The standards movement is grounded in the idea that children benefit from clear and high expectations. But this research suggests that, even when students are exposed to the same content and given the same assignments, the expectations we have for study work may be very, very different. So how can we ensure we hold the bar equally high for all students? Yes, we need to adopt and implement rigorous standards and/or curricula. But, what if teachers are systematically adjusting their feedback to praise children of color for meeting a lower bar?

We actually are all too familiar with how this plays out in the real world, and these findings would be unsurprising to the many minority students who graduated from high school at the top of their class, but who’ve had culture shock when they matriculated to elite colleges and universities. One such student, Darryl Robinson, recently penned a piece for the Washington Post detailing how far behind he was when he started at Georgetown… Interestingly, it wasn’t until Robinson pushed his way into Advanced Placement courses that he felt like he was being really pushed. “Suddenly,” Robinson explained, “I was expected to think about concepts, such as public policy’s cause and effect, and apply these ideas to real-life situations.”

But, what was the difference? Robinson was seen as an exceptional student. He clearly had the aptitude and the drive necessary to achieve at high levels. So why did it take until late high school to ask of Robinson what teachers had no doubt been asking of his white, middle class and affluent peers for years?

There are no doubt multiple explanations, but it’s hard for me to ignore that, in AP classes, there are not only rigorous standards and quality curricular materials, but there are also assessments to which all students will be held, regardless of their background, prior knowledge, or experience. And these assessments set a clear bar for where all students should be. Such clarity makes it more difficult to allow personal biases—whether deliberate or subconscious—to subtly lower standards for students from whom you don’t expect quite as much.

It’s become popular in many education circles to decry “teaching to the test,” but this latest research provides one more reason why these independent checks on what students have actually learned are a critical element of an effort to close America’s achievement gap.

Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Kathleen Porter Magee, explaining how testing, along with strong, college-preparatory curricula and underlying standards, helps set high expectations for all children and ensures they get the challenge they need for success.

In order to have high expectations of students, educators must first have high expectations for themselves

The organization Success for Black Boys, pointing out that teachers and school leaders must become accountable for success and failure (and subject each other to scrutiny)  in order to help all children succeed.

Yes, folks…our children are in fact those “Come in Behind-Stay Behind” children. Yours, mine, our neighbors’, our friends’, our church members’…they are our kids. Who knows, maybe now, we, communities and concerned citizens, will rally together and do something to prevent this from happening since it’s so close to home?  We certainly fail miserably at doing even the most basic things when it comes to empowering the poor (insert more sighs please). What pains me most about children not having the necessary skills to emerge as readers by kindergarten is how easy and accessible these skills are.  Parents and caregivers need a little guidance, that’s all.  More knowledge, less products, a few songs, poems, and key guiding principles are needed.  The children do the rest.  They are built for it.

This is much of what I do.  I build parental skills so that parents know how to build their children’s skill, in a timely manner, before school.  Low income…middle income…parents and children are the same and we need to get to them with the same intensity and urgency. With patience, love, and a lot of singing, clapping, and exposure to print children can have the skills they need to develop an interest in reading and the confidence needed to get there.. the idea that they can’t build skills one-on-one at home, with a loving caregiver or parent, is just plain…silly for a lack of a better, but less appropriate word.

Parent Power activist Nikolai Pizzaro, on how families, with just some tools, can help their kids succeed in school and in life. Dropout Nation offers families advice through its continuing series, the Five Questions all families should ask. You can listen to the first, second, and third podcasts here or at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page.

The school must be the unit of change-and schools must put kids on different pathway than most schools do today.

Canon Anderson, superintendent of the Newark, N.J. school district, on why our kids need systemic reform.

Imagine two eighth-grade students, Student A and Student B, who both attend public schools in the United States. Student A is significantly less likely to have a certified or experienced teacher, over twice as likely to have street gangs present at school and is 10 times less likely to take an AP exam than Student B. In anything else that could possibly affect student achievement — parent involvement, poverty, child care — Student B has the clear advantage. What could possibly cause this severe disadvantage for Student A? The answer is something as simple as the color of your skin. Student A is black, while Student B is white.

