THE ROLE OF THE GAPS: At the age of 3!

THURSDAY, JUNE 12, 2014

Part 4—The gaps come early and often: How do some American kids get a head start on their literacy?

On Monday, New York Times readers were given a delightful portrait of this process. In an essay on the op-ed page, Pamela Druckerman introduced us to her 5-year-old twins.

This mother’s boys are 5 years old. They share a World Cup obsession:

DRUCKERMAN (6/9/14): At dinner recently, one of my 5-year-old twins announced that he intended to learn Croatian.

This didn’t surprise me. Mealtimes at our house have become low-level colloquia on international affairs. Often I play resident expert as the children fire questions at me: What language do they speak in Korea? Is Barcelona a country? Does someone in our family live in Iran?

Honestly, my kids used to talk about superheroes. But two months ago, my husband bought them each a World Cup sticker album. Within a week, they were full-blown soccer fanatics. They now trot off to school wearing soccer shirts, beg to watch matches the moment they get home and fall asleep clutching their albums.

In fairness, these kids are already 5. They already go to school at some level. But in this delightful, tongue-in-cheek report, Druckerman describes the giant head start they’re getting on their literacy.

These kids get to fire off questions at dinner—and their questions get answered! And look at the language, the knowledge and concepts they’re gaining in the course of pursuing their new obsession.

They know there’s a place called Croatia—and that the people there speak “Croatian.” Complex language is flying around and entering 5-year-old heads:

DRUCKERMAN: [A]ctually watching small Americans (albeit Americans in Paris, who call the game “football”) hatch into fanatics has made me realize that a World Cup obsession is different from, say, being nuts about the Yankees. That’s because the World Cup doesn’t just give you a sport; it also gives you the world.

[...]

Of course, the World Cup view of the world isn’t entirely accurate...My kids are convinced that Uruguayans are mostly cheaters and even biters, because last year a Uruguayan playing for Liverpool was suspended for biting his opponent. They’re also fuzzy on some of the historical details we’ve discussed.

“What’s the name again of the team that invaded Mozambique?” one of the twins asked.

“Portugal,” I replied. “And it’s not a team, it’s a country.”

Anyway, the tournament isn’t just a history and geography lesson. It also gives kids a feeling of mastery. When one of the boys recently declared that “most people in Brazil are Brazilians,” it wasn’t just a profound statement of truth...It was also his way of organizing life into a coherent story.

Most people in Brazil are Brazilians! Elsewhere, you find Uruguayans.

A great deal of sophistication is being imparted in these discussions—and it isn’t just knowledge about history and geography, some of which may be bogus. These kids are gaining verbal sophistication too—for example, the knowledge that a particular type of word, “Brazilian,” derives from the word Brazil.

At 5, American children are just starting their official “school” years. But large gaps of various types already exist by the age of 5, or even at eighteen months (details tomorrow).

This fact has become better understood in recent years. In the current Education Week, former Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin refers to one of the best-known such gaps—the “30 million word gap:”

FRANKLIN (6/11/14): With the benefit of hindsight, if I were to assume the job of mayor today, I would use the bully pulpit to immerse myself in every public discussion about K-12 education...

I would focus on early learning. Research shows that children growing up in low-income households hear approximately 30 million fewer words than children growing up in middle-income and affluent families by the time they reach their 4th birthday. I would find a way to guarantee every 3- and 4-year-old child access to high-quality early education.

Mayor Angel Taveras of Providence, R.I., had the right idea when he launched Providence Talks to close this gap. The reality is that if we want our teenagers to graduate from high school ready for college or career, we have the responsibility to start them on the right course by preparing our earliest learners for kindergarten.

The so-called “30 million word gap” is in place by age 3. It has nothing to do with the work of our teachers, our schools or our school districts.

It has nothing to do with children’s exposure, or lack of exposure, to the Common Core “standards.” This very large gap is firmly in place before kids go to school.

Does it matter if children from low-income families “hear approximately 30 million fewer words than children growing up in middle-income and affluent families?” More specifically, does this early gap affect their future literacy?

We can’t really answer that question, in part because we live in a world which doesn’t really care a great deal about our “achievement gaps.”

When these large gaps get cited in the press, it’s usually in a narrow context and for a narrow purpose. The comment will usually be designed to drive some elite script about the way our test scores are stagnant and our schools are failing—and, therefore, about our need for “education reform.”

In fact, our most reliable test scores aren’t stagnant at all, but you’ll almost never see that reported in the press. In a similar vein, you’ll rarely read about the “30 million word gap” or about efforts, like Providence Talks, to close that early gap.

You won’t read much about this gap, or about those efforts, in the mainstream press corps. But this mammoth disinterest suffuses the “liberal” world too.

You won’t read about Providence Talks at Salon, or hear it discussed on MSNBC. Nor will you encounter discussions of that large word gap.

You won’t be taught to worry about the 3-year-olds who are on the short end of that gap. Such concerns barely exist in the “liberal world” as it currently operates.

The liberal world cares about gays who want to marry (that’s good!). But it doesn’t care about low-income children, whether they’re 3, 5 or 6. No fact could possibly be more clear. We liberals quit on low-income kids a very long time ago.

For today, let’s leave it here, with a bit of a study in contrasts. On the one hand, we have a pair of 5-year-olds who are bathed in a world of language, including some rather complex language. (That’s good!)

On the other hand, we have Mayor Franklin mentioning a very large gap which is in place by age 3 or age 4. She seems to think that this early gap affects the future prospects of the kids who are on its short end.

Tomorrow, we’ll explore her reasons for thinking that. Next week, we’ll return to the very large gaps in Tuscaloosa. We’ll look at the ways those gaps were recently spun within a world, which, if we might be so frank, doesn’t seem to give a flying falafel about the prospects of low-income kids.

What is the 30 million word gap? Why did Mayor Franklin cite it?

According to Nexis, the 30 million word gap has never been mentioned on any network news program, not even under its simpler description as “the word gap.” According to Nexis, it has never been mentioned on MSNBC.

According to Nexis, Providence Talks has been mentioned on major news program only twice, both times on NPR.

Rightly or wrongly, that early “word gap” has been considered a big deal since 1995. But within our mainstream press corps, our very large gaps exist for one reason—to drive preferred scripts from wealthy elites about the need for “reform.”

Within the current liberal world, those gaps barely exist at all. Kids on the short end of those gaps can go hang. We walked away long ago.

Tomorrow: Anne Frank in kindergarten

Supplemental: What’s the real point of the Common Core?

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 11, 2014

Common versus higher: From the standpoint of messaging, an advocate can never go wrong calling for “higher standards.”

That sounds like something a person would want! Who could possibly stand opposed to “higher standards?”

This messaging drives the campaign in support of the Common Core. That said, the Common Core is often supported in a different way.

Often, advocates praise the Common Core because it creates a common set of “standards.” If every state signs on to the program, all the states will be teaching the same skills in each grade!

At first glance, that seems to make perfect sense. We live in a highly mobile world. Under this theory, a student who moved from one state to another would encounter the same set of “standards” at his new school.

That said, the Common Core is often praised on that other basis. It’s praised because its “standards” are higher than those which have obtained in many states in the past.

Which is it? Is the Common Core a good idea because it creates a common set of “standards?” Or is it good because the standards in question are higher?

The two rationales often appear interchangeably. Consider a passage from Lyndsey Layton’s detailed report in Sunday’s Washington Post.

In the following passage, Layton describes the way Arne Duncan got states to adopt the Common Core through the use of stimulus money. In the process, Layton cites both rationales for the program:

LAYTON (6/8/14): As secretary [of education], Duncan named as his chief of staff Margot Rogers, a top Gates official he got to know through that grant. He also hired James Shelton, a program officer at the foundation, to serve first as his head of innovation and most recently as the deputy secretary, responsible for a wide array of federal policy decisions.

Duncan and his team leveraged stimulus money to reward states that adopted common standards.

They created Race to the Top, a $4.3 billion contest for education grants. Under the contest rules, states that adopted high standards stood the best chance of winning. It was a clever way around federal laws that prohibit Washington from interfering in what takes place in classrooms. It was also a tantalizing incentive for cash-strapped states.

First, we’re told that Duncan offered money to states which adopted common standards. Then, we’re told that the standards in question had to be high.

The point is simple. You'll see two different rationales used in support of the Common Core. Sometimes, we’re told the program is good because the states will have common standards. We’re also told the program is good because the standards are high—in effect, because instruction will be more challenging than before.

At least on the surface, uniformity across the states makes an obvious type of sense. Beyond that, many kids would presumably benefit from more challenging instruction.

That said, our basic question remains:

Given our large achievement gaps, how can any set of “standards” make sense for all kids in a single grade? The gaps are very large in our schools. How can any set of “standards” be appropriate for all students?

This is the world’s most obvious question. Through twenty years of the “standards movement,” we’ve never seen it asked.

THE ROLE OF THE GAPS: In fourth grade!

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 11, 2014

Part 3—Teaching from behind: How would tougher “standards”—a more challenging course of study—address the nation’s large achievement gaps?

For ourselves, we have no idea. But that seems to be Bill Gates’ basic concept of the Common Core.

