It seems like everyone is talking about the new Nikole Hannah-Jones piece. (If you haven't read Hannah-Jones’s recent essay and its prequel, pause here and read both.) Nobody but my mom asked for my opinion, but readers, what are you here for if not my musings? So I'm going to share them, however half-baked they are at this point.
My thoughts about the piece are not totally coherent and are mostly framed as questions rather than answers, but I’m going to try my best to group them into three main themes.
Some context, for those who don't know me personally: I'm a firm believer in the social and cultural benefits of public education. Despite being in the fortunate position of being financially able to send my kids to private school, I chose public school so they could get those benefits. At the same time, I'm also fortunate to have made the very conscious, very expensive choice to buy an apartment in one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods so that I could send my children to one of the highest-performing zoned schools. So like Hannah-Jones, I'm a staunch supporter of public education, but unlike Hannah-Jones, I have admittedly been a welcome recipient of the myriad benefits of residential segregation.
Now that that's out of the way…
Theme 1: The Importance of Progress Monitoring
Hannah-Jones points to a lack of insight into her daughter’s learning as a core issue with her schooling. One example she provides is that her daughter, Najya, never had homework. Since Najya did little, if any, work at home, Hannah-Jones had few opportunities to see work samples and monitor her daughter's academic progress.
It’s true that academic outcomes tend to be better when parents are active and involved, and parents can’t be active and involved when they don’t know what’s going on in the classroom. That's why it seems so crazy to me that we're moving not only to eliminate homework, but also to eliminate standardized testing. Standardized testing offers one of the only uniform, normed ways to monitor progress. As a parent, I don't actually know how my kids are doing relative to their grade-level peers unless I see standardized test scores. Qualitative and subjective data, like teacher narratives and report card grades, are helpful, but they are much harder to interpret; standardized test results give me a far clearer and more objective picture of how they are doing than really anything else.
I appreciate the criticisms of standardized testing. That said, Hannah-Jones alludes to rampant and extreme grade inflation, so standardized tests are essential for maintaining clear, high, measurable standards, and for making sure kids are progressing through their education knowing what we expect them to know. Testing has to start early because one grade builds on the last, and you can't build a house on a shaky foundation; as Hannah-Jones points out, early knowledge gaps persist and widen over time. Best to identify them and intervene right away.
Theme 2: The Importance of Good Teachers
Yes, progress monitoring at home is essential for a productive home-school partnership. But many parents, for various reasons, are unable to adequately support academic progress at home. High-quality teachers are essential for closing the gap in what parents can (and cannot) provide. Reduced ratios, teacher training, and after-school tutoring can help identify struggling students and catch them up before lagging skills turn into real academic problems that are difficult to overcome.
Therefore, we should think of teachers as the ultimate school resource. We always talk about improving under-resourced schools in terms of devoting more resources, as if the core problem is that we're not spending enough. But the truth is we spend a tremendous amount per pupil already, with more taxpayer money going to vulnerable students. The problem is that we're spending it inefficiently and misdirecting resources toward things that don't really move the needle. If we're serious about closing achievement gaps, teacher quality (i.e. recruiting, training, and retention) seems like exactly where resources should go.
Theme 3: The Importancce of School Culture
School culture is essential for student success, and part of that culture is an engaged, involved parent community. Hannah-Jones writes that, as someone with high socioeconomic status, she felt an obligation to improve the culture of a high-poverty school when most of the other parents in the community lacked the ability to contribute productively to it.
Admittedly, I often have a cynical attitude when I talk about the role of parents in schools. When I enrolled my daughter at PS6, I filled out a form requesting friends that I hoped would be in her class, but I joked that I had no expectation that my requests would be honored, and I preferred it that way. I work with a lot of parents who send their kids to private schools whose perception is that there's a pay-to-play system in which the wealthiest families get the best treatment. I don't want that experience. I don't want schools catering to any one student or being especially responsive to any one parent. Teachers and administrators should know what they're doing and be captains of the ship, with uniform treatment for every kid in the building no matter how pushy the parents.
That said, four years later, we are dealing with the class-size debacle that I wrote about last week. I told my sister-in-law Jane–who knows my thoughts and opinions on schools well–that I was disappointed with our administrators because I believed that they failed to communicate with parents. I felt they should have been more proactive about presenting us with a clear, concrete plan for how they'd use space and staff to support our children despite the unusually large classes. Jane pushed back: Did I really think the school owed parents that level of detail and proactivity in their communication? I said yes. We're important stakeholders, and our engagement is a key part of school culture, which is itself a key part of school quality.
So how do I reconcile these two seemingly contradictory views: that schools shouldn't be so responsive to parents, but also that they should be responsive to parents? I don't know the answer. Maybe it’s that schools shouldn't favor certain parents, but they should be highly responsive, equally, to all of them. I appreciate it’s a hard needle to thread.
Another complicating factor is that my kids attend a school where parents are easy to engage. We have the time, the savvy, and the money to be effective partners. Those resources–financial and otherwise–aren't available equally at every school. So how do you partner with all families equitably when some appear to have relatively less to give the school in return?
If I'm being honest (pessimistic?), I usually say schools are largely a reflection of the socioeconomic status of the families who send their kids there. The research bears this out: Socioeconomic status is a better predictor of student outcomes than almost anything else we measure. But I don't think that lets us off the hook. Quite the opposite, in fact. Schools represent our best opportunity to equalize opportunities, rather than simply mirror opportunities, for the students they serve. Let’s invest intelligently in them.
T-minus three weeks to AYF!