Richard Rothstein's Class and Schools

...Yet, it does illustrate what might happen if the public sector would extend the military model to organizing communities around public service and would include in those programs the kinds of health, housing, adult training, preschool, school integration, and school investment levels available to military personnel and their children...

...The same is true for the experiences of inspiring teachers...

...The argument is based on longitudinal studies of teacher "value added" in two states, Tennessee and Texas...

...About fifty million young people attend schools from kindergarten to twelfth grade, 90 percent of them in public institutions...

...The total annual government investment in this system is more than six hundred billion dollars, but that does not include private spending on tuition, books, supplies, preschools, and the time parents invest in school activities...

...There may be other factors at work in the black-white test score gap besides differences in the income, nutrition, and parent education between the middle and lower classes...

...Nor have they identified the characteristics of teachers who are particularly effective with low-income students...

...However, it has a possible downside: despite the book's subtitle, which includes the words "educational reform," and numerous calls in the book for improving schools as part of a broader strategy to improve learning of lower social class youth, policymakers could easily read the book and conclude that better schools would have little, if any, effect on the learning gap...

...But three hundred years of living in a society that refused to consider that blacks could compete academically with whites has clearly left a deep mark, not easily erased even by better nutrition and early childhood education...

...Family profoundly affects children's early development, including their physical development, exposure to language, and a host of behavioral factors that influence school perfor*In the interest of full disclosure, I co-authored a book comparing public and private education with Rothstein and Luis Benveniste in 2002...

...So the poor performance of students in inner-city schools is made to represent the "failure" of American public education as a whole...

...Even if the group is average, another important question is whether the characteristics of the successful schools or teachers are easily reproduced in other schools or potential teachers...

...Some are even lower, but some are much higher...

...These are precisely the kinds of investments and conditions Rothstein recommends that policymakers pursue to reduce the black-white test score gap...

...96 n DISSENT / Fall 2004...

...Professional women are still paid much less than men—one reason that the relatively low salaries in K-12 education still attract mostly women—but their increased wages have forced states to spend much more on education just to stay even in terms of the quality of people they can attract into the profession...

...As Rothstein makes clear, this does not mean that children learn nothing in school...

...Rothstein points to wealth differences between black and white families of similar income and admits that "culture" may also play a role...

...Another twelve million go to colleges, again a high percentage public...

...Not only that, but the Tennessee and Texas studies cannot identify the characteristics of teachers that put them in the upper tail of effectiveness...

...These two ideas convey explicitly that if some schools or teachers can succeed with otherwise low-performing students, then all schools could do so by using the same methods...

...International tests put the United States relatively lower in reading and especially math compared to European and Asian "competitors," adding to the general sense that our schools are not doing as well as they should for average American children...

...More relevant, what would it cost to attract them into teaching lowBOOKS income students in low-income schools...

...The wages of women with university degrees increased 25 percent in real terms in 1979-1998 compared to less than 10 percent for men...

...As far as I can tell, this is what Rothstein suggests it would take to drive up minority test scores...

...The Pentagon's schools seem to be the clearest example of that model...

...But to me, Rothstein's argument is politically most powerful in challenging the teacher and school improvement panacea to the test score gap, because that is where both conservatives and liberals have focused their arguments...

...DISSENT / Fall 2004 • 93 BOOKS mance...

...All of these are contextual changes of the kind that Rothstein proposes would have larger effects than the teacher skill, teacher effort, or school organization variables normally discussed by school reformers...

...CLASS AND SCHOOLS: USING SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, AND EDUCATIONAL REFORM TO CLOSE THE BLACK-WHITE ACHIEVEMENT GAP by Richard Rothstein Economic Policy Institute, 2004 210 pp $17.95, paper AMERICAN EDUCATION is a huge industry...

...IN ORDER TO MAKE this case, Rothstein challenges two widely propagated ideas about overcoming learning gaps: The first is that there are many schools where low-income black children perform well above average thanks to better organization, greater teacher effort, and dedication to closing the learning gap—schools that "beat the demographic odds...