In Sunday’s Washington Post, Lyndsey Layton produced a valuable report about the way Gates has used his billions to create and sponsor the Common Core. Late in her piece, she described his semi-magical thinking:

LAYTON (6/8/14): Now six years into his quest, Gates finds himself in an uncomfortable place—countering critics on the left and right who question whether the Common Core will have any impact or negative effects...

Gates is disdainful of the rhetoric from opponents. He sees himself as a technocrat trying to foster solutions to a profound social problem—gaping inequalities in U.S. public education—by investing in promising new ideas.

Those “gaping inequalities” certainly are a profound social problem. But how does the Common Core address those very large gaps?

For ourselves, we have no idea—and Layton didn’t ask.

Often, people like Gates don’t seem to grasp the role of the gaps in our schools. By ninth grade, years of failure and incomprehension drive alienation and despair. In turn, these attitudes drive the truancy and the suspensions described by Robert Balfanz in his report about low-income high schools in Sunday’s New York Times.

In a piece for the Sunday Review, Balfanz described high schools in which many ninth-graders are years below traditional “grade level” and are badly disaffected to boot. That very same day, in the Washington Post, Gates said a tougher course of study would somehow address this gap.

We have no idea how that would work. To us, Gates was disregarding the role of the gaps, as is amazingly common.

For today, let’s forget the alienation of those struggling ninth-grade students. Let’s go all the way back to fourth grade. Let’s assume the children in question are still full of high hopes.

By most accounts, large achievement gaps are already present by fourth grade. Many Americans kids will be reading above the fourth grade level. Many others will be several years behind.

In math, these scores from last year’s NAEP suggest substantial gaps:

Average scores, Grade 4 math, 2013 NAEP
Higher-income students 253.98
Lower-income students 230.20

90th percentile 278.21
75th percentile 262.07
50th percentile 243.03
25th percentile 222.45
10th percentile 202.82

Ten percent of fourth-graders scored above 278; a similar number scored below 202. Taken at face value, those scores suggest a very large gap in math achievement, involving large numbers of kids.

Schools are challenged by these gaps, in an array of ways. And it isn’t just our journalists and “educational experts” who fail to come to terms with the size of the gaps. Often, schools and school systems do a poor job meeting the challenges too.

How do you teach in the face of such gaps? Should every child be taught the same math, no matter how much they already know? Should everyone get the same reading assignments, no matter how well they can read?

According to the Common Core, everyone should be taught the same math—we just need to make the math harder! We don’t know how that’s supposed to work for the many (superlative) kids on the short end of those very large gaps.

We’ve followed these topics for more than forty years. We never cease to be amazed by the ease with which people disregard the size of the gaps, and the role they play in our classrooms.

Let’s wander back almost forty years to consider a classic example.

In the late 1970s, the Baltimore City Schools produced a sweeping new social studies curriculum. At each grade level, the study guide recommended an astonishing array of textbooks and supplementary reading materials.

No school could possibly afford to purchase all the listed books. But a more obvious problem obtained: many books seemed to be much too hard for kids at the given grade level.

The author of this sweeping curriculum, the late Sam Banks, was a superlative person. But he seemed to have little sense of the role of the gaps in elementary schools.

One year, we conducted a study of the “readability” of the various books in the city’s social studies and science curricula.

We used standard readability formulas, which are of course imprecise. In the Baltimore Sun, we described part of what we had found:

SOMERBY (2/9/82): [I]n grade after grade, for topic after topic, [Baltimore social studies] guides recommend textbooks which are clearly too difficult for most city students to work from—books which are completely inappropriate for children who may be several years below traditional grade level in reading.

In the first semester of fourth grade, for example, the two most commonly cited textbooks are Daniel Chu’s “A Glorious Age in Africa”—a textbook with a measured eighth-grade reading level—and Frederick King’s “The Social Studies and Our Country”—Laidlaw’s sixth-grade textbook.

Few fourth graders anywhere will be able to profit from textbooks as difficult as these. In an urban system like Baltimore’s, this selection is particularly surprising—and dooms any attempt to teach the social studies curriculum in a rigorous, systematic way.

Good grief! Chu’s book may be superb, but if we want fourth graders to get lots of reading experiences, they won’t be getting them there—the book is simply too hard. Nor did it make much sense to recommend a sixth-grade textbook for fourth-grade students who were often working below their own grade’s reading level.

In the year we spent on this study, we came to admire Dr. Banks, for several different reasons. But as far as we know, he had never taught elementary school. We’d have to say he had little sense of the role played by the gaps in such schools.

The gaps are already there in fourth grade. As the grades roll by and the gaps widen, the challenge to teachers may grow. It may become harder and harder to find readable textbooks and supplementary reading materials—the kinds of books the students can actually read.

When it comes to math, a school system may have an excellent curriculum—but it will likely be geared to kids who are working on or around traditional “grade level.” If your students are years “behind,” and perhaps confused and discouraged to boot, there is no guide you can follow at all, let alone a textbook program.

When will we see instructional programs geared to the full range of students? In his recent column, Eduardo Porter described the kind of gap which obtains at the start of sixth grade:

“In some public schools, children who are entering the sixth grade with the measured proficiency of first graders are mixed in with children who perform well above the sixth-grade standard.”

Last Sunday, Balfanz described the gap which obtains in low-income high schools:

“In a 22-school sample that we studied closely, nearly all ninth-grade students were either too old for their grades, had repeated ninth grade, needed special education, were chronically absent or had academic skills at the seventh grade level or below.”

We’ll guess that quite a few of those kids had academic skills at well below the seventh grade level. You can’t address these yawning gaps by teaching everyone the same thing—let alone by making your common “standards” even harder!

Dr. Banks was a deeply caring person. But he seemed to have no sense of the role played by the gaps in our elementary schools.

Today, a similar blind spot obtains. According to the Common Core, all kids should get taught the same sixth-grade math—but we need to make it harder!

How does that help sixth-grade students who are already floundering and confused? We don’t have the slightest idea. Layton didn’t ask.

Tomorrow: The gaps before kindergarten

Supplemental: What the heck is the Common Core?

TUESDAY, JUNE 10, 2014

A rumination on “standards:” What the heck are the Common Core “standards?” And why are they called by that name?

The “standards movement” has been in vogue for many years now. In our view, the use of that term has always seemed a bit odd.

For starters, Wikipedia tells us this about the Common Core:

“The Common Core State Standards Initiative is an educational initiative in the United States that details what K-12 students should know in English language arts and mathematics at the end of each grade.”

In fact, the Common Core “standards” are the skills students are supposed to be taught at each grade level. In Grade 6 math, these are the first two “standards” under the “Geometry” heading—and yes, that’s the actual numbering for each skill:

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.6.G.A.1
Find the area of right triangles, other triangles, special quadrilaterals, and polygons by composing into rectangles or decomposing into triangles and other shapes; apply these techniques in the context of solving real-world and mathematical problems.

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.6.G.A.2
Find the volume of a right rectangular prism with fractional edge lengths by packing it with unit cubes of the appropriate unit fraction edge lengths, and show that the volume is the same as would be found by multiplying the edge lengths of the prism. Apply the formulas V = l w h and V = b h to find volumes of right rectangular prisms with fractional edge lengths in the context of solving real-world and mathematical problems.

In common parlance, it seems to us that these would more naturally be referred to as “skills.” At any rate, you can review all the “standards” for all the grades at this, the “Read the Standards” page at the Common Core web site.

The Common Core lists the skills which should get taught in each grade. For that reason, we’re always a little bit puzzled when we’re told that this doesn’t constitute a “curriculum.”

David Brooks rattled this talking-point in a recent column (text below). In her valuable piece in Sunday’s Washington Post, Lyndsey Layton put it like this:

LAYTON (6/8/14): The math standards require students to learn multiple ways to solve problems and explain how they got their answers, while the English standards emphasize nonfiction and expect students to use evidence to back up oral and written arguments. The standards are not a curriculum but skills that students should acquire at each grade. How they are taught and materials used are decisions left to states and school districts.

“The standards are not a curriculum but [are] skills that students should acquire at each grade?” In common parlance, once you’ve told a teacher what skills she must teach throughout the year, haven’t you pretty much defined her curriculum?

We’ll offer a guess. For legal and political reasons, Common Core moguls want to minimize the sense that the states and/or the feds are intruding on the community’s right to run its own local schools. We’ll guess this sound-bite was invented to promote this conception.

If our speculation is correct, that means that “not a curriculum” is part of the “messaging” Layton describes in her report. Ironically, it would mean that Layton repeated one of the messages, even as she described the source of the messaging.

Whatever! To us, the Common Core “standards” come pretty darn close to being a “curriculum.”

That doesn’t mean that it’s a bad curriculum, of course—we’re sorry, a bad set of “standards.” It may be a very good listing of Grade 6 math skills—but only for students who are functioning at an appropriate level.

For many sixth-graders, the Grade 6 math “standards” may be very good—perhaps an improvement on the way they otherwise would have been taught. That said, our basic question remains: Given our large achievement gaps, how can any set of math “standards” be appropriate for all the kids in all our sixth-grade classrooms all across the land?

For some high-functioning sixth-grade students, those Grade 6 “standards” may be hopelessly boring. For other sixth-graders, those “standards” may be years beyond their actual level of functioning.

Given our large achievement gaps, how can any set of standards be appropriate for all students in a given grade? We’ve been asking this obvious question for years.

Given the way our discourse works, we’ve never seen that question asked or answered anywhere else. As we’ve noted, our journalists are very good at disregarding the size of the gaps.

