Insight

The facts about classroom ‘miracle workers’

by Maisie McAdoo

Oct 5, 2006 10:59 AM

Raise your hand if you’ve heard any of these phrases recently: “Teachers change lives”; “teachers do God’s work”; “they produce miracles every day.”

Most teachers have heard them all. They are meant as compliments but they may not feel like that. Being a miracle worker is not what the day-to-day work of teaching feels like.

Why do people talk this way? It may be wishful thinking, or it may serve to deflect responsibility from administrators, politicians or taxpayers.

A sore subject

Such phrases add a sweet veneer, but in reality there is a furious debate going on about teachers’ responsibility for student achievement. It’s a sore subject in education, with point-scoring by the right and the left over accountability, the causes of the achievement gap, and the education of disadvantaged students.

In her inaugural education column Aug. 9 in The New York Times, Diana Jean Schemo suggested that schools alone could not close the achievement gap between white and minority children. She recalled the 1966 Coleman report, a major congressional study that concluded that the main cause of the achievement gap was not the quality of schools but the different backgrounds and resources of poor and middle-class families. Schemo brought those findings up to date with the influential 2004 book “Class and Schools” by Richard Rothstein, himself a former Times education columnist. Rothstein argued that any successful effort to narrow the academic achievement gap must include social and economic policies to improve the circumstances of poor families and communities.

Springing into action, Fordham Foundation President Chester Finn labeled Schemo a “liberal” in his weekly column and claimed that such talk was a “defeatist” view of education. In a column titled “March of the Pessimists” on Aug. 17, Finn said that what Schemo overlooked was how many “terrific” schools manage to “beat the odds” and produce well-educated youngsters in spite of the “hostile forces at work in many of those kids’ lives.” He cited research by the Education Trust, the widely cited book “No Excuses” by Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom and even an episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to say that there are schools with high student poverty rates that still succeed. “Yes, such schools cost more,” he wrote. “Sometimes the cost is measured in dollars, sometimes in sweat equity from tireless teachers and relentless principals, most often in both. But it can be done.”

A day later, Rothstein responded to Finn on the Economic Policy Institute Web site, telling readers that many “beat-the-odds” schools don’t really beat the odds. Their results are used to “prove” that schools can close the achievement gap. But in fact, Rothstein wrote, “in every case … they enroll children who are more likely to have higher achievement.” For example, admissions are screened, there is a gifted and talented program in the school, or an unusually high number of neighborhood parents have college degrees.

Beating the odds

A March 2006 study by Florida State University researcher Douglas Harris in fact revealed that “high-flying” schools identified by the Education Trust as beating the odds were relatively few in number, were required to exhibit high achievement in only one subject, one year or one grade to make the “high-flying” list, and were not followed by the study over time. Yet the Ed Trust report provoked much posturing: Now schools had “no excuse” for not succeeding with poor and minority children. “We’d better not hear that racist nonsense anymore,” a Hoover Institution fellow wrote.

What can teachers really do? Recent research out of Tennessee proves quite conclusively that highly effective teachers can and do overcome the odds and help low-performing children move farther up the performance scale than anyone would have predicted. But the average performance gap doesn’t close as a result. This is where the debate gets sticky. It is not because teachers don’t work hard or don’t believe all children can learn. It’s because generation upon generation of poverty and discrimination have real effects.

The performance gap is some 30 percentile points between the average achievement of blacks and Hispanics and that of whites. Of course there are many high-scoring blacks and low-scoring whites, but that doesn’t change the averages much, and the reasons are rooted in social reality.

Because middle-class parents speak more words per hour to their toddlers, by the start of preschool, according to a University of Kansas research project, the average child of middle-class professionals has a vocabulary nearly 50 percent greater than the average child of working-class parents, and twice that of a child from a welfare family. That is going to have an effect on early literacy achievement. On average, Rothstein reports, 42 percent of black 4th-graders watch six hours of television a day, compared to 13 percent of whites. Quality after-school care and safe streets so children can play outdoors are needed to redress these inequities. Poor children have twice the rate of severe vision impairment, far higher rates of asthma, and less stable housing. All these interfere with schooling and are beyond teachers’ control.

Don’t expect miracles

Where does this leave teachers? Sometimes, as scapegoats. For all its good aspects, the No Child Left Behind law, with its requirement for 100 percent proficiency by 2014, sets up unrealistic expectations for closing the performance gap. Like the Finn/Thernstrom viewpoint, it sets schools and teachers up to fail, when in fact they may be succeeding by any reasonable measure.

Excellent teachers can and do help children overcome obstacles, but it isn’t about miracles or guilt-tripping. Effective teaching strategies and the ability to differentiate instruction to reach individual children can make a big difference for poor and minority student achievement. Some researchers have posited that teachers are responsible for nearly half of student gains (see chart). They cannot cure chronic ailments or clean the city air, but teachers can help children learn.

There are instructional skills and abilities that teachers must master, and when they do the effect will be real enough. So can teachers change lives? Absolutely. But can they overcome all the brutal realities of race and class? Only in the movies.