Focused on the Opportunity Gap
Learning Gains Depend on Joining Outcome Goals to
Sufficient and Smart Inputs
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By Jamie Horwitz
WASHINGTON, DC (April 25, 2013)
– For more than a generation, policymakers have intensely focused on the
achievement gap, the difference between primarily low-income and minority
children compared to their peers on standardized tests and other outputs. In
doing so, they have neglected the basic truth that achievement follows from
opportunities to learn, according to the authors of a new book and campaign
launched today, called Closing the Opportunity Gap. Students’ learning
and academic performance will, the authors explain, only improve when state and
school district officials make a commitment to addressing the nation’s
opportunity gap.
“Quite simply, children learn when
they are supported with high expectations, quality teaching and deep
engagement, and made to feel that they are entitled to good schooling; the richer
those opportunities, the greater the learning. When those opportunities are
denied or diminished, lower achievement is the dire and foreseeable result,”
explained Stanford University Professor Prudence Carter, co-editor of Closing
the Opportunity Gap.
The book’s expert authors and
campaign leaders note that while measuring achievement gaps is important,
identifying gaps does not address needs or capacity. “Achievement gap
measurement is best used as part of a balanced evaluation, pointing us to where
we need to focus our capacity-building efforts. Simply recognizing gaps does
nothing to close them,” explained University of Colorado Boulder Professor
Kevin Welner, the book’s other editor. Added Welner, “Today is the 30th
anniversary of the publication of ‘A Nation at Risk.’ And 30 years later we are
still failing to provide all children with rich learning opportunities, so we
are still a nation at risk.”
Welner, along with Stanford
University Professor Linda Darling-Hammond, one of the book’s 21 authors,
announced the Closing the Opportunity Gap campaign today at a news conference
in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the National Press Club.
No Gain in Achievement without
Improving Opportunity
“Addressing opportunity requires
looking at inputs as much as outputs. What we’re proposing is a pivot for
American education,” said the Schott Foundation’s President, Dr. John H.
Jackson. The new Opportunity Gap initiative is working with the Schott
Foundation’s “Opportunity to Learn” campaign.
Campaign leaders point out that for
more than two decades, predating the Bush-era “No Child Left Behind”
legislation, education policy and school improvement efforts have given short
shrift to capacity building. Policies arising out of the so-called school accountability
movement have instead used student testing to identify achievement gaps and to
create strong incentives to improve test scores.
At today’s news conference, Welner,
who is also Director of the National Education Policy Center; Darling Hammond,
Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University and
co-director of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education; and
Jackson, the Schott Foundation’s President, together explained how and why no
real academic improvement can be made with the same old approach.
“We as a nation have already
obtained any gains that might be garnered through high-stakes, test-centric
teaching” said Welner. “In fact, high expectations become a punitive false
promise if combined with low resources, low opportunities, and a lack of
support.”
Darling-Hammond addressed the
nation’s potential to move forward, “Children have plenty of opportunities to
fill in bubbles, but they lack opportunities to learn. When we start creating
more equitable opportunities and gauging how well states and districts are
doing to create those opportunities, we will join our best international
competitors in showing strong academic progress.”
Rep. Mike Honda of California’s
17th Congressional District provided introductory remarks, stressing the
importance of addressing the opportunity gap. Rep. Honda authored the
legislation that created the Equity and Excellence Commission, which earlier in
February issued its groundbreaking report, “For Each and Every Child.”
The Cost of Not Minding the Gap
In their chapter in Closing the
Opportunity Gap, economists Clive Belfield and Hank Levin conservatively
estimate that the economic benefit of closing the opportunity gap by just
one-third would result in $50 billion in annual fiscal savings and $200 billion
in savings from a societal perspective (for example, by lowering rates of crime
and incarceration). By point of comparison, they note, total annual taxpayer
spending on K-12 education, including national, state and local expenditures,
is approximately $570 billion.
Opportunities Denied to Low-Income
and Minority Youth
Our society becomes more diverse
each year and is on its way to becoming a majority-minority society by
mid-century. Yet, opportunities to learn are most often denied to students of
color and to students who come from impoverished homes. The results can be
shocking. For example, the average White 13-year-old reads at a higher level
and performs better in math than the average Black or Latino 17-year-old.
