Eleven Atlanta public school teachers and administrators were sentenced to prison in April for racketeering. Their racket? Changing students’ answers on standardized tests to make it look like their high-poverty, open-enrollment schools were effective. The pay-off? Continued employment, big bonuses, and higher salaries.
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Outrageous as it was, this local crime merely imitates a fully legal fraud taking place in public and charter schools across the nation, with similar motives. They promote students with phony “credit recovery” courses and inflated grades, regardless of attendance, effort, or achievement.
Why do some think it necessary to cheat on tests, promotion, and graduation in high-poverty schools? Why can’t those of us who teach in such schools get the same results by simply applying the same techniques and holding the same high expectations that succeed in middle-class schools?
As a professor at American University last decade, I asked myself this question when I noticed our university’s minuscule enrollment of African-American students from D.C. public schools. In 2010, I set out to explore the reasons. I began teaching in the city’s high-poverty, open-enrollment public and charter high schools.
There is an answer to my question — one that the education establishment won’t address, and the “education reformers,” with their mantra of “no excuses” and “ZIP code doesn’t matter,” refuse to hear.
In our economically segregated society, ZIP code does matter. It is an excellent average predictor of how easy it is for a school to educate a child. The mechanism for this correlation is the physical and psychological damage of growing up in poverty, which leaves large numbers of alienated and disruptive students in the classroom. These students have the power to make everyone’s education impossible.
Middle-class families have been moving out of poor neighborhoods since racial housing restrictions eased. Among those who remain, there is a concentration of unemployable female heads of household who lose control of their children’s behavior in elementary school and in many cases never regain it.
This is one reason the situation is so dramatically different for poor children who attend “admission” schools — public, charter, religious, or private. These schools push out disruptive students, either under the radar or as a matter of explicit policy. At these schools, nearly all of the surviving students master middle-class social skills and college prep or vocational academics, and graduate with a shot at the middle class.
And herein lies a partial answer to our ongoing national waste of potential. Every public or charter school should strive to replicate the academic achievement of the admission schools, yet keep embracing the commitment to educating every child.
Yes, disruption and failure to attend and work should result in students being taken out of their cohort. But rather than banishing them, as admission schools currently do, schools should support struggling students with remediation classes until they are prepared to try for a grade-level credit again, in a new cohort.
When I began teaching in a high-poverty high school in 2010, it took me a year to grasp the severity of the challenges my students faced. It took another year to see that, amazingly, roughly half of them could still make it. Some had a determined, proudly competent parent who rigorously managed their behavior. Others provided their own seemingly magical inner motivation. When I managed to separate a large math class into two smaller ones, based on behavior and effort, the motivated students remarked on how easy it had suddenly become to learn without the usual disruption.
A policy of removing disruptive students for remediation will require a significant shift in everyone’s thinking. At least half of teaching positions in high-poverty, open-enrollment schools would have to be occupied by social workers and remedial specialists dedicated to re-teaching the importance of fundamentals such as attendance, behavior, and effort.
It will also require incentives for honesty that were missing in Atlanta. Teachers who accurately report students’ shortcomings should be rewarded, not punished. They are providing families with what they need to plan for the future – namely, reality.
And we should not sugar-coat the fact that poor families are under stress and need extra support. We should guarantee $30,000 jobs, with no reduction in welfare benefits, for parents who can stick with a work schedule while their children are at school.
Further, we should support poor families during pregnancy and the first year of life by creating universal local home-visit programs, under which nurses and teachers model how to care for and talk with infants in this period that is so crucial for physical and cognitive development.
A jobs and infancy program is a social offer we can’t refuse when we compare its $100 billion annual cost to the trillion dollars we spend on programs for people who remain in poverty. Since ZIP code matters, you can’t separate the school and the home. You have to strengthen them both at the same time.
Caleb Rossiter is the author of Ain’t Nobody Be Learnin’ Nothin’: The Fraud and the Fix for High-Poverty Schools, available May 10. He teaches mathematics at American University and at a D.C. “admission” high school, the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions for editorials, available at this link.
