Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Assessment of Educational Progress.
The project of fixing America’s educational system should begin with a strategic analysis of where, in the interaction of children and schools, we find our most serious academic problems; and where, in the educational pipeline, those problems can be most effectively addressed. While the achievement of major educational gains for all categories of youngsters remains challenging, the gaps to be closed can be parsed into just two broad categories, and these can be addressed at just a few promising intervention points, all replicable at a national scale, and all affordable—measuring affordability in terms of their long-term, rather than short-term, cost-benefit ratios.
The largest academic achievement gap, one that has long consumed the energies of U.S. national, state, and local education agencies, remains the one separating poor minority children from mainstream whites (see table 2.7). Closing that gap has so far proven to be beyond the reach of the most prevalent education reform policies. To date, despite the expenditure of billions of dollars and the implementation of countless experimental reforms—affecting teachers, class sizes, school organization, high-stakes testing, and so on—progress has been very limited and geographically sporadic. Not far behind poor minority children in school performance is a growing cohort of lower-income white children—most often those raised in single-parent families, a phenomenon largely ignored by reformers obsessed with ethnically correlated performance differences.
Table 2.7
NAEP Test Scores by Race and Location, 2011
Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Increasingly noticeable is the academic achievement gap between girls (higher) and boys (lower) among schoolchildren of all class and ethnic backgrounds, as indicated in table 2.8. Some recent reports on male/female school performance disparities ascribe them to likely differences in brain wiring, and therefore conclude they might be lessened by using gender-differentiated teaching strategies, and perhaps hiring more male teachers. This is most certainly wrong; effective schooling can be—and should be—gender-blind. When Lawrence Summers, as president of Harvard, suggested something similar, that women’s underrepresentation in mathematics and the sciences was due to gender-based cognitive differences, he was booed off the stage and ultimately lost his job. Cognitive determinism is no more defensible when it is used to justify why so many boys are lagging academically. For children growing up in poor families—white or black—a better explanation is that being raised in fatherless households disproportionately undermines the school performance of boys. Girls often have a positive role model—and achievement motivator—in their mothers, while boys in the absence of fathers are apt to look to delinquent older males (who most likely show contempt for any evidence of academic striving) for guidance.18
Table 2.8
NAEP Eighth-Grade Reading Scores by Gender and Race
Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Assessment of Educational Progress.
The one American school cohort that is not being left behind academically is made up of upper-middle-class white children. Even here, girls do better than boys, but the boys easily do well enough to succeed in college and later in their working careers. Obviously, it is no surprise that socioeconomically advantaged kids do well in school, and disadvantaged ones do badly; we have always known this intuitively and statistically have confirmed it repeatedly since the publication of the Coleman Report in 1966,19 but we have had a hard time translating this knowledge into a plan of educational action. Until the 1960s, we simply shrugged and accepted differential school outcomes as the unavoidable byproduct of social stratification. After the Supreme Court ended de jure racial segregation in 1954, we naively assumed that racial mixing—and, by extension, socioeconomic class mixing—would trump the disparities in home environments. When that didn’t work, we decided that compensatory resources would do the trick—for example, giving school districts with large numbers of disadvantaged children more money to pay teachers more, run smaller classes, hire paraprofessionals, and engage educational “experts.” When that didn’t work either, we launched the current generation of reforms that will be reviewed in detail in chapter 3.
Although the strongest predictor of academic performance for all schoolchildren is family social and economic status, and this explains not only the inferior academic performance of lower-income minority schoolchildren but also that of lower-income whites, with the greatest impact falling on boys in both groups, there is not much we can do about that. Decades of failed experiments have conclusively shown that it is nearly impossible for government to level the socioeconomic playing field through interventions in the home. The inevitable policy conclusion to be drawn from this fact is that if we are to raise the academic performance of disadvantaged children, we must do so in school.
But which kind of school? It is becoming increasingly obvious that all of these apparently discrete school performance gaps—affecting African American and Hispanic children, lower-income white children, and lower-income boys of all ethnic backgrounds—have their origins in the same underlying condition: cultural deprivation at an early age. If that is so—and the work of E. D. Hirsch and other scholars of cognitive development persuasively documents the validity of this hypothesis—it is a problem that can only be successfully remedied at an early age. All efforts to date that have attempted to close the academic gap in high school and college have yielded only marginal gains. Even elementary school may be too late. There is a growing body of evidence that the best place to address this issue is in preschool. But not any old preschool, as the country’s disappointing experience with Head Start, the nation’s largest preschool program for disadvantaged youth, has demonstrated. However, with the right kind of preschool curriculum, and the right kind of preschool teachers, and with sufficient time—in school-day hours and school-year days—a very large share of these heretofore intractable gaps can be closed. Why and how this is to be done is discussed in detail in chapter 3.
But it is not just children from poor minority families who are being “left behind.” Looking at the previous tables, we can see that currently the majority of American schoolchildren are falling short relative to their potential and the education they need to excel in the twenty-first-century knowledge economy. This is the gap separating “normally” performing American middle-class schoolchildren from their more successful European and Asian peers and their affluent—often privately schooled—upper-middle-class American ones. This Mainstream achievement gap affects the largest number of American schoolchildren and also happens to be the easiest to close, yet it has gotten practically no notice at all. This gap can and should be closed later in the educational cycle—that is, in high school and college—and we have good evidence on how to do it. Since this gap is not grounded in hard-to-overcome handicaps of poverty, racism, family structure, or cultural disadvantage, we need only look for guidance to places where mainstream students are doing well—like Massachusetts in the United States, or Japan abroad. Indeed, the most irrefutable evidence that the Mainstream gap can be closed is in the marked variation among American states in the performance of their white, middle-class, suburban schoolchildren. For example, those in Massachusetts taking the NAEP eighth-grade reading test in