Brooks repeats the message: The standards aren’t a curriculum! All advocates of the Common Core know they should make that claim. Here’s the way Brooks put it:

BROOKS (4/18/14): About seven years ago, it was widely acknowledged that state education standards were a complete mess. Huge numbers of students were graduating from high school unprepared either for college work or modern employment. A student who was rated ''proficient'' in one state would be rated ''below basic'' in another. About 14 states had pretty good standards, according to studies at the time, but the rest had standards that were verbose, lax or wildly confusing.

The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers set out to draft clearer, consistent and more rigorous standards. Remember, school standards are not curricula. They do not determine what students read or how teachers should teach. They are the goals for what students should know at the end of each grade.

The Common Core standards do not determine how teachers should teach?

That may be true, but they do determine what teachers should teach. In fact, they determine which skills a math teacher must teach. To us, that sounds a great deal like a curriculum.

Layton described the process by which the “messaging” was created. It seems to us that she proceeded to repeat one of the basic messages.

Brooks repeated the message too. To our highly sensitive ear, the message doesn’t make sense.

THE ROLE OF THE GAPS: In low-income high schools!

TUESDAY, JUNE 10, 2014

Part 2—Depression, disorder, despair: Bill Gates, a college dropout, has no background in public education.

After spending his early years at Seattle’s View Ridge Elementary School, Gates never attended a public school, let alone taught in one. There has never been the slightest sign that he has the slightest idea how such entities work.

On the brighter side, Gates has mountains of cash, and an apparent belief that he understands public schooling. Given the modern cultural context, he’s surrounded by unimpressive “elites” who go through life with both hands out:

One hand is out for receiving their cash. The other hand is used for receiving their scripts.

In Sunday’s Washington Post, Lyndsey Layton described the way these hapless elites are helping Gates “reform” the nation’s schools. At issue was his recent drive to establish the Common Core, a set of grade-level “standards” for large groups of kids who may have little in common.

As she starts, Layton describes the way Gates, a perfect mark, got conned into thinking the Common Core was an important idea. In the following passage, she describes one of the three million ways he spread his money around:

LAYTON (6/8/14): The [Gates] foundation, for instance, gave more than $5 million to the University of North Carolina-affiliated Hunt Institute, led by the state’s former four-term Democratic governor, Jim Hunt, to advocate for the Common Core in statehouses around the country.

The grant was the institute’s largest source of income in 2009, more than 10 times the size of its next largest donation.

[...]

The Hunt Institute spent $437,000 to hire GMMB, a strategic communications firm owned by Jim Margolis, a top Democratic strategist and veteran of both of Obama’s presidential campaigns. GMMB conducted polling around standards, developed fact sheets, identified language that would be effective in winning support and prepared talking points, among other efforts.

The groups organized by Hunt developed a “messaging tool kit” that included sample letters to the editor, op-ed pieces that could be tailored to individuals depending on whether they were teachers, parents, business executives or civil rights leaders.

Life is good if you’re funded by Gates! You don’t even have to compose your own letters to the local paper. With one hand you accept your cash payments. With the other, you cut-and-paste the sample letters you’ve been handed—or even an op-ed piece!

Everyone has been in on this game, including “educational experts” of both the “left” and the “right.” As Layton notes, even teachers unions and civil rights groups have been taking this swag.

Can we talk? There has never been the slightest sign that Gates is insightful about public schools. That said, he does have plenty of cash, and the country is full of hacks who are eager to grab it and spend it.

Layton does a very good job reporting the way the money flowed as Gates pushed the Common Core through the various states. On the down side, she never notes the logical flaw at the heart of this project.

Given our giant achievement gaps, how is any set of grade-level “standards” supposed to guide the education of all kids in a given grade? For those who have never set foot in a low-income school, this obvious question may not come to mind. As we noted yesterday, we’ve been asking this obvious question for the past quite a few years.

For now, forget the Common Core. How can any set of grade-level “standards” span our enormous gaps?

For detached non-observers like Gates, this obvious question might not occur. But in Sunday’s New York Times, someone who is deeply involved in our public schools described the role of the gaps.

The writer was Robert Balfanz. He’s an education professor at Johns Hopkins, director of the Everyone Graduates Center.

Needless to say, everyone doesn’t graduate from our public high schools. In his piece, Balfanz describes the struggles which occur within many schools.

His piece was called THE GREAT DIVIDE. That headline refers to the very large gaps which divide the nation’s students well before ninth grade:

BALFANZ (6/8/14): This month, more than three million high school students will receive their diplomas. At more than 80 percent, America’s graduation rate is at a record high. More kids are going to college, too. But one-third of the nation’s African-American and Latino young men will not graduate.

In an era when there is virtually no legal work for dropouts, these young men face a bleak future. It is not news that the students who don’t make it out of high school largely come from our poorest neighborhoods, but the degree to which they are hyper-concentrated in a small set of schools is alarming. In fact, according to new research I conducted with my colleagues at Johns Hopkins University, half of the African-American boys who veer off the path to high school graduation do so in just 660 of more than 12,600 regular and vocational high schools.

These 660 schools are typically big high schools that teach only poor kids of color. They are concentrated in 15 states. Many are in major cities, but others are in smaller, decaying industrial cities or in the South, especially in Georgia, Florida and North Carolina.

This seemingly intractable problem is a national tragedy...

In our view, the focus on those 660 schools may be a bit misleading. It may suggest that these struggling students would fare substantially better in other high schools.

That supposition may be true, but it’s far from obvious.

Balfanz works in a program to keep these struggling students “on track,” presumably for graduation. A bit later, he provides a cursory look at the size of the gaps, and at the role these punishing gaps play within these low-income schools:

BALFANZ: It is not unusual for up to half the students [in these high schools] to miss a month or more of school, and often more students are suspended in a year than graduate. In a 22-school sample that we studied closely, nearly all ninth-grade students were either too old for their grades, had repeated ninth grade, needed special education, were chronically absent or had academic skills at the seventh grade level or below. The norm in this environment is to fail classes and then repeat ninth grade. But most students do no better the second time around. Either they drop out then or they may briefly transfer to another school before dropping out later. This is a highly predictable, almost mechanical course, which is why we call those schools dropout factories.

According to Balfanz, “nearly all ninth-grade students” in the study he cites “were either too old for their grades, had repeated ninth grade, needed special education, were chronically absent or had academic skills at the seventh grade level or below.”

We will suggest that the key words there may be the words “or below.”

How far below the seventh-grade level might the skill levels be? Could some ninth-graders, who may be tenth grade by age, be functioning at fifth-grade level?

Everything tells us the answer is yes; our achievement gaps are very wide. Yet Bill Gates and his gang of hacks have spent the past several years trying to establish challenging “standards” for all the students in our ninth grades—for students who are doing quite well and for those who are floundering.

On its face, this makes little sense. That said, Gates, a college dropout, is quite sure that he is involved with a very important idea.

In the rest of his piece, Balfanz describes the ways his program tries to keep those struggling kids from dropping out of school. He doesn’t really try to describe the academic work these kids are doing. We’ll guess it differs from the work being down elsewhere in their regions by kids who, like Gates as a high school freshman, are on their way to Harvard.

Balfanz describes chronic absenteeism at those urban high schools, and high suspension rates. When he does, he is describing the depression, dismay and despair which may overtake the lives of kids who have been floundering in school since the earliest grades.

It’s no fun being confused every day in our public schools. Most adults don’t like the experience being confused and thrown in over their heads on some project. For children, the experience continues for years. This is humiliating and painful, a source of anger, dismay and despair.

How do kids get so far behind by the time they reach the ninth grade? How does the following situation come into being, the situation described by Eduardo Porter?

“In some public schools, children who are entering the sixth grade with the measured proficiency of first graders are mixed in with children who perform well above the sixth-grade standard.”

To state the obvious, those very large gaps don’t get their start in the ninth grade or even the sixth. But given the very large size of these gaps, the notion that they can be addressed by common sets of grade-level standards is, in a word, bizarre.

Tomorrow, we’ll go back to fourth grade to help explain how those gaps occur. On Thursday, we’ll retreat even farther, to the first years of life.

But make no mistake—as far “behind” as those ninth-graders may be, Gates and his minions are even more clueless. As privileged beings pursuing Big Scratch, it’s easy for them to disregard the role of our very large gaps.

Tomorrow: The role of the gaps in fourth grade

Continuing: Our month of the gaps!

MONDAY, JUNE 9, 2014

The role of the gaps in our schools: Today, we start the third week of our ongoing series, “Our month of the gaps.”

Our public schools display very large “achievement gaps.” In a recent New York Times column, Eduardo Porter described this remarkable state of affairs:

PORTER (5/21/14): Addressing the vast disparities between students’ abilities will not be easy. In some public schools, children who are entering the sixth grade with the measured proficiency of first graders are mixed in with children who perform well above the sixth-grade standard.

Schools struggle to teach this mix. Teachers are frustrated: Almost half leave the profession within five years.

Do middle schools really struggle with that wide range of achievement levels? Data from our most reliable testing program, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, suggest the existence of these large achievement gaps within the nation’s student population.

(For painful examples, see last Thursday's report.)

These gaps create large problems within our public schools. Despite this fact, these gaps are often disregarded by our educational experts and our education writers.

