I am a huge fan of HBO's The Wire. I think it's quite possibly one of the best shows on television, and it is certainly the best show in recent memory to tackle the interrelated problems that plague our major metropolitan areas.
In the course of four seasons, it has painted a complex portrait of the city of Baltimore through its depictions of the rival (and strikingly similar) bureaucracies of the drug trade and the police department, the decline of the middle class dock workers and unions, and the municipal political system.
In its current season (still airing), The Wire is tackling the failure of the school system, with a particular focus on the (negative) effects of the No Child Left Behind Act. So it was no surprise to me when I came across this headline in The New York Times today:
Schools Slow at Closing Gaps Between Races:
When President Bush signed his sweeping education law a year into his
presidency, it set 2014 as the deadline by which schools were to close
the test-score gaps between minority and white students that have
persisted since standardized testing began.Now, as Congress prepares to consider reauthorizing the law next year,
researchers and a half-dozen recent studies, including three issued
last week, are reporting little progress toward that goal....
Henry L. Johnson, an assistant secretary of education, said: “I don’t
dispute that looking at some comparisons we see that these gaps are not
closing — or not as fast as they ought to. But it’s also accurate to
say that when taken as a whole, student performance is improving. The
presumption that we won’t get to 100 percent proficiency from here
presumes that everything is static. To reach the 100 percent by 2014,
we’ll all have to work faster and smarter.”
The question is, what exactly does "faster and smarter" look like? This season on The Wire, we've seen how the school system fails students by "teaching the test" and ignoring the specific needs of individual students. The most telling line, perhaps, comes during an administrative meeting on how to "teach the test" when Prez - the retired cop turned teacher - asks a veteran teacher "what is this supposed to measure?" Her response - "Us. This isn't about the students, it's about grading us."
If we dump more money and time into just teaching the test - juking the stats, as Prez calls it - to make the schools look better in an attempt to garner more resources, we're never going to make serious progress and close the achievement gaps (depicted right. click to enlarge the image).
The current administration, though, doesn't want to hear that:
“There are good results of No Child Left Behind across the nation,”
Mr. Bush said last month at a school in North Carolina. “We have an
achievement gap in America that is — that I don’t like and you
shouldn’t like.”“The gap is closing,” he said.
The
researchers behind the reports issued last week in Washington, D.C.,
New York and California were far more pessimistic, though....
“The Bush administration wants to hang a ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner
over N.C.L.B., but a fair assessment is that progress thus far in
closing achievement gaps is disappointing,” Mr. Weiner said. He pointed
to financing and teacher assignment systems that lead to schools with
mostly poor and minority students getting less money, offering fewer
advanced courses and having weaker teachers.
We have an idea of what works - actual teaching instead of "teaching to the test" - but we're not putting the resources behind successful programs that are attentive to individual student needs:
Suggestions abound for ways to narrow the score gaps faster. Since
scholars have documented that minority children enter kindergarten with
weaker reading skills than white children, some experts advocate
increased public financing for early education programs.No Child
Left Behind provides money for tutoring in schools where students are
not succeeding, but critics say it does not provide sufficient
financing to help states and districts turn the schools themselves
around.
Other types of programs have proven successful as well, but these successes are few and far between, and typically don't receive proper funding from cash-strapped schools, relying instead of volunteer work from teachers, faith organizations, and the community.
With a new congress coming in, and NCLB up for review, hopefully we'll get a real investigation into the efficacy of this program that will result in more funding to the programs that work and less emphasis on a test that's more about teacher performance than enhancing student's abilities.
This is an issue of vital importance to the future of our country and the future of the children we are failing - who are mostly children of color and those from low-income communities. We're robbing them of their shot at the American Dream. It's a shame that, on such a critical issue, the most intelligent debate is coming from a TV show rather than our elected officials.