Seventh-grade Nashville student Iz Gius, in the Tennessean, saying succinctly what many school reformers sometimes fail to make clear.

We now Stat homelessness, we Stat domestic violence… We’re finding more ways to use it — monitoring day-to-day progress, monitoring the pace at which we improve and push it along. We’re doing a citywide analysis of how to use CitiStat to drill down into problems that have been in existence for years… We’re creating a Stat process — pull all the people into the same room with independent analysts and figure out how to get rid of roadblocks.

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, to the New York Times, about the use of data in solving quality-of-life problems that plague every locale. This is the kind of unleashing of powerful data that must be embraced to give our children American public education that is worthy of their lives.

Photo courtesy of the Times-Picayune

The terrible news coming out of [New Orleans] about the children being murdered must put our efforts while we are here at [the New  Schools Venture Fund Summit] in perspective Our children need us more than ever at so many different levels. Their dreams and hopes. Their very lives are at stake.

Howard Fuller, eulogizing 15-year-old KIPP Believe College Prep student Christine Marcelin, who was senselessly murdered last week. It is important to systemically reform American public education so that we keep our kids out of poverty and prison. And it is equally vital that we improve quality if life in all areas of our communities so that our kids are as safe outside of schools as they should be in them. We shouldn’t have to bury our children’s futures or their bodies.

Emerging from conversations with these nonunion teachers association representatives, one wonders that teachers unions can get away with bullying teachers and that unions are able to control the message both to teachers and the general public that they promote teachers’ rights when, often, they in fact step on teachers to promote unions’ political power. “The public perception is there’s millions of teachers out there in lockstep with the union, ready to join the union and march, and it couldn’t be farther from the truth,” Farmer said of his own experiences talking to teachers interested in alternatives.

Unions attempt to tighten control over their members, and thus political power, by making alternative organizations look not worth the social and emotional trouble, while restricting information about teachers’ options, even though this is unfair, unprofessional, and unethical. This is textbook bullying: a repeated pattern of aggressive physical or verbal actions “that cause physical or emotional distress, or indirect acts of social aggression.” It is also, Farmer says, classic unionism: “The union has done a good job of creating a chasm between the administration and teachers. Most teachers would tell you they’re terrified of having their administrator have the power to hire and fire them. If you look at charter schools, it’s a more cooperative environment…”

That dependence is rooted in fear rather than confidence. Ruling by fear is a tactic of bullies and tyrants. When you add fear and controversy to an environment teeming with children, teachers and children inevitably lose.

School Reform News’ Joy Pullmann, noting in a report on efforts by the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers to keep out new forms of teacher professional associations, another reason why the old-school industrial unionism embraced by the unions does littlefor those who actually work in classrooms

“The people here in reform in Arkansas are much further ahead than I had anticipated,” [Virginia Walden Ford] said. “I fought the D.C. fight so … I’m very much a realist. But this is what I’m seeing. I’m quite excited about it. I don’t think it’s going to be easy … but it’s on the minds of people now, legislators and citizens, that we have to change something.”…

Earlier this year, she started the Arkansas Parent Network, which aims to better inform parents about what school choice options they have and don’t have. It’s also teaching a more fundamental lesson, she said – that it’s okay to stand up and demand better for your kids.

“We know when parents have the right information to advocate for their children, it’s really empowering,” Walden Ford said. “Those are the lessons I learned that I want to share in Arkansas.”

RedefineEd’s Ron Matus, learning about what could happen in the Diamond State from the longtime Parent Power activist who sparked reform in D.C. two decades ago. And Ford’s example exemplifies the importance of political and grassroots mobilization in advancing the transformation of American public education.

These challenges illustrate that there is no silver bullet solution… But that’s exactly why teachers are more essential than ever —because they can do so much to empower students, and to give them the tools they need to navigate a tough environment. Across the country we see examples of dedicated, talented teachers who lead their students to success despite long odds. They walk into their classrooms, determined to reach every last child, no matter what it takes. It’s great teachers that give us our great confidence that every child—regardless of circumstance—can learn.

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Allan Golston, explaining why overhauling our system of recruiting, training, evaluating, and compensating teachers is more important than the NEA or AFT want to admit.

