The mystery of what happens to you at home, before you trot off to school in the morning, is one of the key elements of the “achievement gap” discussion. How dysfunctional does the home environment have to be to generate the dreaded achievement gap among students who we presume to be similar, if not identical?
In the business environment, workers are presumed to exhibit varying levels of achievement. Cohen is the star of the Banker & Tradesman newsroom, but the bosses don’t hold seminars on the “achievement gap” between him and everyone else. For public school educators, each child is a blank slate that will eventually become perfection. Disappointment reigns, because the notion is ridiculous.
There are too many variables to identify all the factors responsible for the achievement gap. Whether native intelligence, personal pressure, or the dreaded “home environment,” the achievement gap drivers will always exist, to some extent.
What is embarrassing to the educators is that the gap is most pronounced among ethnic and racial groups. The private joke among the school folks, that “Asians are the new Jews,” reflects the reality that you can often predict which races, religions and creeds are going to separate themselves from the educational herd.
The key, in real life, is to lessen the gap; reduce the often shocking deviations among students, often separated by race and/or socio-economic status.
Most states have some pious plan or statement of purpose in place, to ease the embarrassment of the achievement gap. In Massachusetts, the legislature last year cranked out a glorious “Achievement Gap Act of 2010” to rally the troops. This followed Gov. Deval Patrick’s “Readiness Project,” announced in 2008, which also kind of, sort of, dealt with the achievement gap.
It goes on all over the country. Educators and politicians enjoy grandiose solutions to problems that have no ready solutions.
Unyielding Chasm
At the heart of the persistent reality of the achievement gap is the reality that the basic diagnoses may be, to use the technical term, icky. The analysts spend endless hours fighting off theories that racial and ethnic I.Q. plays a role; that peer pressure among lower-income minority groups discourage kids from growing up to be Shakespeare scholars. Most troubling and difficult to talk about is the suspicion that unsophisticated, unmotivated, mildly crazy parents create an achievement gap mentality.
The issue is addressed, at least for public consumption, in artful and subtle ways. Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville, writing last month in an Education Week newspaper blog, delicately spelled out the challenge of teaching “large numbers of children who are either unable to come to school or are so distracted as not to be able to be attentive and supply effort when they get there.”
In many cases, of course, the “distractions” children face involve basket-case families that offer impediments difficult to deal with, except in a military dictatorship. Reville mentions privacy issues a bit in his discussion – and that hints at the reality that unless you can break down the front door of some of those dysfunctional homes, and rescue little Tommy from life at home, the achievement gap may live on, forever.
Manhattan Institute public policy analyst Kay Hymowitz offered up this scenario as early as 2005: “Poor black parents rear their children very differently from the way middle-class parents do, and even by the time the kids are 4 years old, the results are extremely hard to change.” How many folks would stand up at the local school board discussion of the achievement gap and say it, out loud?
Some of the latest nightmare numbers, from a Washington University in St. Louis study, found that 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys; and 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared to 44 percent of white boys.
At the heart of the “solution” to all this may be a strategic question at the front end: Is this a problem that requires an enormous, complex, nationwide bureaucratic nightmare of a solution; or is the best answer a localized, nibble-at-the-margins approach, that can deal with the sensitivity of “family-based” problems – and, perhaps, family-based solutions?
