--Mr. Stickfigure
Forty Acres and a School:
Meeting the Needs of Universal Education
Since the end of the nineteenth century, the most significant change in American education has been that every child must go to school. Universal compulsory education is both our legal obligation and the ultimate justification for what our schools have become in the century since it was instituted. It is a noble goal and it is noble, perhaps, that we have spent a hundred years grappling with the concrete consequences of instituting such a demanding ideal. Of course, there are practical reasons for mandatory education as well, and those are the reasons that have kept the institution funded when our high-mindedness has waned. By the end of the nineteenth century, for instance, it was becoming clear that a rapidly expanding industrial economy demanded a literate population with a functional command of basic mathematics. Everything about an expanding industrial economy, from the basic signage of transportation, to the linguistic flexibility of advertising, to the legal and scientific apparatus that provided the matrix for it all, everything called for universal literacy and mathematics. Today, at the beginning of a new century, in the midst of a global information age, we expect even more of our citizens by way of reading, writing and ‘rithmetic. And yet, still, some of our schools succeed in meeting the mandate of our time, while others fail. If this is the state of things, then we have not yet realized the ideal of universal compulsory education. We have nearly universal attendance, perhaps, and some schools provide a good education. What will it take to make the schools that are still failing successful, so that our compulsory education can finally mean an education for everyone?
It’s a big enough question that it deserves to be parsed before it is answered. The determination of what it will take to make all schools successful depends upon what is making them fail. Is this failure one for which we have a remedy, if properly diagnosed? Or are we failing to recognize the problem itself, quite apart from whether we know how to solve it? In short, do we even know how to teach all of our children? Or are there some children who are still inscrutable to our methods? Fortunately for my purposes, there is already an extensive body of literature and tradition of professional development dedicated to answering these questions more thoroughly than I can here. Broadly, the term “best practices” applies to this field of publishing and professional exchange. Best practices represent the experiential wisdom of thousands of successful teachers and administrators throughout the country and the world. While specific theories, techniques and products vary as much as the teachers and students who produce them, best practices offer a unified theme when taken as a whole. That theme is also the beginning of an answer to the question of universal education: With the guidance of the right teachers, any child can be a successful student.
We know what to do to make schools successful, but we are not doing it. Consequently, if true, my question has become a charge. Because if we have the knowledge, we must account for why that knowledge has not been made universally manifest in all of our schools. Our habit of looking at particular schools, either successful or failing ones, as discrete and independent artifacts has helped to obscure from us the broad causes of both success and failure. This atomized analysis is, by definition, ill-suited for examination of a universal compulsory education system. Each school in the country--public, private and parochial--participates in the system of universal education. That a significant portion of these schools are failing represents a failing of that system to fulfill its founding purpose.
But what is failing? Where is the system breaking down? Again, there is no particular cog or wheel that we do not know how to fix. There is no social or economic condition that renders children incapable of being educated, and there is no class or culture that has not been served by at least a few successful schools. Thus, the system is not failing for lack of knowledge of how its parts work. Rather, it is failing because there have not been enough operational resources provided to run the entire system. Failing schools are schools which do not have adequate resources to meet the educational needs of their students. This paucity is, ultimately, part of the responsibility of our system of universal education. Failing schools are where our students slip through the crack for lack of ground to stand on.
But who is slipping through the cracks in our institution? This question has been answered clearly enough by the U.S. Department of Education’s
Certain subgroups outperformed others in reading in 2003. . . . White and Asian/Pacific Islander students had higher average scores than American Indian, Hispanic, and Black students in grades 4 and 8. Additionally, in grade 4, White students outperformed Asian/Pacific Islander students and Hispanic students outperformed Black students. . . .The level of poverty in the school . . . was negatively associated with student achievement in both grades in 2003.[1]
In the event that the connection between race, poverty and test results is not explicit enough, the
Certain characteristics of the highest poverty schools (more than 75 percent of students eligible for subsidized lunch) are evident. Relative to the total 4th-grade population, there was a lower percentage of White students and a higher percentage of Black and Hispanic students in the highest poverty schools in 2000.[2]
Students of color are disproportionately low performing and disproportionately poor. Students of color are slipping through the cracks. These are the cracks left unfilled by adequate resources, the spaces where pedagogical best practices should be operating but are not.
It follows the logic of universal compulsory education that the students with the most needs will require the most educational resources. To follow that logic, however, is to collide with an individualist culture that aspires to be a meritocracy. Here is the dialectic underbelly of universal compulsory education—its constitutional cognitive dissonance. On some level, it’s a fairly simple operation: assess the needs of all of our students and send our best teachers to teach the neediest ones first. But the closer such an idea gets to reality, the more laughable it seems. We are not inclined to shift valuable resources based solely on need; we want to know why resources are deserved, how they are earned, what you have done to merit them. Perhaps this is when it is useful to remember that universal compulsory education is, after all, a subordinate necessity, dependent upon our economic and cultural need for the continuous production of literate citizens.
Maybe we have enough literate citizens to fuel the techo-industrial machine. Maybe the term “universal” is merely a useful heuristic to help us conceive and operate an institution that is not universal, but just very, very large. But as the U.S. Department of Education reminds us, we can never say that we don’t know who is left out of our universe. By definition, they are our neediest students, but American history has made them black. Indeed, the institution of universal education has played a major role in that history, and it has been characterized, mainly, by having insufficient resources to meet the needs of its students.
But what, even in the broadest sense, would it take to meet the needs of our students of color? To the extent that these students are also disproportionately likely to be in poverty, it will take schools with educational resources that, for wealthier students, are provided by the community. These include many things that do not impact the budget of schools in wealthier communities, such as specialized academic intervention, individualized music training, club sports, and other resources paid for privately but which have a positive influence on academic success. High-poverty communities, however, are also more likely to send students to schools with mental and physical health needs, needs that must be met in addition to academic intervention and enrichment, sports and art and community service. In short, there is every reason to believe that it takes more educational resources to make a high-poverty school successful than a school in a wealthy community.
In the end, educational resources boil down to the same thing as everything else: money. Money is not to say cash, however, and the answer is not merely bigger discretionary budgets. Yet the fact that there is so much controversy over public school funding and teacher pay does not bode well for a discussion of the full range of economic restructuring required to make our failing schools successful. If we rule out redistributing resources from successful schools to failing ones, we are left looking at an enormous up-front investment, indeed. The fact that the investment would be made, primarily, in the education of our students of color, leaves only one question remaining: Why don’t we want to make the investment and thereby fulfill the mandate of universal education?
Because the cost would amount to paying reparations, which is a price
[1]
[2]
Note: Since accessed, the above links no longer point to the right sections, so I have disabled them. It is not impossible that I get around to updating them, someday.
No comments:
Post a Comment