We Must Close the Gap
Reprinted from Education Update, May 1999
At her sessions “Achievement in America: Can We Close the Gap?”, Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust in Washington D.C., described “the three most devastating ways in which [U.S. schools] are systematically shortchanging some of our kids.” Haycock had abundant data behind her assertions about the causes of the achievement gap.
First, Haycock said, U.S. schools “are teaching different kids different things, with poor and minority kids disproportionately less likely to be taught rigorous, challenging subject matter.”
Second, schools are giving some students lower-quality instruction. “In every subject area, poor children are more likely to be taught by under-qualified teachers and minority youngsters are vastly less likely to be taught by well-educated teachers.”
The third reason “socks you in the face when you spend as much time in classrooms as my staff and I do,” Haycock said. “I can only summarize what we’ve found by saying we’ve been stunned at how little [schools] expect of poor children”, by how few assignments poor children get in a week, and by “the miserably low level” of assignments they do get.
In high-poverty middle schools, there are often more coloring assignments than math and writing assignments. “I’m not joking… or exaggerating,” Haycock said. “Even at the high school level, we’re finding a stunning number of coloring assignments. A teacher will say, ‘Read To Kill A Mockingbird and when you’re done, color a poster on it’.”
Fortunately, Haycock said, communities are now proving that the achievement gap doesn’t need to exist. “If we set clear and high standards for all kids, make sure that all kids, not just some, are in a curriculum that lines up with those standards, and if we make sure teachers master the skills they need, then no matter what kind of neighborhoods they live in, they can meet those standards.”
“In fact,” asserted Haycock, “rather than being harmed by [high] standards, as some suggest, poorer minority kids have the most to gain, for the simple reason that they are the biggest victims of our current system of different and lower standard for children.”
Responding to an audience member’s comment that some teachers fear harming students’ self-esteem by giving them more challenging work, Haycock said, “You can’t build self-esteem by giving kids… ‘baby work’. They recognize it. Doing well on a coloring assignment does not build self-esteem. It makes me insane when I come across this phenomenon, but I do constantly,” she continued. “Teachers [need] to understand that you do not build self-esteem any other way than by setting the bar higher and helping kids get there. That’s how coaches do it; that’s how we need to do it.”