Rotting Apple

Today's article goes into more issues regarding poverty, race, and education, focusing particularly on those schools in the poorer districts of New York, and basing itself on a report done by the same organization hosting it. As the largest school district in the US, it gives a nice demonstration of just how big a problem this is. According to the report, a students' success is much more influenced by their wealth and racial background, wealthier schools have better teachers, poorer schools have less stable teaching staff and aren't likely to be tested for programs like gifted-and-talented. Not really all that surprising given what we've already talked about here.

What WAS surprising about the article was the really strange, off-putting emphasis on race. While the connection between race and poverty is confirmed statistically, and household wealth has a clear connection to the quality of schools students attend, the phrase "correlation does not prove causation" is important to remember. There's evidence that the correlation of race and poverty is more rooted in the sustained behavioral programs passed from parent to child than actual racism (something which might be fixed by better education).

As an ever more progressive society, we've (mostly) evolved past racism, to the point where we're approaching the point where it's no longer relevant enough to deserve comment (do note, though, that racism is still somewhat prominent in certain regions, as well as cases at the individual level. I'm talking about the US as a whole). However, this article tries to weave race into an issue that really has nothing to do with it. I've seen other articles touching on these subjects mention it, too.

It's not that big of an issue, but I wonder if this itself may be an issue within efforts to help relieve educational inequality. That is, a misapplication of cause to situations that historically were affected by racist tendencies which have since faded with time. Both viewpoints (race-based and wealth-based educational inequality) have the same end goal and would likely get there given enough time, but with the idea that race is a large factor, it would take a lot longer as it's going after the wrong cause.

Beside misplaced mentions of race, the article also presented a few solutions to the issues it discussed:

• Restore funding for education that was previously reduced
• Fantastic, it was ridiculous that their funding was cut to begin with.
• Fund schools based on need
• This, however, isn't so fantastic. The idea is nice, but how do you balance the complicated budget involved in running a school, especially based on the ill-defined notion of "need"? What do you do if a school's bureaucracy gets leaky and the funds are abused for things other than student education? Cut the budget? Then the students suffer. But throwing more money at it won't fix it, either. I suppose that's what their last point is for, but such things can be easily circumvented depending on how well they're handled.
• Test for Gifted and Talented in kindergarten and have students take the Specialized High School Admissions Test in middle school
• Fine, though as per my blog post on tracking, this (mostly the Gifted program) can potentially be abused if you're not very careful. A distinction must be made between a better education for Gifted students than the average student and something that's just better suited to the student.
• Offer tutoring for low-income students
• It really shouldn't just be for low-income students (especially when the line can be blurry and heavily context-dependent), though giving them a higher priority could avert any issues.
• Submit schools to an "opportunity audit" to ensure they're offering a fair opportunity to learn
• This is a good idea in theory, but in practice such an audit would have to be carefully handled to provide as much scrutiny as possible. There's the distinct possibility of an apathetic check-the-box mentality that would fail to provide the kind of support it would theoretically provide.

The solutions presented were in the right place, but need more thought to be rigorous enough to be applied to real schools and districts.

And that about wraps it up. Thanks for reading, and see you next week.

The Article:

• Pedro Noguera & John H. Jackson. Why Education Inequality Exists - And How To Fix It. Received from http://schottfoundation.org/drupal/media-center/why-education-inequality-persists-and-how-to-fix-it

Sources:

• NCES. Enrollment, poverty, and federal funds for the 100 largest school districts, by enrollment size in 2010: Fall 2010, 2009-10, and federal fiscal year 2012. Received from http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_104.asp
• Suzanne Macartney, Alemayehu Bishaw, & Kayla Fontenot. Poverty Rates for Selected Detailed Race and Hispanic Groups by State and Place: 2007-2011. Received from http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acsbr11-17.pdf
• Sharmila Choudhury. Racial and Ethnic Differences in Wealth and Asset Choices. Received from http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v64n4/v64n4p1.html

Loopholes in No Child Left Behind

The new flavor of the week, The Persistence of Educational Inequality. It has some backing, too.