All week, we’ll look at the way these very large gaps complicate matters within our schools. As we do, we’ll note the way the problems we describe are commonly disregarded, finessed.

Will people ever come to terms with the problems caused by the gaps? As matters stand, we don’t seem to care about the low-income kids who are often found at the short end of these punishing gaps.

Surely, that can’t be the case! But that’s the way it seems.

THE ROLE OF THE GAPS: Large gaps confronted by Common Core!

MONDAY, JUNE 9, 2014

Part 1—Gates disregards the gaps: With substantial regularity, our journalists and “educational experts” disregard the gaps.

They act as if the gaps don’t exist. They disregard the size of the gaps—and our nation’s achievement gaps are very large indeed.

When they disregard the gaps, they disregard the low-income kids who tend to be the victims of this challenging state of affairs. In effect, they display an essential disinterest in these low-income students.

In our view, The Atlantic’s lengthy piece, “Segregation Now...,” largely represents a cuffing-aside of those kids. On balance, so did this commentary by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who sends his son to Manhattan Country School—a perfectly appropriate choice—while passing judgment on Alabamians who take a similar approach.

We’ll save those matters for the fourth week of “Our month of the gaps,” the series which continues today. In this, the third week of our series, we’ll start with education reformer Bill Gates, who has distributed money to many folks in the past fifteen years while disregarding the gaps.

First, a quick blast from the past:

Back in 1997, President Clinton announced a sensible-sounding goal. He wanted to set higher standards for our public schools.

This sounded perfectly sensible. As we asked in the Baltimore Sun, who could possibly be opposed to higher standards?

Inevitably, “higher standards” sounds like something a sensible person would want. That said, we also asked an obvious question:

How can setting higher standards help the millions of low-income kids who are failing to attain the standards we already have? Would “higher standards” help those kids? Eventually, we imagined an example from the world of track:

SOMERBY (2/16/97): When I taught in the Baltimore schools, my fellow teachers knew what the standards were. The problem we had was getting kids to attain them. And nothing the president said in his speech tells me how we will get our students to attain our new, higher standards—how we will meet the wonderful standards that are so easy to discuss in a speech.

[...]

Setting higher standards always sounds good, but it begs the question of how we will attain the new standards. It’s as if we set the high-jump bar at six feet and found that no one could jump over it. So the president makes a suggestion: Let’s raise the bar to seven!

For the record, we like President Clinton. But when we propose more challenging standards, we blow right past an obvious question:

How are higher standards supposed to help the many kids who can’t meet the standards we already have? If they can’t get over the bar at six feet, why should we raise it to seven?

That column appeared in 1997. We remembered that column when we read yesterday’s Washington Post, in which a major journalist, and a nation of experts, disregarded the very large gaps which define our educational challenge.

Lyndsey Layton’s front-page report was 3700 words long. In great detail, she described the way Bill Gates has spread his money around to get the states to adopt the new Common Core standards.

According to Layton, the Gates Foundation has spent $3.4 billion since 1999 in an attempt to reshape the world of public education. In this passage, Layton offers a puzzling account of what Gates hopes to achieve:

LAYTON (6/8/14): In an interview, Gates said his role is to fund the research and development of new tools, such as the Common Core, and offer them to decision-makers who are trying to improve education for millions of Americans. It's up to the government to decide which tools to use, but someone has to invest in their creation, he said.

“The country as a whole has a huge problem that low-income kids get less good education than suburban kids get," Gates said. "And that is a huge challenge. . . . Education can get better. Some people may not believe that. Education can change. We can do better.”

Apparently speaking English, Gates said the nation’s low-income kids “get less good education than suburban kids get.” Presumably, he was referring to bone-crushing achievement gaps like these:

Average scores, Grade 8 math, 2013 NAEP
Higher-income students: 297.13
Lower-income students: 269.96

White students: 293.19
Black students: 262.73

Higher-income white students: 299.80
Lower-income white students: 278.36
Higher-income black students: 275.97
Lower-income black students: 258.46

Those are painful statistics. On their face, they define extremely large gaps in academic attainment, a point we discussed all last week.

(For details concerning those gaps, see last Thursday's report.)

In a slightly more rational world, those average scores would be seen as highly challenging statistics.

In our world, journalists and “educational experts” routinely disregard the meaning of those statistics and the gaps they define. To our eye, this tendency was on display all through Layton’s report.

Unless something is grossly wrong with those data, lower-income black kids are achieving much less in math, on average, than their higher-income white peers. Based on standard rules of thumb for assessing NAEP scores, the gap seems to be quite large.

We have no idea how this situation will be addressed by adopting the Common Core, which establishes one set of challenging standards for all the students in a given grade.

Given our large achievement gaps, does this approach make sense? Just consider the nation’s eighth-graders:

Some of our middle schools enroll large numbers of lower-income black students—average score in math, 258. Elsewhere, schools may enroll large numbers of higher-income white kids—average score, 300.

Academically, these two groups of kids come from two different worlds. How is any single set of grade-level standards supposed to address their widely divergent needs?

This may be the world’s most obvious question, but it never seems to occur to Layton or her editors. Late in her report, she describes Gates’ intentions again:

LAYTON: Now six years into his quest, Gates finds himself in an uncomfortable place—countering critics on the left and right who question whether the Common Core will have any impact or negative effects, whether it represents government intrusion, and whether the new policy will benefit technology firms such as Microsoft.

Gates is disdainful of the rhetoric from opponents. He sees himself as a technocrat trying to foster solutions to a profound social problem—gaping inequalities in U.S. public education—by investing in promising new ideas.

According to Layton, Gates is trying to address the “gaping inequalities” which obtain in our public schools. The data we have posted above define one of those very large gaps.

But how can any set of grade-level standards address the yawning achievement gap defined by those punishing data? Layton never asks the question; Gates doesn’t try to explain.

We’ve asked two different questions today. Let’s get clear on what they are:

First question: How can tougher standards help the many kids who can’t meet the standards we already have?

Second question: How can any set of standards address the needs of all the kids in a given grade, given our very wide range of achievement levels?

These are the world’s most obvious questions. But Layton didn’t pose these questions to Gates, and there’s no sign that these questions have ever occurred to him.

Our public schools feature large achievement gaps. Some kids know a lot of math. Other kids know much less.

Our journalists are highly skilled at disregarding the size of those gaps. All this week, we’ll examine the role of the gaps in our public schools—and the way these yawning gaps are routinely ignored.

Tomorrow: In high school, our punishing gaps

Supplemental: A 7-year-old reader in Gotham!

FRIDAY, JUNE 6, 2014

She goes unloved at Salon: This morning, in the New York Times, we read about a 7-year-old in New York City who already has two literary heroes.

Delightfully, her name is Mikayla Capers; she lives in East New York, Brooklyn. Vivien Lee profiled her budding literary engagement, which we hope will turn out to be lasting, helpful and real:

YEE (6/6/14): Mikayla’s heroes are Harry Potter and the characters in the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series. After reading that she was a fan of the series, Abrams Books, the series’ publisher, arranged to send her a trove of signed books and merchandise. For Mr. King, it is one bright note in what has been a week of horror.

In the “week of horror” referenced there, this young person was stabbed seventeen times—and survived. In the course of the attack, her best friend, who was 6, was killed.

(“Mr. King” is her uncle, Lemar King. In this earlier report, he was the source for this portrait of Capers: “She is a chatterbox who loves the Harry Potter books and 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid.’ ”)

We were impressed by the thought that this young person already loves those books. She comes from a demographic which often ends up on the short end of our nation’s punishing academic/literacy gaps.

Those gaps come early and often. Many kids who live in public housing, as Capers does, are on the short end of the so-called “30 million word gap” by the time they’re three years old! (For links, see below.)

Around the country, some are trying to address that gap, in the face of massive disinterest from just about everybody else.

We’ll admit we had an unwholesome reaction to this morning’s report. It occurred to us that we haven’t read a word about Capers from the various chatterboxes we review at Salon.

A search shows that Salon has posted three extremely brief AP reports about this matter, wherever it is they post reports they don’t expect anyone to read. But we haven’t read a reaction to this event from the site’s top salonsplainers.

We’ve read three separate columns at Salon this week about Maureen Dowd’s misadventure with pot. (In a typical display, none of the columns actually managed to explain what Dowd said actually happened.) The interest in Dowd’s pot use has been high, but no one has said a word about Capers—not even Katie McDonough, who does her highly entitled mcdonoughsplaining from right there in Brooklyn, the borough she shares with this child.

Can we talk? Salon doesn’t care about kids like this! It doesn’t discuss them when they get stabbed. It doesn’t waste its time on their general societal plight.

We liberals have a very hard time processing the following fact. But as a group, we basically quit on black kids a long time ago. Our “intellectual leaders” don’t really like young people like the chatterbox Capers. As has been clear for decades now, we don’t give the first flying fig what happens to them in their schools.

We prove this basic point all year long. If you doubt that, read Salon. Or watch The One True Channel.

Concerning the 30 million words: Where do our achievement gaps come from? In a remarkable bit of research published in 1995, Hart and Risley attempted to tackle that topic. They described a 30-35 million word gap which is in place by age 3.

Correlation is not causation. Beyond that, we’d assume the question is less the number of words a young child hears than the number of brain cells that develop in the course of her responses to all that chatter.

