A small article in the Dayton News(http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/dayton-news/many-area-children-not-ready-for-kindergarten-946044.html) flatly states that 40% of their kids entering school for the first time aren’t kindergarten ready. Valerie Strauss, writing in the Washington Post (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/race-to-the-top/the-elephant-obama-lauer-ignor.html?wpisrc=nl_education) talks about the connection between poverty and academic achievement, which is ignored by public policy.
For those of us working in the trenches, it is almost unimaginable that there are so many goofy ideas accepted as gospel. And funded. Federal Department of Education policy sees itself as the guardians of research based approaches, but the fundamental research on which it bases what is funded is funamentally flawed.
1. Most schools are not failing, thank you very much. Middle class children are doing quite okay. Schools with a high percentage of kids not testing at grade level also have a high percentage of children who qualify for free and reduced lunch. One of the most dismal reports I have ever read was a report on all Alabama elementary schools. The schools on the top of the list, where virtually all of the students were at grade level had no poor kids. The worst schools, where only 20-25% of the students tested at grade level had a 92-99% poverty level. Moving up the chart, schools with fifty percent of their kids at grade level had 50% poverty. Seventy percent testing at grade level had 30% poverty. The correlation between povery and school achievement was startlingly clear. School failure is entirely about POVERTY.
2. Kindergarten readiness is the single best predictor of how the students at a school will perform when they are in third grade, sixth grade and high school. No Child Left Behind Act doesn’t test kids when they start school. It pre-supposes that all children start kindergarten equally endowed, so when students are tested at the end of third grade, the disparities between middle class and poor students must be the fault of the schools. In fact, poor children do not start kindergarten armed with the necessary skills that middle class kids almost all have. While we have no doubt that children are equally endowed by their creator equally, they sure aren’t endowed evenly by their parents. Certainly there may be a few extraordinary teachers who can overcome those deficits, but it is insanely difficult to remediate such a high percentage of children who lag so far behind. That we assume that somehow teachers should be far better performers than the average corporate employee makes no sense.
3. Contrary to Federal Department of Education policy, research does not validate their policy. In fact, as Ms. Strauss notes, the overwhelming crush of solid research underscores the exact opposite of their policy. The single best correlation between kids who succeed in school is the educational level of their mother. It is not the school a child attends or their teachers.
4. Persistently low-performing schools have a single, overarching characteristic – a very high percentage of impoverished students. If we want to actually alter the outcomes at these schools, the most relevant one is preparing incoming students to start school prepared with what they need to navigate kindergarten properly.
Until education policy becomes in line with research, critical funding will never be put where the real payback can come.