The meat of the post is that the act colloquially known as "No Child Left Behind" has some issues which allow states to re-appropriate resources such that rather than using the federal funding as a supplement to state and district funding, it's being used to reduce the cost on the state and district. While the act does have a section to avoid this, there's a loophole which allows districts to ignore the portion of teacher salary based on experience, when high-experience teachers tend to migrate to wealthier schools. This makes it seem as though wealthier and poorer schools have comparable resources, even though the wealthier schools generally have more qualified teachers and may even be spending more.

Likely the most irritating thing I find about this article (and seemingly every other news or blog-like post) is the almost complete lack of any sources beyond links to the same website. Is it really so hard to provide a link to the PDF of the report the Department of Education apparently posted that you based your ENTIRE post on? I ended up having to find equivalent sources to back up THEIR arguments, and couldn't find the report they were talking about (mostly because of just how many reports the ED hosts, and how vaguely the article referenced it).

A complete lack of citation aside, the article seems fairly well supported, assuming the "loophole" they talked about was indeed factual, and it's probably one of the more well put together articles I've read. The data (sourceless or not) was well organized and clearly led into their conclusions. This seems like a very real issue which, upon being resolved, would lead to a big step in reducing educational inequality. It's very interesting to see these kinds of problems uncovered and then have possible solutions proposed immediately, and hopefully more has been done about it since its discovery.

See you next week, and thanks for reading.

The Article:

• Raegan Miller & Cynthia G. Brown. The Persistence of Educational Inequality. Retrieved from http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/news/2011/12/02/10805/the-persistence-of-educational-inequality/

Sources:

• ED Press Office. More Than 40% of Low-Income Schools Don't Get a Fair Share of State and Local Funds, Department of Education Research Finds. Retrieved from http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/more-40-low-income-schools-dont-get-fair-share-state-and-local-funds-department-
• Congress. The Elementary and Second Education Act: Section 1120A, "FISCAL REQUIREMENTS". Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/pg2.html#sec1120A
• Matthew A. Kraft, John P. Papay, Megin Charner-Laird, Susan Moore Johnson, Monica Ng, & Stefanie K. Reinhorn. Committed to Their Students but in Need of Support: How School Context Influences Teacher Turnover in High-Poverty, Urban Schools. Retrieved from http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mkraft/files/kraft_papay_charner-laird_johnson_ng_reinhorn_-_teachers_in_high-poverty_urban_schools.pdf

This is a little (several days) late, and I almost certainly won't get credit, but I feel it would be in my best interest to post anyway to catch up with the rest of the class.

In any case, today's article focuses less on traditional issues of academic performance (wealth, race, gender, etc) and more on inequalities between classrooms of the same subject, even in the same school, particularly involving mathematics.

The essential thing to take from the article is that not every classroom is created equal, and while it does concede that impoverished school's programs have more in common across states than across social status boundaries, it takes a look at the random chance a student of any financial backing gets when being put in a classroom. Different classrooms teach different topics for different amount of times with different amounts of rigor and with a different ordering of subjects. This can come in the form of teacher individualization as well as something called "tracking."

"Tracking" is a common practice in which students are given different levels of course content, effectively putting them on a particular track that they can't easily rise above. If a student performs well, they go into classrooms which have been designated as providing higher quality education, while poorly performing students go into lower classes. While on a lower track, it becomes difficult for a student to catch up with higher track students, effectively setting a standard for their quality of education on the basis that they won't be capable of handling the extra content higher tracks offer.


My dad actually fell victim to this phenomena, and has told me extensively about it. As a child, he had dyslexia, but because of a lack of understanding of the disease was simply labelled "slow" and placed in significantly lower level "special" classes. Even his teachers seemed to be biased against him because of his placement, as he often mentions a math teacher saying he was "stupid" and "would never amount to anything" in front of the class.

