A discussion of closing the achievement gap should not focus on equalizing outcomes, but rather on equalizing learning opportunities. To achieve that goal, we need to take a look at what is going wrong with the education of African American children—especially low-income children.
Although we can commend the No Child Left Behind initiative for the fact that the federal government is trying to “do something,” this reform provides no national, visionary leadership that shows schools how to improve student achievement. Most of its agenda is outside-in or top-down. Its methods generally consist of politicians pressuring, threatening, or punishing school districts. In this climate of hysteria over high-stakes testing, school districts are responding with hysterical solutions.
What Schools Do Wrong
Pushing the Curriculum Down
It seems that the solution for everything wrong with education today is to teach students more academic content at a lower grade level. If students are performing poorly on 5th grade mathematics, the solution is to teach them more advanced mathematics in the 2nd grade. The state board of education in Michigan recently approved new math standards for elementary and middle school students. To achieve these standards, the board has proposed pushing the teaching of multiplication from 3rd grade down to 2nd grade (Higgins, 2004).
Another example of the mad scramble to “raise standards”—in ways that favor the already-privileged—is the addition of constructed writing responses to high-stakes tests. You cannot just descend on a lower-income African American child in the 2nd or 3rd grade and expect that child to be a proficient writer when he or she has not received the necessary support. As an elementary school principal wisely said to me, “You have to talk it before you can write it.” The children who do well on such tests are those whose parents read to them, take them on enrichment excursions, and provide opportunities to talk about the children's ideas and develop their imaginations. Many low-income African American children do not benefit from these experiences at home.
I recently served as a consultant for a large midwestern school district. Several teachers in this district had been fired for binding African American boys to their chairs with duct tape and taping their wrists together with masking tape. A white male principal had lost his job for administering corporal punishment to African American boys. The people who invited me into their school district were not interested in any consultation on how their students were being treated in an academic context. They wanted a magic pill for managing the students' behavior.
In one of the schools that I toured, I asked to see the kindergarten classrooms. I was shocked to see that they looked like 1st grade classrooms, with chairs lined up in rows facing the chalkboard. I could tell from the work on the board that the students were engaged in 1st grade reading assignments and 2nd grade penmanship activities.
Where are the art easels, I asked, the reading corner, the water and sand tables, and the housekeeping corner—all features of a developmentally appropriate kindergarten? The teachers replied that when preschool classes were added to the building, the administration put them in the kindergarten classrooms and moved the kindergarten into the 1st grade classrooms. I was horrified, because I knew that pushing these children into a 1st grade environment was not developmentally appropriate. And the proof was in the pudding: It was not working. Ninety-seven percent of the students were below grade level in kindergarten.
Ignorance About Students' Backgrounds
In the same school, the principal could not tell me what percentage of students had attended preschool, let alone the quality of the students' preschool experiences. Nor did the principal know the occupations of the students' parents. When questioned about this, she pulled out a file box in which she had stored forms that the parents had completed in the fall. After she read about 30 of them to me, I got the picture. Many of the parents were unemployed; some were fast-food workers; and some, according to the principal's suspicions, were engaged in illegal activities. The principal commented that she wanted to continue reading these forms—she had not read them before, and she was interested to see the parents' occupations. Mind you, this was in May. The school year was almost over.
How could this school, in which 97 percent of students qualified for free lunch, address its students' needs without considering basic information about the students' preschool experience and their parents' education levels and occupations? Administrators and teachers needed to be aware that the children were entering school without the social and intellectual profiles that the school depended on to fulfill its function. They needed to see why it was necessary to go the extra mile to ensure student achievement.
These issues are important because a child's education must be built on a firm foundation. Strategies that may work for upper-middle-class students who have had high-quality preschool experiences will not work with students who do not have that background. Instead of accelerating academic progress, placing students in instructional activities for which they are unprepared puts them at a severe disadvantage.
Inequality in Preschool Experience
A teacher in a workshop I conducted for the Columbus, Ohio, public schools commented that she sees many middle-class (predominantly white) families delaying their children's entry into kindergarten until the children are 6 years old so that they will be more mature and more able to compete and excel. The lower-income (predominantly African American) parents cannot afford to send their children to preschool, but they know that their children should be getting “something,” so they send them to kindergarten early to reap the advantages that they believe it offers. Teachers are therefore confronted with 6-year-old white children and 4-year-old black children in the same classroom. As the younger children start school, the deck is already stacked against them (see also Gaskill, 1993).
When Head Start was established in the 1960s, that was the beginning of early childhood education in the United States as we know it today. Before Head Start, preschools existed on college campuses as laboratory schools, and attendance was limited to a small segment of mostly upper-middle-class children. Head Start demonstrated how much young children desire stimulation and how much they can learn at an early age. Middle-class Americans began to realize the advantages that the preschool experience could offer their children, and more and more of them sought out high-quality, academically oriented preschools (Langway, Jackson, Zabarsky, Sherley, & Whitmore,1983). We have 35-year longitudinal studies that document the benefits of preschool (Berrueta-Clement, Barnett, Schweinhart, Epstein, & Weikart, 1984; Lee, 2003; Schweinhart, 1994), but because of funding limitations only a minuscule number of the children who are eligible for Head Start are enrolled. Even though we know beyond the shadow of a doubt the benefits of a high-quality preschool experience, there is very little inclination to extend it to the children who need it the most.
Steps Toward Equality
Start Out Right
As a first step in closing the achievement gap, schools must ensure that every child is reading on grade level in the 1st grade. Although educators and policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels tout 3rd grade as the goal for grade-level reading achievement, middle-class parents would not be satisfied if their children were reading below grade level until the 3rd grade.
