to provide adequate school funding, a crucial
conversation continues, largely behind the scenes. At first,
President George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind”
education reform was seen as a Republican hoax, an unfunded
mandate, a punitive approach to what should be everyone’s
responsibility, a strategy with little chance of success. But now,
four years into the law, former skeptics are starting, gradually
and reluctantly, to embrace the concept, if not the law itself. Too
many kids are being left behind. Children in poverty can learn. Poverty-stricken
schools can teach.
Educators are embracing even this: Test scores are reliable
indicators of student achievement, and low scores mean that
something is wrong. The education experts brought to Springfield
for the March 23 panel on “Closing the Achievement Gap”
all insisted that school changes should be
“data-driven.” This was the second program in an
education policy series co-sponsored by Mayor Tim Davlin’s
Office of Education Liaison and the University of Illinois at Springfield. The
panelists said not only that teachers and administrators but also
parents and communities must learn to decipher what the data are
telling them. By “data,” they’re referring not just
to test scores but also to all kinds of classroom studies and school
records that attempt to take the guesswork out of school performance.
Seat-of-the-pants education has been left behind for a more scientific
approach. I was surprised and pleased to learn that even
data-driven educators have a remarkably human side. They said that
schools need to not only hire good teachers and fire bad ones but
also give teachers a professional atmosphere to work in, with
plenty of in-service training and support, and then celebrate their
successes. They said that parents have to be involved, even if it
takes offering hamburgers and ice cream at school programs.
“We were not going to allow parents to not be part of our
program,” said Dr. James Rosborg of McKendree College,
recalling his 11 years as school superintendent in Belleville.
Parents must be made to feel welcome at school, but if they
won’t come, educators must go visit them at home. “We
have to get the chip off their shoulder so they’ll buy into
their child’s potential for success.” Panelists said that educators need to take into
account the problems kids face at home without letting those become
an excuse for not teaching them. “Recognize poverty, student mobility,
and alcohol/drugs as a negative impact upon student learning,”
one wrote in a handout. “Make sure a student’s basic needs
of food, shelter, clothing, and safety are met every day before you
start attempting to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic.”
Rosborg cares in the way many educators care: “I found something
good in every kid — and I had some real dirtballs.” The NCLB law’s emphasis on reading and
math test scores has prompted thousands of schools across the
country to teach their low performers little besides those two
subjects, a practice known as “narrowing the
curriculum.” In some ways it makes good sense to concentrate
on the basics until students learn to read and add, but it can make
school, especially high school, boring. And high school is already
boring enough. A survey released last month by the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation asked 500 high school dropouts why they quit.
Nearly half said that classes weren’t interesting, and 43
percent said that they’d missed too many days of school and
couldn’t catch up. The dropouts said more “real
world” learning opportunities and smaller class sizes might
have kept them in school. Dropouts may not be the most credible critics,
but professional educators are also saying that it’s
important to look for better ways than the old text book-and-lecture method of teaching.
“Instructional practices in high schools have not changed since
35 years ago,” says Sheila Stocks-Smith, the education liaison.
“It’s an area where we can improve.” Pilot programs
at Springfield’s Lanphier High School show promise, and the
Chicago Public Schools are doing pioneering reform work by starting 100
new high schools. “There’s a lot of emphasis on smaller
learning communities built around a theme,” says Stocks-Smith. All this is too important to be left to the
schools alone, which is why it’s good to have a city
education office, independent of the school district, to bring in
outside experts and different perspectives. Even though it was
heartening to see Diane Rutledge, the school superintendent, seated
in the front row, and a couple District 186 school board members in
the audience, they already know this stuff and have implemented
many of the suggested reforms. This series of programs is really
for the rest of us, who need to become more data-savvy and
child-friendly and who need to have our faith in public schools
renewed. Getting the community more involved is another key to
closing the achievement gap and leaving fewer children behind.
This article appears in Apr 6-12, 2006.
