Giving every kid the best education is hard but necessary work.
I was glad to read that some schools in Seattle are trying to get more students into the classes that offer the greatest challenge and reward.
Students are often divided into different class levels based on a judgment about their ability to do more or less challenging work. The sorting is called tracking, and there are good and bad reasons for doing it and good and bad consequences, too. Not everyone learns at the same pace, and not everyone is equally prepared for rigorous work.
Tracking has long been a contentious issue around the country, including in Seattle, where we’ve argued about who gets into advanced classes and programs and who doesn’t.
Parents want their children in those classes because they expect the classes to have the best teachers and curriculum, but everywhere it’s usually the case that white and Asian-American students are in the more sought-after programs and black and Latino poorer students are not.
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Given our history, many worry about bias or unfairness in the system. They don’t have tracking in Finland, and their schools do quite well, but then our society has never operated on the same assumptions of equality that Finland has.
Periodically some educators try to change the status quo. The story I mentioned said there is a plan at Seattle’s Garfield High School “to combine ninth-graders of varied academic records into what the school is calling honors-for-all English and social-studies classes this fall.”
The story mentioned research that found elsewhere in the country that when students all get the higher-level curriculum, achievement rises for all students.
Last fall, Washington Middle School in Seattle blended regular track students into English and social-studies classes that work a grade above regular classes. The percentage of students who passed the state language-arts test went up this year.
Opening advanced-learning classes (in this case International Baccalaureate classes) to all juniors and seniors at Rainier Beach High School in Southeast Seattle was followed by greatly increased graduation rates.
We have real inequalities that mean our students don’t start on an equal footing, and we have deep biases about behavior and ability that affect judgments about ability. Inequality and bias both pollute our efforts to educate children.
Delivering a good education to most students is a complicated business, but failure is no option in a world that requires well-educated citizens, parents, workers.
People say it once wasn’t so bad that not every kid got a great education, because there was always work that didn’t demand more than a few basics. That hasn’t been true for a long time now. And even when it was true, how fair was it to divide children in ways that would determine the kind of life they would have? Believing in the fairness of the system requires a lot of trust, and there are many reasons be leery.
When someone can walk into a school, look into a classroom and tell by the appearance of the students inside whether it is likely to be an advanced class or not, we have an issue.
Fixing that is not simple or easy.
Last week the U.S. Postal Service started selling stamps honoring the late Jaime Escalante, the Los Angeles high-school teacher who inspired the 1988 movie “Stand and Deliver,” which was about his success teaching high-level math to Latino students from poor families. He was inspirational because he wouldn’t accept the idea that his students couldn’t excel.
He was also practical. He saw that kids came with deficiencies built up over their academic careers, and he created programs to fill gaps in their learning and to help younger students prepare for the rigors of high-school math.
The younger we start preparing students for the best curriculum, the more success we and they will have. Education should be about opening doors, not closing them.