By the time youngsters reach high school in the United States, the achievement gap is immense. The average black 12th grader has the reading and writing skills of a typical white 8th grader and the math skills of a typical white 7th grader. The gap between white and Hispanic students is similar. But some remarkable inner-city schools are showing that the achievement gap can be closed, even at the middle and high school level, if poor minority kids are given the right kind of instruction.
Over the past two years, I have visited six outstanding schools. (For a list of schools, see sidebar.) All of these educational gems enroll minority youngsters from rough urban neighborhoods with initially poor to mediocre academic skills; all but one are open-admission schools that admit students mostly by lottery. Their middle school students perform as well as their white peers, and in some middle schools, minority students learn at a rate comparable to that of affluent white students in their state’s top schools. (For one impressive example, see Figure 1.) At the high school level, low-income minority students are more likely to matriculate to college than their more advantaged peers, with more than 95 percent of graduates gaining admission to college. Not surprisingly, they all have gifted, deeply committed teachers and dedicated, forceful principals. They also have rigorous academic standards, test students frequently, and carefully monitor students’ academic performance to assess where students need help. “Accountability,” for both teachers and students, is not a loaded code word but a lodestar. Students take a college-prep curriculum and are not tracked into vocational or noncollege-bound classes. Most of the schools have uniforms or a dress code, an extended school day, and three weeks of summer school.
One thought on “The New Paternalism in Urban Schools”
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Do the teachers at these paternalistic schools (and I also do not feel this is a bad movement – I think it is a grand one, and kind of cringe at that p-word adjective) get to send their own children to these schools? Seriously. Because one of the hardest parts of teaching at one of these KIPP schools (for example) is getting there extra early, leaving extra-late, and working during a good part of the summer. If your own children do not get to come with you and spend some extra time in your classroom, who is watching them? If your own kids go to a standard public school and you are gone every day from 6:30 a.m. until 5 p.m., and then get home to get phone calls all evening and weekend from students with questions or problems, then your own children rarely get to see you, and can’t really get any school support from you at all.
Many of the teachers at these schools (which can be wonderfully, exceptionally successful!) are either very young and have no families, or their kids are in at least high school or higher – I might venture to guess that it is a higher ratio of these teachers at KIPP schools than at typical public schools. I don’t know this for a fact though. It would be interesting to know.
One of the more difficult aspects of my truly desiring a full-time, special ed teaching job right now, is this strain on my own family. I can offer a lot more than many candidates in terms of relating to parents, communicating with them, and connecting with (especially) children and families with special academic needs, because of my own family experience. But my involvement in their lives cannot take backseat to my career either.
Neat article, and very revealing in its semantics.