An Achievement Gap Report Unreported by the Mainstream Media

by Clay Burell

categories: Education and Technology, Education Politics, Mainstream Pundits, Student Rights

Published May 13, 2009 @ 06:15AM PT

Scott McLeod over at Dangerously Irrelevant tipped me off to this EdWeek article on a study from the Educational Testing Service (ETS), "Parsing the Achievement Gap II." You'd think that our pundits at the New York Times and Washington Post would greet the study with as much fanfare as they have those by mere economists - "mere" in the sense that economists are not experts in education any more than educators are experts in economics. The ETS, after all and warts and all, is in the education business.

But no such luck. Robert Brooks is playing (bad) stenographer* for economist Roland Fryer - of "pay students for good grades" fame - and his myopic study of Harlem Promise Academy, while Thomas Friedman is playing ditto for the McKinsey and Company consultancy group's splashy "low grades create a lasting recession" report based on free-market evangelist-economist Eric Hanushek (and then stenographically plugging Wendy Kopp's Teach for America as the solution, which must have made her as happy as Arne Duncan's recent $15 million grant of our tax dollars to her organization).

But the ETS study? I haven't seen any serious reporting on it in our nation's top presses - nothing from the NYTimes or WaPo. (The Huffington Post did cover it, by the way - an interesting commentary on the shifting landscape of journalism today. HuffPo's Mike Smith covered the National Press Corp press conference in which the report was unveiled, and provides some interesting glimpses of resistance from a Department of Education spokesman to the report's findings about the desirability of experienced teachers and other things.)

Maybe the mainstream pundits passed it by because it doesn't fit so well into Joel Klein's and Eli Broad's "tough love" view that schools should be shouldered with erasing poverty's effects on student achievement, and teachers blamed for not pulling it off. The ETA report, after covering "school factors" in the achievement gap, shines its lights on other factors that the media- (and Arne Duncan-) dazzling Education Equality Project prefers to keep dark: "The Home-School Connection" and "Before and Beyond School."

So let the blogosphere fill the gaps left by the mainstream media.

First, the non-school factors:

The Home and School Connection
• Parent participation – White students’ parents are more likely to attend a school event or to volunteer at school. The gap in parents volunteering in schools remained unchanged; the gap in parents attending school events narrowed.

Before and Beyond School
• Frequent changing of schools – Minority students are more likely to change schools frequently, although there has been improvement. There was little change in the gap.
• Low birth weight – The percentage of Black infants born with low birth weight is higher than that for White and Hispanic infants. The rate of low birth weight increased among all groups.
• Environmental damage – Minority and low-income children were more likely to be exposed to environmental hazards.

Exposure to lead – The gaps were unchanged but levels of exposure were down.
Exposure to mercury – There were gaps in exposure to mercury, but no trend data were available.

• Hunger and nutrition – Minority and low-income children were more likely to be food insecure. The White-Black gap was unchanged; the White-Hispanic gap narrowed.
• Talking and reading to babies and young children –.Minority and low-income children were less likely to be read to daily. The gaps were unchanged.
• Excessive television watching – Minority and lower-SES children watch more television. The gap was unchanged between White and Black students; the gap widened among students whose parents have different education levels.
• Parent-pupil ratio – Minority students were less likely to live with two parents. The gaps were unchanged.
• Summer achievement gain/loss – Minority and low-SES students grow less academically over the summer. Trend data were unavailable.

Finally, most of the "School Factors" in the report are inconvenient supplements to the standard fare of low standards and bad teachers served up by the mainstream. Here they are:

• Teacher preparation – Minority and low-income students are less likely to be taught by certified teachers and more likely to be taught by math teachers with neither a major nor minor in mathematics. The gap in students having teachers prepared in the subjects they teach widened between White and Hispanic students and remained about the same for the other populations.
• Teacher experience – Minority and low-income students are more likely to be taught by inexperienced teachers. These gaps have not changed.
• Teacher absence and turnover – Minority and low-income students are more likely to attend schools with high levels of teacher absence and teacher turnover. There was little change in the gaps.
• Class size – Teachers in high-minority schools are more likely to have large classes. The gap has widened between high-minority and low-minority schools.
• Availability of instructional technology – Minority and low-income students have less access to technology in school, although there is improvement in access across the board, and the gap has narrowed.
• Fear and safety at school – Minority students are more likely to report issues of fear and safety at school. The gaps widened for students reporting the presence of street gangs and fights in school, and remained unchanged for students reporting feeling fearful in school.

What a different picture: large classes, revolving-door and less-qualified teachers, unsafe and technology-poor schools, and communities that don't foster learning at home or outside of school.

While we might give credit to Ed. Sec. Duncan's push to improve teacher quality and "incent" a more equitable distribution of high-quality teachers in under-privileged schools - and the devil is in the details here - this report underlines factors that receive little to no attention (and funding) in his approach.

On a positive note, it was nice to see Jay Mathews at the Washington Post giving long-overdue recognition to the studies and writings of Gerald Bracey, from whose works I quote liberally on these pages. Let's hope we see more such broadening of horizons on the mainstream media's part.

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*Robert at Core Knowledge takes the pin to Brooks' zeppelin in a nice post. [Update: So does Corey Bower, extensively.]