Above all else, literacy is the habit of paying attention and trying to figure things out. Some very young people get much more help developing these habits.

Back to the 30 million words: When this gap does get discussed, journalists tend to tiptoe around. Where could the ongoing research take us? We’d like to see that explored.

For a recent account of this gap, click this. For an NPR presentation, click here. For a lengthy report by Paul Tough in 2006, we’ll suggest that you just click this.

Can this baby talk research help? Not if nobody pays attention to what is being said.

THE SIZE OF THE GAPS: In Alabama!

FRIDAY, JUNE 6, 2014

Part 5—A tale of at least two cities: On balance, we weren’t enthralled by The Atlantic’s performance.

Last month, the famous American publication featured a 10,000-word report called “Segregation Now...”

Pseudo-liberal hearts were moved. For several major reasons, we were less than enthralled.

Don’t get us wrong! In her lengthy report, Nikole Hannah-Jones told a fascinating story about the historical treatment of race within the Tuscaloosa City Schools.

She focused on the city’s high schools. She took us all the way back to pre-Brown days, when Tuscaloosa ran one high school for its white kids and a second high school for their black counterparts.

In 1979, under the aegis of federal courts, the city finally took a completely different direction. In this passage, Hannah-Jones described the creation of Central High School, a single, city-wide high school which all students attended:

HANNAH-JONES (4/16/14): In the fall of 1979, Central High School opened to serve all public-high-school students in the district—no matter their race, no matter whether they lived in the city’s public-housing projects or in one of the mansions along the meandering Black Warrior River. The mega-school, a creative solution to a complex problem, resulted from many hours of argument and negotiation in [Judge Frank] McFadden’s chambers. It was spread across two campuses—ninth- and 10th-graders at the former black high school, now called Central West; 11th- and 12th-graders at the old white high school, called Central East. (The judge’s order also created three single-grade middle schools.)

All traces of the segregated system, from the mascots to the school colors of the two former schools, were discarded. All of Tuscaloosa’s public-high-school students would now unite under the red-and-white banner of the Falcons. As one of the biggest schools in the state, Central would offer classes in subjects ranging from Latin to forensics.

All traces of the segregated system were discarded? We'll guess that the gaps were still there.

In theory, this turn to a single all-city school was a great idea. In practice, the large number of campuses this arrangement involved made for a somewhat clumsy solution.

That doesn’t mean that this arrangement couldn’t have worked. As she continued, Hannah-Jones painted a glorious picture of the new Central High—and she voiced an objection:

HANNAH-JONES (continuing directly): Over the years, Central racked up debate-team championships. Its math team dominated at state competitions. The cheerleaders tumbled their way to nationals, and the Falcons football team trounced local competitors so badly, some refused to play against it. Central students were regularly named National Merit Scholars. In 2001, the state found Central’s projected dropout rate to be less than half Alabama’s average.

“Central and its resources could reach any child,” said Robert Coates, a former principal of the school.

The school was hardly perfect. Black students were disproportionately funneled into vocational classes, and white students into honors classes. Some parents complained that competitive opportunities were limited to just the very best students and athletes because the school, at 2,300 students, was so large. And the white flight that had begun when the courts first ordered the district to desegregate continued, slowly, after the formation of the mega-school. But despite these challenges, large numbers of black students studied the same robust curriculum as white students, and students of both races mixed peacefully and thrived.

Welcome to Shangri-la! Portraits like these make us liberals feel good. But how accurate is this portrayal? To what extent did “large numbers of black students” actually “thrive” as they studied that “robust curriculum” in this earlier high school?

In the end, there’s no real way to answer that question. There are no data describing the academic performance of Tuscaloosa’s various kids during the era in question.

But make no mistake—Hannah-Jones is telling a tale of at least two cities in her portrait of the school which could reach any child as its math team ruled the state, as it racked up those Merit Scholarships.

According to Hannah-Jones, some of the kids who attended that version of Central High came from “the mansions along the meandering Black Warrior River.” Other kids at that earlier version of Central “lived in the city’s public-housing projects.”

Academically, those kids were almost surely living in two different cities. Much of American history had been devoted to creating the gaps which almost surely defined that state of affairs.

What did the various “achievement gaps” look like in that era’s Tuscaloosa? No data exist to answer that question. But those gaps are large in Alabama today, as they are around the nation, although the gaps are getting smaller in both the nation and the state.

How large are the gaps in today’s Alabama? In Grade 8 math, Alabama’s black students have recorded substantial score gains in the past two decades, but so have the state’s white students.

For that reason, the various gaps were still large on last year’s NAEP math tests. Despite the score gains of recent decades, these were daunting statistics:

Average scores, Grade 8 math
Alabama, 2013 NAEP
All students: 269.19

Higher-income students: 286.71
Lower-income students: 255.64

White students: 279.57
Black students: 250.16

Higher-income white students: 288.18
Lower-income white students: 266.62
Higher-income black students: 272.98
Lower-income black students: 245.94

For the record, Alabama’s higher-income black students scored close to their national peers last year. In all other categories, Alabama’s average scores trailed those of the the nation by substantial amounts.

(To give you a general sense of those gaps, the average score for all students nationwide was 283.62. Alabama trailed the nation by more than thirteen points.)

Let’s return to the Tuscaloosa of 1979. Better yet, let’s imagine that Tuscaloosa returned to its earlier policy this year—that all the city’s various students attended one large high school.

In many ways, that would presumably be a good thing. But students would be attending that school from at least two different cities.

Higher-income white students would be coming from their homes across the Black Warrior River. Lower-income black students would be coming from their homes in the public housing projects in the city’s West End.

If Tuscaloosa is like Alabama as a whole, a gap of more than 40 points separated those groups in Grade 8 math last year. According to a very rough rule of thumb, the one group, on average, exceeded the other by four academic years.

Hannah-Jones rhapsodized about the way Tuscaloosa’s kids all attended one high school in an earlier era. She then offered an insinuation about the way that school’s black kids were “disproportionately funneled” away from honors classes.

It’s easy for liberals to play it that way. It makes us pseudo-liberals feel good.

It’s safe and it’s easy; journalistically, though, it’s quite slick. In our view, an approach like that is also unhelpful, uncaring.

In our view, it does a disservice to the superlative kids who stand on the lower end of those punishing gaps, which are very real.

How do we make those gaps go away? How do we better serve superlative kids like D’Leisha Dent, who wants to achieve and to serve?

Thank you for asking those very good questions! In our view, Hannah-Jones largely finessed that very key point in a piece which ran 10,000 words.

When “Our month of the gaps” continues, we’ll tell you why we say that.

Over the past thirteen years: Over the past thirteen years, Grade 8 math scores have risen in Alabama, as they have around the nation. Some of the gaps are smaller.

Below, you see the average scores for the state’s white and black students. For each year, you see the average for white kids, the average for black kids, and the size of the gap:

Average scores, Grade 8 math
White kids, black kids: Alabama, 2013 NAEP
2013: 279.57, 250.16 (29.41)
2011: 280.13, 249.82 (30.31)
2009: 280.31, 248.01 (32.30)
2007: 278.20, 245.78 (32.42)
2005: 275.57, 239.97 (35.60)
2003: 274.70, 240.27 (34.43)
2000: 275.32, 239.89 (35.43)

Scores are higher for both groups. The size of the gap is down.

(We’re starting with the year 2000 because, for technical reasons, it’s the earliest year which permits a clean comparison with 2013. Score gains were also recorded in the 1990s.)

Supplemental: The size of our gaps versus Korea’s!

THURSDAY, JUNE 5, 2014

A very large challenge for schools: We just keep reprinting that striking passage from Eduardo Porter’s Economic Scene column.

Our achievement gaps are large. The challenge this creates for schools is almost never discussed in our impoverished education discourse, which mainly involves reciting sound-bites from elite “education reformers.”

In the passage shown below, Porter describes a deeply challenging state of affairs. Based on our dozen years in the classroom, this strikes us as the most significant portrait we’ve ever read of American schools:

PORTER (5/21/14): Addressing the vast disparities between students’ abilities will not be easy. In some public schools, children who are entering the sixth grade with the measured proficiency of first graders are mixed in with children who perform well above the sixth-grade standard.

Schools struggle to teach this mix. Teachers are frustrated: Almost half leave the profession within five years.

Do American schools really confront such “vast disparities” in achievement within a single grade, within a single age group? In our experience, yes, they do—and the problem created by these gaps is virtually never discussed.

(Instead, we create grade-level “standards” for all the schools in a given state—or now, for all the schools in the nation. No one explains how such an approach is supposed to make sense, given those “vast disparities.”)

As “Our month of the gaps” continues, we’ll discuss the challenges created by this wide range of achievement levels. For today, let’s consider a question:

Is the range of achievement in our schools wider than that in other countries?

Do our schools confront an unusually wide range of achievement levels? In her ballyhooed book, The Smartest Kids in the World, Amanda Ripley seemed to say that they do. In this passage, she described results from the first PISA tests in 2000:

RIPLEY (page 17): Across the ocean, the United States rang in somewhere above Greece and below Canada [in math], a middling performance that would be repeated in every subsequent round [of PISA testing]. U.S. teenagers did better in reading but that was only comforting, since math skills tended to be better predictors of future earnings.