Since then, he's had a borderline phobia of mathematics, despite intensely liking it once he retried it in his later years, which he regrettably says has limited and likely will limit him for the rest of his life. Unlike what his teacher thought, however, through sheer force of will, he's now a professor and the director of UNM's EMSA, within a few years of his PhD at just over 41. However, it takes a special kind of personality to win out after such an enormous disadvantage.

Ironically, I had almost exactly the opposite experience. Having a predisposition toward logical and mathematical thinking (as well as a father paranoid about being unfairly prejudiced, without whom I probably would've had a similar experience because of some linguistic quirks present up until 2nd grade), I was put in higher and higher educational tracks, gaining a ridiculous advantage over other students who would likely be just as capable as me were they given a proper education.

With both perspectives, it's easy to say there's a fair amount of inequality in schools with regards to tracking. The general justification for it is that homogeneous classrooms (that is, classrooms consisting of intellectual peers) benefit greatly from it, and are given courses suited to their intellectual ability. The problem comes in, though, that while not everyone is as intellectually capable, classroom performance isn't necessarily a good indicator of actual ability, nor is the quality of education given to lower tracks really suited to the average of students placed within it. That ability is also not necessarily static, as some research shows that what numbers like IQ, which are often used as indicators for higher tracks, show depends on the amount of motivation for those taking the test, can change with time (particularly in youth), and more fluid definitions of intelligence can be generally increased through certain types of training.

So not only does tracking produce false negatives and provide a lower quality education than lower tracks are capable of handling, the very notion that some people are just smarter is up for question. If a student's intelligence can be increased via a particular form of training/education, then the justification that they're in the lower track because they aren't intelligent enough for more is simply wrong. They aren't (generally, as more research would have to be done to fully establish the link) doing poorly because they can't handle the material, they're doing poorly because they aren't being given the proper education that allows them to comprehend the more advanced material.

Take it as you will, and see you tomorrow. Thanks for reading.

The article:

• William H. Schmidt (7/17/2012). Inequality in the American Education System. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-h-schmidt/educational-inequality-system_b_1679243.html

Sources:

• Page E. & Keith T. The Elephant in the Room. Retrieved from http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10236.aspx
• Pro-tracking perspective
• Mary Hatwood Futrell & Joel Gomez. How Tracking Creates a Poverty of Learning. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/may08/vol65/num08/How-Tracking-Creates-a-Poverty-of-Learning.aspx
• Anti-tracking perspective
• Angela Lee Duckworth, Patrick D. Quinn, Donald R. Lynam, Rolf Loeber, & Magda Stouthamer-Loeber. Role of Test Motivation in Intelligence Testing. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3093513/pdf/pnas.201018601.pdf
• Sue Ramsden, Fiona M. Richardson, Goulven Josse, Michael S. C. Thomas, Caroline Ellis,Clare Shakeshaft, Mohamed L. Seghier, & Cathy J. Price. Verbal and Non-Verbal Intelligence Changes in Teenage Brain. Retrieved from http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v479/n7371/full/nature10514.html
• Susanne M. Jaeggi, Martin Buschkuehl, John Jonides, & Walter J. Perrig. Improving Fluid Intelligence with Training on Working Memory. Retrieved from http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/04/25/0801268105.abstract

Literacy Crises

My name is Robert McDaniels, and I'll be your blogger for the moment.

I'm a CS major who enjoys to write on occasion, but let's get right to it.

The topic for the week (or two) is JP Gee's "Literacy Crises," a look into the recurrent political and social so-called crises of literacy throughout history. That is to say, several times in our history we've found the gap between the rich and the poor alarming enough to be considered a crisis. A war on illiteracy, right? Well, we'll be reading this for class to get introduced to the major theme of social status's impact on the academic achievement of the poor vs the rich.

We'll get there soon enough, Gaston. Thanks for reading.

Gee, James Paul. Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses. Routledge, 2007.