Thoughts on the Achievement Gap

I wrote this as a writing sample in April 2013. 
As I prepare to complete my Teach For America commitment, I often find myself discussing the complexities of the achievement gap with friends and fellow corps members. I recently looked back at the application essay I wrote for Teach For America and found that I, like many others who involve themselves in education reform, had oversimplified the issues involved. I wrote about wanting to be a teacher that cared about her students when, perhaps, no others had cared before. I wrote about wanting to be the teacher who would finally encourage her students to read and seek knowledge. However, in both of the schools in which I taught I encountered countless numbers of teachers who care about their students and many teachers who want their students to develop passions that will lead them to success, and yet we still face unanswered questions and failing students. Closing the achievement gap, I’ve learned, does not just depend on teachers. It does not just depend on parents. It does not just depend on schools. It depends on all of these components working together to build strong and diverse communities.

Last summer, I read Jonathon Kozol’s book The Shame of the Nation: The Rise of Apartheid Schooling in America. Kozol’s premise is that failing schools are disadvantaged primarily because they are segregated; the same resources are not directed at schools that have minority populations and classroom expectations and environments in African-American and Hispanic schools vary greatly from those in other schools. Kozol writes about the rigidity used in many urban schools—from silent lunches to explicit rules about how to sit in a chair—and compares it to the method of behavioral control typically used in prisons. He asks whether the policy makers that lavish praise on schools that make gains through these behavior controls would welcome those methods if they were used in the schools their own children attend. If rigid behavior controls yield such great results, why do we not implement them in all schools? Though people speak of school reform in language that’s supposedly applicable to all, school reform, Kozol writes, consists mostly of practices “targeted primarily at poor children of color” and designed to prepare them for low-wage service careers. These practices would be, to put it mildly, unwelcome in a middle class neighborhood school full of white children, regardless of the supposed academic gains they may provide.

Kozol’s book, along with my own experiences in the classroom and the Memphis community, have led me to this firm belief about the achievement gap: until the children of our policy makers, doctors, and lawyers attend school with the children of the people who serve them at McDonald’s, who fix their cars at the body shop, and even those who beg for money in the streets, the achievement gap will persist. Certainly, outstanding teachers and school leaders can and absolutely do make a difference even in highly segregated classrooms, but we as a nation will not make significant progress until all children can look around their classrooms and see faces like and unlike their own. The end of apartheid schooling in America will come only when America’s decision-makers must make the same choices about class size, school funding, and classroom environments for their own children as they make for the impoverished, often minority children in our urban schools.

Equity

Hello world! I recently finished my first year in the classroom as a Teach for America corps member. I took this position to learn more about education and try to get some ideas for its improvement. This year, I developed more questions than answers. The biggest question, for me, is: how do we determine what comprises educational equity? We talk a lot about our students "attaining an excellent education" but what does that mean?

I recently finished reading Diane Ravitch's Death and Life of the Great American School System and am now engrossed in Jonathon Kozol's The Shame of the Nation. I know Ravitch to be a TFA-critic and it wouldn't surprise me to find out that Kozol felt the same way, but perhaps for different reasons. Both books have helped me refine my thinking and brought me back to the academic mindset I've missed since graduation. They've also served as my inspiration to start this blog.

I reserve the right to change any opinion I express on this page. I tend to use writing as a way to sort out my thoughts and welcome comments that encourage me to look at an issue from another angle. I hope you will engage with me on these issues. Happy reading!