Even in reading, a gulf of more than ninety points separated America’s most-advantaged kids from the least-advantaged peers. By comparison, only thirty-three points separated Korea’s most-privileged and least-privileged students, and almost all of them scored higher than their American counterparts.

Ripley refers to a PISA statistic which compares average scores in the top and bottom quarters of a nation’s student population (essentially, by family socioeconomic status). In that initial testing, the range of reading scores within the U.S. was about three times as large as the range of scores in Korea.

It’s simpler to run a classroom, a school or a school district if you aren’t forced to confront a very wide range of achievement levels. For today, we’ll assume that this basic point will seem fairly obvious.

Back in 2000, we had a much wider range of scores than Korea. To what extent has this pattern obtained in other rounds of PISA testing?

We’ve never seen that question discussed, and we never will.

Porter’s portrait goes to a point which is almost never discussed. “Education reporters” tend to restrict themselves to familiar, elite-sponsored talking points: Our teachers are a group of fiends! Our schools are in a tailspin!

Steadily rising scores on the NAEP are hard to square with that memorized message. The solution is easily grasped:

“Education reporters” never report the steady rise in those scores!

To ponder Ripley’s statistic, click here, scroll to Figure 6.1.

THE SIZE OF THE GAPS: Some painful statistics!

THURSDAY, JUNE 5, 2014

Part 4—A societal challenge: Within our student population, the gaps—the so-called “achievement gaps”—show up early and often.

Indeed, the gaps exist before our students are even technically students! Case in point:

Last year, in the New York Times, Stanford professor Sean Reardon described the way children from affluent families are pulling away from their middle-class peers in academic attainment. In the course of explaining this new dynamic, Reardon described an early gap—and a societal challenge:

REARDON (4/28/13): It may seem counterintuitive, but schools don't seem to produce much of the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students. We know this because children from rich and poor families score very differently on school readiness tests when they enter kindergarten, and this gap grows by less than 10 percent between kindergarten and high school.

When he talks about “rich and poor families,” Reardon seems to mean families from the 90th and 10th percentiles by family income. In that passage, he seems to say that a substantial gap already exists on the day children from these two groups show up for kindergarten.

We don’t understand what Reardon means when he says this gap “grows by less than ten percent” as these kids proceed through high school. Presumably, the gap in knowledge and skills is quite large by the end of their high school years—substantially larger than it was when these kids were five or six.

That said, substantial gaps already exist in the first years of life. Tomorrow, we’ll consider the so-called “30 million word gap,” a daunting gap which is said to exist by the time children are 3.

Simply put, kids from low-income, low-literacy backgrounds aren’t immersed in the culture of literacy in the ways their middle-class counterparts are. For kids from high-literacy backgrounds, his immersion starts in the first days of life. It helps produce the achievement gaps which represent a major societal challenge.

A certain class of upper-class liberal seems to enjoy pretending that these gaps don’t really exist. To us, their conduct has the feel of throwback, a throwback to the 1960s, when Hart and Risley hadn’t conducted the research which defined that 30 million word gap.

At that time, it seemed it would perhaps be easy to address the gaps which existed in schools like the ones Jonathan Kozol and Herbert Kohl described in their famous books from 1967, Death at an Early Age and 36 Children.

Today, sensible people know better. But all too often, journalists and professors seem to prefer to run with a bit of a ruse.

Have journalists sometimes avoided the gaps, dumbing us down in the process? We’ll return to that question in Week 3 of this month-long report.

For today, we’ll return to data from last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to see how large those gaps can be. In our view, those punishing gaps can be painfully large.

The statistics which follow are painful statistics. That said, the problems these statistics capture can’t be confronted as long as upper-class pseudo-liberals keep finding ways to avoid them—keep finding ways to avert our gaze from the problems of low-income kids.

In yesterday's report, we looked at data from last year’s NAEP testing in Grade 8 math. These data can be used to divide the nation’s students into two groups by family income, based on eligibility for free or reduced price lunch.

Again, we’ll note that this is not a measure of poverty. Given current demographics, this measure divides the nation’s student population roughly in half.

According to NAEP data, exactly 50 percent of students tested in Grade 8 math were eligible for free or reduced price lunch last year; 50 percent were not. We’ll refer to these groups as “lower income” and “higher income students.”

As we noted yesterday, there was a substantial gap between these two groups on last year’s Grade 8 math test. As we saw in the data reprinted below, higher-income students scored substantially better.

We’re looking at a substantial gap. If we apply a common but very rough rule of thumb, this gap in test scores could be compared to almost three academic years:

Average scores, Grade 8 math
All public school students, 2013 NAEP
All students: 283.62
Higher-income students: 297.13
Lower-income students: 269.96

Remember—roughly half the higher-income students scored above 297. Roughly half the lower-income students scored below 270.

As such, those average scores seem to define a large gap in academic achievement. This presents a challenge to our schools. It defines an obvious problem in social justice.

Alas! These gaps look worse, become more painful, when we review the average scores attained by higher- and lower-income students in various “racial” groups. As a starting point, this is the way the “income gap” worked among white students:

Average scores, Grade 8 math
White students only, 2013 NAEP
All white students: 293.19
Higher-income white students: 299.80
Lower-income white students: 278.36

Thus defined, the “income gap” among white students was more than 21 points.

A somewhat smaller “income gap” obtained among the nation’s black students. But in both income groups, black kids scored substantially lower than their white counterparts:

Average scores, Grade 8 math
Black students only, 2013 NAEP
All black students: 262.73
Higher-income black students: 275.97
Lower-income black students: 258.46

In these data, we see one of the ugliest statistics we know. By a slender margin, lower-income white students outscored higher-income black students in Grade 8 math last year. We’d call that an ugly fact.

Those are average scores, of course. Many black students scored extremely well in Grade 8 math.

It’s also true that all these scores have been rising in the past several decades. Despite the propaganda you constantly meet in the nation’s leading newspapers, black kids’ math scores have substantially risen in recent decades.

White kids’ math scores are better too. For that reason, the gap persists, although it has gotten smaller.

Despite what you constantly hear from our journalists, black and white math scores are rising. But despite that good news, the statistics we’ve just presented define a major national challenge. The situation isn’t helped when upper-class Princeton professors look for ways to fudge this gap. Nor are things helped when we pretend that things were great at Tuscaloosa’s original Central High, when that city’s black and white kids all attended one high school together.

Those statistics define a large societal challenge. Let’s complete the statistical picture:

Average scores, Grade 8 math
Hispanic students only, 2013 NAEP
All Hispanic students: 271.02
Higher-income Hispanic students: 282.81
Lower-income Hispanic students: 267.50

Average scores, Grade 8 math
Asian-American students only, 2013 NAEP
All Asian-American students: 305.92
Higher-income Asian-American students: 316.53
Lower-income Asian-American students: 289.53

For the record, we’re using the term “Asian-American” in place of the official NAEP language, which refers to “Asian/Pacific Islander” students.

Those data start to define the size of the gaps. They also define a societal challenge—a challenge our journalists and professors may not care much about.

In the days of Kozol and Kohl, we liberals were eager to tackle this challenge. Today, we tend to salonsplain everything else. Our deserving black kids—the D’Leisha Dents, and so many others—are pretty much left on their own.

Life in Princeton can be quite good! Who cares about Tuscaloosa?

Tomorrow: The gaps in Alabama

To access all NAEP data: To access the NAEP data cited above, click here, then click on MAIN NDE (Main NAEP Data Explorer).

Click again to agree to terms; from there, you’re on your own.

Supplemental: D’Leisha Dent to Miles College!

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 4, 2014

Bittersweet good news: When Nikole Hannah-Jones profiled Tuscaloosa’s public schools, she focused on three generations of the James Dent family.

That included D’Leisha Dent, senior class president at Tuscaloosa’s Central High School.

Dent was also homecoming queen this year. She’s a member of the mayor’s youth council; she was a three-time individual state champion in track.

But because of Dent’s low ACT scores, Hannah-Jones said she was barely getting a nibble from the four-year colleges she hoped to attend. Her profile ended on this downbeat note:

HANNAH-JONES (4/16/14): For black students like D’Leisha—the grandchildren of the historic Brown decision—having to play catch-up with their white counterparts is supposed to be a thing of the past. The promise was that students of all colors would be educated side by side, and would advance together into a more integrated, equitable American society. Polls show Americans embracing this promise in the abstract, but that rarely translates into on-the-ground support for integration efforts.

Late last year, D’Leisha took the ACT for the third time, but her score dropped back to 16. So early on a Saturday in February, she got up quietly, forced a few bites of a muffin into her nervous stomach, and drove once again to the community college where the test is administered. A few weeks later, she got her score: 16 again. She contemplated a fifth attempt, but could see little point.

A few months earlier, D’Leisha had talked about how much she looked forward to meeting people from different cultures at college and sitting in a racially mixed classroom for the first time. But her college hopes are thinner now than she’d expected then. As of this writing, they largely hinge on the tenuous promise of a coach at a small, historically black college outside of Birmingham, who has told her that the school will have a place for her despite her score. No official offer of admission has yet arrived.

As it turns out, that small, historically black college came through. According to the Tuscaloosa News, Dent will be attending Miles College, where she will compete in two sports—track and volleyball.

In her lengthy report, Hannah-Jones focused on issues of “resegregation.” Dent had always attended all-black schools in Tuscaloosa. According to Hannah-Jones, she looked forward to “meeting people from different cultures at college and sitting in a racially mixed classroom for the first time.”