...They began entering school in the mid-1970s, had a good chance to have been in a Head Start program, and if they lived in the South, were likely for the first time to attend a desegregated school...

...Putting money into better health care and nutrition for pregnant mothers and children, into high quality child care and preschool, and into after-school and summer programs that stimulate low-income children outside of school could have much more effect on the black-white test score gap than school reform and even recruiting somewhat more able teachers...

...Rothstein lists all the reasons why...

...A subset of this idea is that there are particularly inspiring teachers such as Jaime Escalante of Stand and Deliver fame that other teachers could emulate to get similar results...

...No one is sure why this occurred, but it corresponds with a large drop in the poverty rate in America in the 1960s into the early 1970s, with Head Start, and with school desegregation in the South...

...If schools are really as bad as conservative think tanks such as the Hoover Institution and Heritage Foundation claim, why not go after the mass of America's suburban schools, which cater mainly to white, Asian, and upwardly mobile Hispanic and black students...

...Even if the American public would be convinced that the test score gap between low- and middleincome students, and particularly between black or Latino and white students, could be closed by recruiting and developing enough "super teachers" to fill low-income schools, the cost of doing so is certainly far more than the American public is ready to spend on public education...

...Is that due to the effect of the military environment or because recruits differed from those who did not enter the military...

...From the mid1970s to the end of the 1980s, blacks' and Latinos' test scores in primary and middle school rose steadily relative to whites' test scores...

...In 2001, some 112,000 students attended such schools, 157 overseas and seventy of them in the United States...

...These studies present empirical data showing that students who, for several consecutive years, have teachers who are in the top 15 percent to 20 percent of effectiveness—that is, whose students consistently do much better than they would be predicted to do given their background characteristics—score much higher in math than students regularly facing average teachers...

...No surprise, then, that the condition of education has long been high on the list of American concerns...

...Conservatives claim that blacks are only hurting themselves by holding on to aspects of a DISSENT / Fall 2004 • 9 5 BOOKS culture that has black youth denigrating excellence in academic competition (even while black parents may have high academic expectations for their children...

...IN THIS REGARD, I think Rothstein missed an opportunity to buttress his proposals by taking a somewhat different perspective on Pentagon schools—schools run directly by the Department of Defense on military bases in the United States and overseas...

...Did not we start to do that in the War on Poverty programs of the late 1960s...

...More recently, as baby boomers' children began competing for college places, and the global economy and increased income inequality drove up the value of a college education, the stakes on doing well in school have shot up, and with them, the focus on educational "quality," usually measured as how well students perform on tests...

...Even if they could, what would it cost to recruit people into teaching who are that effective...

...In this case, culture reflects the history of black-white relations in America...

...This is the political context for Richard Rothstein's important book Class and Schools.* Class and Schools makes a fairly simple argument: how well children do in school is not just, or not even mainly, the result of how good their teacher is, or curriculum, or school management...

...Conservatives have found in low-achieving blacks the perfect club with which to beat public education...

...The problem with that strategy is that the families sending their children to such schools are generally satisfied with them...

...If low-income children could only have such highly effective teachers, the studies contend, the learning gap between lowand middle-income children could be closed...

...Children's family and community environment continues to play a crucial role in their school achievement and attainment...

...There is some truth in that claim...

...The total bill may be close to a trillion dollars per year...

...94 • DISSENT / Fall 2004 Rothstein is convincing in showing that the many examples of successful schools and teachers are generally not treating average groups of low-income students...

...Ultimately, the black-white test score gap was reduced by about one-third...

...I do not want to push this example too far...

...As the book points out, such notions play to a statistical reality: not all those in a group that on average performs poorly are at the average...

...There is some historical evidence to support Rothstein's argument...

...and decent, stable, and integrated housing and preschools...

...The second is that quality of teaching has a major impact more generally on student performance, so that improving teaching for low-income minority children would eliminate the learning gap...

...This may seem obvious, but if Rothstein's carefully made case is correct, schools— whether public or private—have relatively little influence on the rate at which children learn...