Similar outcome gaps exist for graduation rates, grade retention and course
failure rates, and college preparatory course taking.
We suffer from such gaps for
reasons that are well understood but largely ignored: a cumulative and
devastating mountain of denied opportunities to learn and to thrive.
In the first chapter of Closing
the Opportunity Gap, children who have advantages are compared to someone
taking an elevator, while disadvantaged youth take the stairs:
“To visualize how unfair this
system has become, imagine two children asked to race to the top of a stairway.
One child is well nourished, well trained, and well equipped; the other lacks
all these basic resources. But, instead of designing a system around the needs
of this second child, her stairway (akin to the minimal opportunities and
resources available at her school) is steep and slippery. Meanwhile, the first
child’s stairway is replaced with an escalator. Holding these two children to
the same standards may allow for a comforting ‘no excuses’ sound byte, but it
does nothing to help that second child achieve.”
The Shifting Policy Climate
Over the past year, the Obama
administration has shown clear signs of shifting more attention to improving
opportunities to learn and thereby reducing the opportunity gap. President
Obama’s State of the Union Address stressed the importance of high-quality
early-childhood education. Last month, at a White House meeting of newspaper
publishers, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called for more attention to be
paid to closing the opportunity gap. He has also indicated a receptiveness to
the Equity and Excellence Commission and its February 2013 report noted above,
which spoke clearly to the need to emphasize opportunities to learn: http://www.ed.gov/blog/2013/02/equity-and-excellence-commission-delivers-report-to-secretary-duncan/
As stated in the April 2013 report from the Leadership Conference, “If adopted
and implemented fully, the commission’s recommendations could go a long way
toward reversing a ‘rising tide’ of inequality and ensuring an equitable
education for every child in the United States.”
Some Areas for Improvement: We Can
Create Opportunity
Among the many areas where
opportunity can be created and the gap narrowed, according to the book’s expert
authors:
•
Provide High-Quality Early
Childhood Education. Daunting achievement gaps exist
even in kindergarten. Pre-school experiences that are not of high quality do
little to change this. But well designed and well supported, high-quality early
childhood education has been shown to make a huge difference and to provide an
excellent return on investment.
•
End Segregation in Housing,
Schools and Classrooms. Instead of policies that
lead to segregation and stratification of students and their families, we can
turn to policies demonstrated to promote affordable and more integrated
housing, policies that create integrated magnet schools, policies that enforce
existing civil rights laws, school choice policies that prioritize diversity,
and differentiation policies that turn to universal acceleration instead of
racialized tracking and the rationing of high-quality curriculum. While the
United States has a long history of segregation, the nation also has a long
history of policies proven effective at addressing segregation. Right now, the
nation’s schools are more segregated than they were 30 years ago.
•
Provide Crucial Funding and
Resources. At the heart of many existing
opportunity gaps lie the unequal allocation and inadequate level of resources
in schools and communities. Funding spent wisely to address these clear needs
is a vital element of any serious effort to close the nation’s opportunity
gaps. While more resources are needed to achieve equivalent outcomes in
high-cost locations with high-need students, the sad truth is that they often
are given even less.
•
Provide More and Better
Learning Time. The time that youth spend after
school and during the summer can be enriching and thus enhance learning, or it
can be stultifying and thus result in substantial learning loss. Children
growing up in communities of concentrated poverty get the short end of the stick.
Initiatives to extend learning time are a good first step. Those
initiatives must be designed to ensure that disadvantaged children are provided
with enrichment, not additional test preparation.
•
Focus on Childhood Health. The high level of childhood poverty, coupled with the low level
of social supports for low-income children’s health and welfare, creates
daunting obstacles for learning. Instead of “no excuses” demands leveled at
children and their teachers, lawmakers should address their very real needs for
health care, eye care, dental care, and a healthy diet. These health issues
have been proven to have a direct linkage to academic success.
•
Focus on Teacher Experience
and Supports. Schools with the most
disadvantaged students tend to be in classrooms with the most inexperienced
teachers and also the school settings with the worst working conditions and
limited support for those teachers. The teacher turnover and poor results that follow
are hardly surprising, and no amount of tough evaluations or alternative
certifications will change this dysfunctional dynamic. Only through improved
preparation, supports, and working conditions can we realistically expect to
close this element of the opportunity gap.