More than half the students at Miles come from outside Alabama, but the school has very few white students. We’ll bet that Miles has made the right choice in accepting Dent, but Dent still won’t move beyond the classroom separation that was invented so long ago.

In our view, Dent may have missed out on white Alabama. But based on Hannah-Jones’ profile of this superlative kid, a lot of kids in white Alabama have surely missed out on the chance to know her.

For the record, no, it isn’t their fault. And better days lie ahead.

THE SIZE OF THE GAPS: By family income, also by race!

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 4, 2014

Part 3—First approximations: Very large “achievement gaps” exist in American schools.

In yesterday’s main report, we looked at the range of scores in Grade 8 math on last year’s NAEP math test. We refer to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the 43-year-old federal program which is widely regarded as out most reliable testing program.

Students took the NAEP last year. Based on conventional rules of thumb, a very wide range of math achievement is suggested by these scores:

Average scores, Grade 8 math, 2013 NAEP
90th percentile: 331
75th percentile: 310
50th percentile: 286
25th percentile: 261
10th percentile: 237

Just for the record, ten percent of tested students scored below that lowest score. Ten percent of tested students scored above 331.

When conventional rules of thumb are applied, those scores suggest a very wide range of achievement levels among the nation’s eighth graders. As we all know, these gaps don’t appear completely at random among our students.

To a significant degree, these gaps in achievement correlate with family income and race. In recent weeks, major journalists seemed eager to underplay, avoid or deny that highly salient fact.

In a 10,000-word piece in The Atlantic, Nikole Hannah-Jones found a hundred ways to underplay the savagery of the achievement gap which faces low-income black kids. Meanwhile, in the New York Times and the Washington Post, Eduardo Porter and Professor Perry seemed to imagine a more pleasing world, a world in which black kids are “disproportionately” represented in public school gifted programs because they have been “channeled” or “funneled into a lower-quality education.”

Hannah-Jones made the same pleasing suggestion in her fascinating report about Tuscaloosa’s schools. For reasons we’ll detail in coming weeks, we think such journalism is a bit on the heinous side, though your results may differ.

Your results may differ! If so, we’ll suggest your results could be wrong.

For today, let’s start to define the size of the gaps by family income and also by race. How large are the achievement gaps based on income and race?

Again, we’ll use data from last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, the widely-praised federal testing program. Let’s start with family income.

In its public data, the NAEP employs a fairly crude measure of family income. It divides students into two large groups—those who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and those who don’t qualify.

This is not a measure of poverty, though journalists often present it as such. As a rough measure, a student qualifies for reduced price lunch if his family’s income is roughly twice the federal poverty level.

At present, this measure divides the nation’s student population roughly in half. According to NAEP data, exactly 50 percent of eighth-graders tested in math last year qualified for free or reduced price lunch. Fifty percent did not.

We’ll refer to these two groups as “lower-income” and “upper-income students.” Below, you see the average scores in Grade 8 math recorded by these two groups:

Average scores, Grade 8 math
Public school students, 2013 NAEP
All students: 283.62
Higher-income students: 297.13
Lower-income students: 269.96

A gap of 27.17 points separated the average scores of those two groups of kids. By a very rough rule of thumb which is often applied to NAEP scores, that represents an achievement gap approaching three academic years.

That is a very rough rule of thumb, as we constantly note. We’d love to see the nation’s “education reporters” interview NAEP officials and other experts, if any exist, to estimate the range of achievement suggested by those average scores.

That said, a second point is very much worth noting—those are the average scores for students in each income group. Roughly half the upper-income students scored somewhere above 297. Roughly half the lower-income group scored somewhere below 270.

Considered that way, those average scores suggest a fairly large “achievement gap” based on family income. We’ll discuss some of the ways such gaps arise in the weeks ahead.

That said, the gaps between our major “racial” and ethnic groups were somewhat larger than that. Using the language of the NAEP, these are the average scores recorded by the four major groups:

Average scores, Grade 8 math
Public school students, 2013 NAEP
All students: 283.62
Asian/Pacific Islander students: 305.92
White students: 293.19
Hispanic students: 271.02
Black students: 262.73

The gap between white kids and black kids was slightly larger than the gap between higher-income and lower-income students. Meanwhile, our Asian-American kids made everyone look bad.

Tomorrow, we’ll break these scores down further. We’ll look at the average scores of lower- and higher-income kids within each of the four “racial”/ethnic groups.

Before the week is done, we’ll also take a quick look at Alabama’s statewide scores. Here’s why:

Hannah-Jones’ lengthy Atlantic piece dealt with Tuscaloosa’s public schools. In the main, she discussed Tuscaloosa’s high schools, past and present, dating back to the 1960s.

In its so-called Trial Urban District study, the NAEP produces scores for twenty-one cities around the nation; Tuscaloosa isn’t part of this program. But when we look at the size of the gaps for Alabama as a whole, we may start to gain a new perspective on some of Hannah-Jones’ suggestions and representations, past as well as present.

What’s happening in Tuscaloosa’s schools? The question is very important.

Those schools are full of deserving kids. They want to live good lives; they want to serve and achieve.

In many ways, we thought Hannah-Jones’ representations were pleasing for the adult crowd but perhaps a bit less than respectful of those children’s interests. Your results may differ, of course. But are you real sure that they should?

Tomorrow: The size of the gaps, presented in more detail

To access all NAEP data: To access the NAEP data cited above, click here, then click on MAIN NDE (Main NAEP Data Explorer).

Click again to agree to terms; from there, you’re on your own. You’d never know it from reading newspapers, but mountains of data exist.

Supplemental: Can NAEP scores be trusted?

TUESDAY, JUNE 3, 2014

Ruminations on the so-called gold standard: We’ll be looking at NAEP scores for the next several weeks during our series, “Our month of the gaps.”

This raises a basic question: Can NAEP scores be trusted?

We’d be inclined to say yes, with a few reservations.

In recent years, a great deal of fraud has occurred in the nation’s state-by-state, “high stakes” testing programs. For what it’s worth, no one has been on the cheating beat any longer than we have.

We first approached the Baltimore Sun about outright cheating on standardized tests in 1971 or 1972. We’ve pursued a series of other such episodes over the past forty years.

Cheating scandals have been common of late. With that in mind, can NAEP scores be trusted?

We’d be inclined to say yes.

In its 43 years of operation, the NAEP has never been a high-stakes test. Teachers and principals have nothing at stake in the results of these tests.

Beyond that, the NAEP is run by competent people, and it’s adequately funded. Often, this hasn’t seemed to be the case with our state-run tests.

For these reasons, the NAEP has always been described as the “gold standard” of domestic testing. We do have one potential concern.

In the last decade, the NAEP has emerged into the public eye. As a result, state superintendents do have something to gain, or something to lose, if a state does unusually well on the NAEP, or unusually poorly.

Can state superintendents put their thumbs on the scale as the NAEP selects its statewide samples of students for testing? If so, someone is going to monkey around with the statewide sample at some point—or someone already has.

In recent years, the state of Maryland has eliminated a very high number of students from the testing, part of a state’s prerogative under certain technical guidelines. The state scored well with its sample of students pared down in this way. This produced little discussion.

The nation’s press corps should have examined these questions long ago. In truth, little real reporting is done by the nation’s education reporters. They mainly exist to recite elite scripts about the stagnant scores in our failing schools—scripts which fly in the face of the actual data emerging from the NAEP.

Everybody praises the NAEP—and no one reports what the NAEP data show! We’ll be using NAEP data for the next several weeks.

They’re the only real data we have.

THE SIZE OF THE GAPS: From bottom to top!

TUESDAY, JUNE 3, 2014

Part 2—Porter’s portrait confirmed: Could Eduardo Porter’s portrait of our schools possibly be accurate?

Two weeks ago, Porter devoted his Economic Scene column to a somewhat formulaic treatment of our public schools. Porter isn’t an education specialist. After reading his column, we’d have to say it showed.

Still, Porter painted a very striking portrait at one point in his piece. We’ll return to the question we asked last week:

Can the highlighted claim possibly be accurate?

PORTER (5/16/14): Tracking also happens within schools, where students are often separated by ability. “Advanced children are all put together; they all know each other and learn from each other’s habits,” said Sal Khan, the founder of the Khan Academy of on-line education. “At the low end, it’s an educational wasteland.”

Addressing the vast disparities between students’ abilities will not be easy. In some public schools, children who are entering the sixth grade with the measured proficiency of first graders are mixed in with children who perform well above the sixth-grade standard.

Schools struggle to teach this mix. Teachers are frustrated: Almost half leave the profession within five years.

Can that possibly be correct? According to Porter, some middle schools struggle with an amazing range of achievement levels. Some sixth graders have “the measured proficiency of first graders,” he says. Other sixth graders in the same schools are performing above sixth grade level!

Almost anyone can see the challenge this wide range of achievement levels would likely present to a school. With even a small amount of imagination, a person might even ask an obvious question:

If sixth graders display this very wide range of achievement levels, what role can a set of grade-level “standards” possibly play in the life of a school? Forget about the Common Core, the current focus of widespread dispute. How can any set of grade level standards address the “vast disparities” described in Porter’s portrait?