...It might be possible to raise teacher effectiveness by 10 percent either through recruitment (higher salaries) or training (higher in service spending), but getting all teachers to be a standard deviation better than they are now is an unreasonable policy strategy...

...The main question Rothstein poses is whether the featured successful schools or teachers are really teaching an average group of (low-income) minority children or have ended up with a subgroup that would perform in the upper tail of the minority distribution anyway...

...The rapid rise in cost per student in America's schools over the past thirty years can be attributed mainly to the rise in the average pay of professional women...

...I agree that those who stay in the military may not be representative of the minority population as a whole...

...Black children born in the late 1960s up until the mid-1970s, were born into families that were considerably less poor than children of the 1950s and the early 1960s...

...Value added" in this case is defined as the increase in test score attributable to a particular teacher in a particular school year...

...This is an articulate, carefully crafted book...

...These are an integral part of Rothstein's case for moving in a different policy direction...

...If anything, the cost of such recruitment has risen in the past generation because of the much greater range of job alternatives available to university-trained young women, the traditional pool for potential teachers...

...The average black or Latino is not a high school dropout, but a high school graduate...

...MARTIN CARNOY is professor of education and economics at the School of Education, Stanford University, and author of Sustaining the New Economy: Work, Family, and Community in the Information Age...

...Middleclass black children do not achieve nearly as well as middle-class white children even when they live in the same communities and attend the same schools...

...And even if urban school districts were able to pay as much or somewhat more than suburban districts, recent studies in New York State show that they would have a much more difficult time keeping pace in the quality of teachers they recruit...

...Yet, what is fascinating about the politics of education since the 1980s is that it has focused so much on the performance of the poorest Americans, particularly inner-city African Americans...

...Even more general reforms, such as school accountability, redefined by the Bush administration as No Child Left Behind, apply to all schools but also mainly affect low-scoring schools in low-income communities...

...However, Rothstein argues, it is a "fanciful goal" to think that any policy could improve teacher quality "so that all teachers rise to the top quintile of teacher effectiveness...

...Unlike the other examples of allegedly successful schools, Pentagon schools are not only public, the entire environment in which these schools are situated is public...

...nutrition...

...So a certain fraction of low-income black children performs at the middle-class white average or better...

...A surer way to improve life chances for lowincome youth, according to Rothstein, is to improve their lives, especially when they are very young, before they enter school, and to focus just as much on their non-cognitive as on their cognitive development...

...Inspiring as they may be, they are difficult to reproduce, as is the case for Jaime Escalante, or may have little to do with the performance of disadvantaged black and Latino children, as is the case of another Los Angeles teacher, Rafe Esquith, featured in the Abigail and Stephan Thernstroms' new book, No Excuses...

...The military spends somewhat more on its schools so may have a better selection of teachers, runs integrated schools, and, like the rest of the public sector, is much less likely to discriminate against minorities job-wise than the private sector...

...Rather, the large gap in academic preparation of children entering kindergarten or the first grade from different family backgrounds and community contexts is not overcome by the schooling experience...

...The military provides great health care...

...Improving teacher quality as a strategy for eliminating the black-white test score gap is also not as clear as it may seem...

...In any case, according to Claire Smrekar and her colleagues, the minority children in Pentagon schools do much better than children of parents with similar social class in civilian schools...

...Conservative academics pushing vouchers and other "market solutions" to "failing" public schools concentrate almost entirely on minorities in large cities—simultaneously producing an extensive literature on the "blackwhite achievement gap...

...However, the average black-white or Latino test score gap represents the test score difference between average blacks, Latinos, and whites...

...THERE ARE other very important issues treated in Class and Schools, namely the validity of testing as a way of measuring the cognitive learning gap between different groups of students and the non-cognitive learning gap, which may be as or more important in later labor-market success rates for different groups...

...Rothstein emphasized that the armed services do not admit high school dropouts and require a certain level of discipline and commitment, thus making the children of minority armed forces personnel not comparable with "civilian poor" minority children...