The second step is to ensure that every child is on grade level in math in the 3rd grade. I select 3rd grade for math performance because teachers address almost every elementary school mathematics operation over the course of 3rd grade. A child who can perform on grade level in math in that grade will have a solid foundation to build on in later years.
We should take every measure to stop the bleeding with the next cohort that enters kindergarten. To achieve that end, we must reduce class sizes for primary grade students. Another fundamental need is creating linkages between preschool and kindergarten by expanding the training given to preschool teachers. Kindergarten teachers participate in teacher training programs that certify them to teach kindergarten through 5th or even 8th grade. They have the opportunity to obtain a long-range view of activities that students engage in throughout the elementary grades. When preschool teachers obtain any training at all, their program generally limits their purview to preschool education, often in an associate's degree program. My experience is that when preschool teachers attend conferences, they want “make and take” sessions instead of workshops that focus on theory and emphasize why we engage young children in particular activities. Thus, we have lower-income children whose preschool teachers lack the expertise to provide instruction that will bridge the gap between what these children receive at home and what they need to succeed in elementary school.
A principal in my model of school reform would canvas the community and identify the preschool educators and child care providers serving the children who feed into the school. The principal could bring those educators and caregivers into a constellation with the elementary school and offer them inservice training, materials, and support to prepare the children for kindergarten.
It is also imperative to improve diagnostic assessment at the classroom level. In workshop after workshop, I have polled teachers about whether they assess students' strengths and weaknesses at the start of the year before beginning instruction. Most teachers I have polled, from elementary school through high school, say that they just open the textbooks and begin teaching.
In Unbank the Fire (1994), I traced the factors that influenced upward mobility for my parents in the rural and urban south in the early 20th century. One factor was that their teachers were a part of their community. These teachers had a keen sense of the level of development that students' families could provide on school entry, the skills that students started out with, and the skills that students needed for success in school. The teachers didn't blame the families; they created a science of bridging the gap. We need such a science today.
Support African American Families
Even more fundamental to closing the achievement gap is challenging the hypocrisy of a system that expects equal outcomes while ignoring the economic and social realities facing low-income African American families. Eighty-five percent of African American households that send children to school are headed by females (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 1999). When a mother must expend a great deal of her energy in generating income, as is the case in most African American families, she has a limited amount of time to negotiate the ins and outs of school and to support her children's academic achievement. Her primary concern is to keep a roof over her family's head.
Regardless of economic status, the typical African American parent does not know the nuances of what is essentially a game of hide-and-seek in elementary and secondary schools. The power structure hides the path to high academic achievement, frustrating African American individuals who seek it. White upper-income parents are a part of the culture that makes the rules, so they function with ease. In the instances in which the path is not hidden, attainment of the goals is placed out of the reach of most African American children, given the resources available to them.
To give just one example, my son Keith was assigned to produce a research paper for his 5th grade science class. I was surprised to receive a packet of information—addressed to me—describing how to write the paper. The students had received no instruction in how to produce research papers. In fact, an administrator later told me that students weren't offered such instruction until 9th grade. Although I had the skills to teach Keith how to write a research paper, I regarded this as just one of many examples of the teaching responsibilities that the school inappropriately placed on parents. As I wrote in Learning While Black,My criticism here is that the teacher should be the equalizer in the classroom. All children should be taught by the teacher so that their fortunes are not totally determined by the skills of their parents. Educators seem not to recognize the injustice of sending projects home that the children cannot complete alone. . . . They seem not to acknowledge the hardship placed on some children, whose parents are unavailable to give them the extraordinary assistance the projects require. (Hale, 2001, p. 87)
Most African American parents have very little exposure to the world of highly competitive upper-middle-class schooling because of our education backgrounds and the settings in which the majority of us raise our children. White upper-income parents are more likely to have the resources to procure expensive private tutoring and test prep courses for their children that enable them to meet high academic standards. Although educators in inner-city schools might claim that they do not expect the same level of participation from low-income parents, I would argue that they have failed to create an instructional accountability infrastructure, independent of parents, that delivers the same quality of instruction found in the suburbs and in private schools.
Instead of excoriating African American mothers for their lack of effort, those who are trying to be helpful need to identify what the “village” can do to support these families. For example, such organizations as the Urban League, the National Black Child Development Institute, or the Children's Defense Fund should create and sponsor an Educational Aid Society in African American communities throughout the United States. This society could provide subsidized or sliding-fee-scale services for families that are having difficulty negotiating the schools. It could provide “education advocates” and high-quality, affordable tutoring and could maintain a Web site on which African American parents could share their experiences with their children's schools.
Everybody's Children
Not long ago I was invited to Richmond, Virginia, to speak to members of a community organization that had recently held a conference on crime. As part of that conference, attendees became aware of the linkage between crime and inferior education of children in the community. To their dismay, they learned that the local penitentiary predicts with accuracy the number of prison cells to prepare by the number of students in the public schools who are reading below grade level in the 2nd grade (Williams, 2002).
There is a lesson here for the people who sit on commissions and panels, pondering and deliberating how to close the achievement gap for other people's children while at the same time structuring education success with ease for their own children. They need to understand that the education of both low-income and middle-class African American children affects the health of society as a whole. The education advantages enjoyed by upper-middle-class children must be extended to all.
If we are serious about closing achievement gaps, we need to form a coalition that includes educators, concerned citizens, civil rights organizations, the business community, fraternal and service organizations, and middle-class black professionals to create support structures—not just to close the gap in school outcomes, but to prepare all African American children for leadership roles in the 21st century.
Let that be our mission.
