Tag Archive for 'low-performing school'

The Pangloss Index: How States Game the No Child Left Behind Act

Published by CKF on November 13, 2007 in Educational Policy, Podcast and Video and Research and Reports. 0 Comments

Education SectorAuthor: Kevin Carey

Despite the poor performance of Birmingham City Schools,

The Alabama Department of Education … says everything is fine, that Birmingham City Schools made “adequate yearly progress” last year under the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). And only five of the district’s 65 schools are “in need of improvement.” The serious consequences and strong interventions that NCLB’s authors envisioned for chronically underperforming districts like Birmingham are nowhere to be found.

The reason is simple: While NCLB was designed to raise achievement standards … , the Alabama Department of Education has lowered standards annually, to the point where even abjectly failing districts like Birmingham make the grade. And it’s not alone — every one of the accountability-avoidance gambits used in Alabama has been adopted in many other states. Indeed, the most noteworthy thing about Alabama’s elaborate plan to avoid NCLB accountability, and the impact of those actions on Birmingham, is how mundane they really are. Similar stories could be written about states and districts across the nation.

Collectively, these states and districts provide a case study in how determined states can undermine even tightly constructed laws like NCLB. And, as importantly, they provide a cautionary tale for members of Congress working to write the next version of the nation’s most important education law.

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Narrowing the Two Achievement Gaps

Published by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. on November 9, 2007 in Essay and Research and Reports. 2 Comments

Education TrustA presentation at the 18th Education Trust National Conference, Nov. 9, 2007, Washington, D.C., by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

© 2007 Core Knowledge Foundation. Not to be copied or reproduced without permission from the Core Knowledge Foundation, 801 E. High Street, Charlottesville, VA 22902.

I am grateful to the Education Trust for inviting me to give this talk. It’s an honor and a kind of homecoming. We at Core Knowledge feel great affinity with The Education Trust with its focus on narrowing the unfair achievement gap between groups. That injustice was my reason for leaving academic pursuits and entering education reform in the 1970s.

I won’t distract you with the intricate details of my experiments on literacy some 35 years ago beyond observing that they were first done at U VA, and then at a mainly African-American college in Richmond. I described the results in two technical publications that are virtually unknown. But they have colored all of my subsequent work. Anyone who bothers to read those reports might be surprised to discover that it was empirical science and not ideology that originated Cultural Literacy and the Core Knowledge movement. The ideological controversies surrounding Cultural Literacy during the 1980s and ’90s were gripping but, to my dazed mind, essentially off point. For, the key educational issues we faced urgently both then and now are less connected with ideology than with empirical reality.

I’ll very briefly describe the discovery that shocked me into education reform. The African-American students at the Richmond college (It was the Sargeant Reynolds Community College.) could read just as well as UVA students when the topic was roommates or car traffic, but they could not read passages about Lee’s surrender to Grant. Their performance on that particular text shook me up the most. For they had graduated from the schools of Richmond, the erstwhile capital of the Confederacy, but were ignorant of the most elementary facts about the Civil War and other basic information that is normally taken for granted in writing. They had not been taught the various things that they needed to know to understand ordinary texts addressed to a general audience. The results were shocking. (What had the schools been doing???). I decided to devote myself to helping right the wrong that is being done to such students.

Let me explain my title: “Narrowing the Two Achievement Gaps.” The sort of gap usually meant by the phrase “achievement gap” is the one between whites and African Americans or whites and Hispanics, or more generally between high- and low- income students. Let’s call this “the fairness gap.” But there is an equally fateful achievement gap between our students and those in other developed nations. Let’s call this “the quality gap.” My first theme in this talk is that these are not separate problems. The solution to the fairness gap is also the solution to the quality gap, and vice versa.

I will focus on the verbal achievement gap, which is critical to academic performance, later income, and general competence. I want to show that if we raise the average verbal achievement for all groups of students we will, by that very deed, also narrow the fairness gap, killing two birds with one stone.

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