We’ll leave that obvious question for another day. That said, we’ve never seen that question asked in our major newspapers, and there’s an obvious reason for that:

In the main, these newspapers exist to spread elite propaganda about the state of our schools. They exist to discuss the gaps, not the gains.

They exist to spread the idea that achievement levels in the schools are stagnant or declining. And, for the past several decades, they have happily talked up the role of grade level sets of standards.

Not for them, the basic facts about the large score gains our schools are recording! Not for them, the obvious question about the way grade level standards are supposed to work!

That said, large achievement gaps exist within our public schools. Today, we start to sketch the size of the gaps.

Is it even dimly possible that Porter’s portrait is accurate? Do our middle schools really “struggle” with such a remarkable “mix?”

Porter didn’t say how he knew that some schools contain the “vast disparities” he described. He didn’t say how many schools face such daunting gaps.

That said, data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the NAEP) let us start to define the size of the gaps within our national student population. Returning to Grade 8 math as our basic field of study, here are some scores from the most recent administration of the so-called “Main NAEP:”

Average scores, Grade 8 math, 2013 NAEP
90th percentile: 331
75th percentile: 310
50th percentile: 286
25th percentile: 261
10th percentile: 237

For all such NAEP data, click here. You can examine the range of scores in reading and math in Grade 4 and Grade 8.

Eighth-graders recorded a wide array of scores on last year’s NAEP math test. At the 90th percentile, students scored 331. Students at the 10th percentile scored almost 100 points lower!

On their face, those scores suggest a very wide range of achievement levels.

As we’ve often noted, a very rough rule of thumb is often applied to NAEP scores. According to this very rough rule of thumb, ten points on the NAEP scale is compared to one academic year.

In yesterday’s report, we saw Stanford professor Sean Reardon applying this very rough rule of thumb to some scores from the NAEP’s Long-Term Trend study. Applied to these Grade 8 math scores, that rule of thumb suggests an astonishing range of achievement levels.

Among eighth graders, could there really be a nine-year achievement gap between students at the 90th and 10th percentiles? For ourselves, we will assume the answer is no. Data like these help explain why we always describe the ten-point rule as a very rough rule of thumb.

How large is the achievement gap among our eighth grade students? Such questions are almost never explored in the national press, which mainly exists to publish propagandistic sound-bites about the public schools.

The nation’s “education reporters” will happily chatter about the role of the Common Core, or other grade level math standards, without presenting or confronting such confounding statistics. Most likely, our education reporters have never clicked through to the data which display this very wide range of scores. In our Propagandistic New World, it simply isn’t done!

Among the nation’s eighth graders, how large is the range of achievement? We’d love to see that question discussed! We were thrilled to see Porter introduce the topic, which is extremely important.

NAEP scores can only provide so much precision. But at least on face, Porter’s portrait isn’t challenged by these confounding NAEP statistics. These data seem to suggest that the achievement range among eighth graders is extremely large.

Tomorrow, we’ll start to look at the way these gaps break down by income and race. For today, let’s add one point:

According to the NAEP data, students at the tenth percentile are doing substantially better than their counterparts did in years past. In 1990, the first year of the Main NAEP study, the tenth percentile score in Grade 8 math was 215. Last year, students at the tenth percentile scored 237.

A substantial score gain has occurred at the tenth percentile. That said, the gap in scores remains large; a slightly larger gain has been recorded at the 90th percentile.

Unless something is grossly wrong with this widely-praised “gold standard” testing program, substantial academic gains seem to have occurred in Grade 8 math. But the gaps seem to remain quite large—and, as Porter suggested, large gaps present very large challenges for our public schools.

Where do these large gaps come from? Tomorrow, we’ll look at the way the gaps in scores align with family income.

Tomorrow: Size of the gap by income

Our month of the gaps continues!

MONDAY, JUNE 2, 2014

Below, we start Week 2: Below, our month-long report, “Our month of the gaps,” continues.

This week, we’ll examine the size of the achievement gaps which help define the challenges facing our public schools.

In recent weeks, some journalists and professors have tried to avoid discussing these gaps, which are often large. This strikes us as an unhelpful approach—but then, what else is new?

Next week, we’ll discuss the challenges these gaps create within our public schools. This week, we’ll try to define the size of these gaps, which our loftiest elites have been fudging.

THE SIZE OF THE GAPS: But first, the good news!

MONDAY, JUNE 2, 2014

Part 1—As found in graf 15: From one perspective, the news about our American schools has been extremely good.

You’re almost never allowed to hear that news, of course. In deference to elite propaganda, the successors to our American press corps relentlessly keep this good news under their hats.

Occasionally, the good news slips out. In April 2013, Stanford professor Sean Reardon was allowed to share the good news in the New York Times, deep inside a lengthy Sunday Review piece with a gloomy overall slant.

Reardon’s piece bore this headline: “No Rich Child Left Behind.” He noted that children whose families are in the top ten percent by income are now outperforming middle-income kids, in ways which didn’t exist in the past.

An achievement gap is opening between the rich and the middle-class! Shielded by this gloomy perspective, Reardon was allowed to cite the good news, though not until paragraph 15:

REARDON (4/28/13): The income gap in academic achievement is not growing because the test scores of poor students are dropping or because our schools are in decline. In fact, average test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the so-called Nation's Report Card, have been rising—substantially in math and very slowly in reading—since the 1970s. The average 9-year-old today has math skills equal to those her parents had at age 11, a two-year improvement in a single generation. The gains are not as large in reading and they are not as large for older students, but there is no evidence that average test scores have declined over the last three decades for any age or economic group.

Say what? The average 9-year-old is two years ahead of where her parents were in math? Given all the propaganda about our stagnant or failing schools, can that possibly be true?

Based upon Reardon’s language, it’s clear that he is referring to data from the so-called “Long Term Trend” study of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the NAEP). Beyond that, it seems that he has applied the very rough ten-point rule of thumb to data from that federal program, which include these scores:

Average math scores, 9-year-old students, NAEP
2012: 243.99
1986: 221.71
1982: 218.98

A statistical bump in 2004 suggests that the actual score gain may be a few points larger than those raw scores suggest. For fuller data, click here, see Figure A.

As of 2012, the average score had risen by 22 points since 1986! If we apply the very rough rule of thumb in which ten points on the NAEP scale equals one academic year, today’s 9-year-olds are roughly two years ahead of their parents in math.

Can that possibly be true? We aren’t sure, in large part because discussions of such topics aren’t permitted within our press corps, where all discussions must advance elite propaganda about our failing schools and our fiendish public school teachers.

Except for very brief glimmers in the occasional fifteenth paragraph, American citizens aren’t allowed to encounter good news of this type. For that reason, no discussion ever occurs in which experts are consulted about the meaning of the score gains which have occurred on these widely-praised federal tests.

Most people have never heard about these score gains on the NAEP. That said, the score gains in math are general. No matter how you slice the demographics, large score gains have been recorded in recent decades, even as our pseudo-journalists peddle their gloomy scripts.

In what follows, we return to data from the so-called Main NAEP, the companion study to the Long-Term Trend study. We refer to score gains recorded between 1996 and 2013, a seventeen-year span.

From one perspective, the news has all been good:

On the Main NAEP, a large score gain (19.86 points) has been recorded in eighth-grade math by lower-income kids. (By students who are eligible for free or reduced price lunch. This is not a measure of poverty.) Slicing the data a different way, large score gains have been recorded by black kids and by Hispanic kids.

The score gains by black kids are largest of all. (Lower-income black kids have recorded a score gain of 24.03 points.) For that reason, we’ve seen a decline in the size of the achievement gap between white kids and black kids.

Once in a very great while, such news is permitted to slip out in some fleeting way. Reardon was permitted to mention this news, but only in paragraph 15 of a lengthy essay which featured a gloomy overall perspective. (We don’t mean that as a criticism of Reardon.)

The relentless suppression of this good news has constituted an act of vast journalistic misconduct. Unless something is grossly wrong with the NAEP data, this journalistic misconduct has created a vast misconception about the current state of American schools and the excellent children within them.

That said, even as these test scores rise, a very large problem persists. That problem involves our achievement gaps, which continue to coexist with these large score gains.

Alas! Black kids are recording better math scores, but white kids are doing better too! Are lower-income students improving? Yes, but higher-income students are also scoring better.

Along with the gains, we still have the gaps! And in many cases, the gaps remain quite large.

Mainstream journalists have refused to tell the public about the gains. Inevitably, uncaring “progressives” and hapless professors have gone right along with this scam.

At the same time, the gaps remain large, and those gaps must be discussed if we want to understand the challenges faced by American schools.

In recent weeks, some professors and “journalists” have worked quite hard to avoid discussing the gaps. Their conduct has been uncaring, disgraceful, lazy, inept. Same as it ever was!

Tomorrow, we’ll start to examine the size of the gaps which help define our ongoing challenge. Next week, we’ll discuss the way these gaps affect our public schools and our deserving, delightful students, who come in various “races” and “colors” from various income groups.

Heroically, Reardon slipped in the good news. Tomorrow, we look at the gaps.

Tomorrow: The size of the gap by income

To access all NAEP data: To access data from either NAEP study, you can use the NAEP Data Explorer. Here's how:

Click here, then click on MAIN NDE (Main NAEP) or LTT NDE (Long-Term Trend). Click again to agree to terms.

At that point, you're on your own. Oodles of data are there.