•
Provide Access to libraries
and the Internet. Vast numbers of students are held
back by their lack of access to books, libraries, and the Internet. For
example, one-fifth of Americans have no ready access to the Internet; these
numbers are much higher in low-income and minority households, making writing a
research paper or filling out a college application far more difficult and
limiting career opportunities. This lack of access was exacerbated during the
economic downturn, when library hours and services were cut and at a time when
many middle-class families have opted to buy a smart phone rather than a home
computer that can be used by children for studying.
•
Provide Tutoring. While tutoring services provided by wealthy school districts and
private tutoring companies are expanding, tutoring for disadvantaged
students—who often have greater need for one-on-one help—is often non-existent.
•
Create Safe and
Well-Maintained School Environments. Students are
less likely to learn when school facilities lack heating or air conditioning,
when bathroom facilities are not clean or usable, when overcrowding forces
classes into gyms or denies students their own seats or desks, and when vermin
infest hallways or classrooms. Similarly, students who face bullying,
harassment or discrimination are less able to focus on learning or even to show
up for school. Safe, welcoming school environments should be a basic starting
point for education.
•
Improve Policies on Student
Discipline. While maintaining a healthy
learning environment in schools is very important, a double standard exists in
many parts of the nation when it comes to school discipline. Based on the small
amount of solid data currently collected, we already know that for the same
types of offenses, African American students are suspended from school at
higher rates than White students. These suspended students then are at greater
risk of dropping out of school.
•
Understand Student Cultures
and Schooling. Healthy reform would develop a
cadre of well-trained teachers who would move forward with a deep understanding
of students’ diversity and of how inequality affects them. Effective school
policies and practices would seek to bridge the injurious communicative divides
among and between students and educators who differ in areas such as race,
ethnicity, culture, and socioeconomic status.
•
Change the Focus of Testing
and Accountability. Instead of continuous batteries of
high-stakes tests, the focus should be on low-stakes, informative testing that
enables teachers to understand how well their students are learning. The focus
should also be on a portfolio of work that expects students to use the full
range of critical thinking skills expected of more advantaged children.
•
Address the Needs of
Language Minorities. Instead of policies that treat
language minority students as simply deficient in English, policies can build
on and invest in the native language skills these children already possess.
Policies that treat these native languages as a resource can cultivate
multilingual students who will have brighter academic futures and who are
better able to contribute to our society and economy.
An opportunity gap may arise
because of any single one of the factors. But our opportunity gap in the United
States is cumulative. Students of color and students from lower-income
communities must generally overcome many of these obstacles.
Building Awareness about
Opportunity
The national Opportunity Gap
campaign, tied to the Closing the Opportunity Gap book, hopes to
spark awareness that can lead to a change in the way we as a society approach
education policy. Next week, for example, a panel of the book’s authors will
address the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association; a
few days later the book’s findings and details on the campaign will be
presented at a national meeting of the Education Writers Association—a
professional organization of journalists who cover education across the
country.
Ranking the States
A key part of the Closing the
Opportunity Gap campaign will be a state-by-state comparison, to be released in
September, that will examine how each state and the District of Columbia
compare with regard to opportunities to learn. “We hope this information will
be a catalyst for state and district officials to redefine their policy
priorities to address the opportunity gap,” said Jackson. “We also hope that
state and district leaders can use this information to advocate for more and
better-aligned resources that propel those who have fallen behind,” he added.
Concrete Legislation
Another part of the Closing the
Opportunity Gap campaign will offer model legislative code provisions that
concretely address and remedy the causes of opportunity gaps. This element,
too, will be available in the fall.
America’s opportunity gap is
hurting the nation’s ability to compete in the global marketplace. Some of our
competitors are far ahead of the United States in creating equity in education.
For example, South Korea, Finland, and other successful nations invest heavily
to ensure that all children at taught by well-trained and well-supported
teachers.
The divide that has developed in
our nation’s education system also touches on how we see ourselves as
Americans. As Welner and Carter emphasize in the new book, “While the nation’s
leaders have concentrated almost exclusively on an achievement gap policy that
measures and sanctions students, teachers and schools, they have ignored the
vast opportunity gap—a gap that is even more at odds with American ideals.”
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