As some pray for a better nation, we must also pray and transform a collection of public education systems that perpetuate educational neglect and malpractice against our children.

I will not pretend to be an expert on teaching, but as a school board member I confess to deep and continuous agita over the the system’s inability to do the right thing; rather, its amazing ability to deny reality, which is the prime directive for institutional entropy. (It is not just the reality of good research that is ignored, it’s the reality of crumbling schools and generations of untaught children.)… I have watched American educators do somersaults to avoid the obvious need for rigorous, fact-based curricula. In fact, the two denials—the effectiveness of direct instruction and the value of content knowledge—go hand in hand and together probably account for most of the national educational malaise. You name it—Clark et al say it goes under various names, “including discovery learning, problem-based learning, inquiry learning, experiential learning, and constructivist learning”—our educators are locked on to bad ideas and ineffective pedagogies like cruise missiles to their preprogrammed targets. “Each new set of advocates for unguided approaches seemed unaware of, or uninterested in,” write Clark et al, “previous evidence that unguided approaches had not been validated.”

Fordham Institute’s Peter Meyer, noting the unwillingness of many education traditionalists to accept the reality of a failed system.

While I agree social cohesion is an essential component of a healthy democracy, denying low-income and immigrant parents the freedom and resources to select their child’s school will weaken our common bonds, not strengthen them. But I acknowledge Geiger’s views have deep historical roots.

In the 1830s, state governments, which were controlled by Protestants, started assuming greater control of publicly-funded education in response to the influx of Catholic immigrants into Catholic schools. The goal of these mid-19th century Protestants wasn’t the nurturing of religious pluralism. They wanted to diminish Catholicism while enhancing their power and influence…. It culminated with a Ku Klux Klan sponsored referendum in Oregon in 1922, requiring all children to attend government (i.e., Protestant) schools. This referendum was overturned by the 1925 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, which is why parents today have a constitutional right to send their children to a non-government school, provided they can pay for it.

While I’m sure Geiger shares my abhorrence of everything the KKK stands for, its 1922 proposal treated all parents equally, which is fairer than what Geiger is proposing. She wants to maintain school choice for those who can afford private school tuition (or homes in middle-class and upper-class neighborhoods), but deny it for those who can’t. Denying freedom and equal opportunity to immigrants as a means of teaching them about American values seems counterintuitive… We can successfully manage the strengths and challenges inherent in our country’s extraordinary diversity and pluralism without unduly limiting the freedoms and opportunities of our least powerful families.

RedefineEd’s Doug Tuthill, explaining why opposing school choice essentially perpetuates two centuries of state-sponsored religious and political bigotry that has also ended up damaging poor and minority families.

In districts with the highest suspension rates in the state, just under a quarter of the entire student body –nearly one of every four students of all races and ages – received at least one suspension that school year. These districts had not only the highest district wide rates for all students, but often very large differences in the risk for suspension between different racial groups, with Black students suspended on average at a rate that was a full 20 percentage points higher than White students… the issue here is not whether students should ever be suspended, but rather whether the frequent use of out-of-school suspension is effective in helping schools provide a safe and productive educational environment—and the evidence clearly indicates this is not the case. Not only is it counterintuitive to punish a disengaged student by giving them a day off school, but research also suggests that such suspensions do not even act as a deterrent to future misbehavior. Indeed, there is some evidence that suspension may actually increase incidents of misbehavior, effectively making the environment even less productive. Researchers have found that students suspended early in middle school are more likely to receive suspensions by eighth grade, suggesting an increase as opposed to an overall decrease in misbehavior. Furthermore, as the American Academy of Pediatrics pointed out, suspensions are not an effective means of engaging parents…

Daniel Losen and his team at the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, explaining in its latest report why the overuse of harsh school discipline is often disproportionate and does little to keep kids on the path to lifelong success.

Apologists for the Los Angeles Unified School District management’s failure to follow existing law to protect students from abuse have introduced three measures that would punish all educators by undermining their due process rights…. Remember, although the Committee members may not be your legislator, their decision to support this attack on teachers affects every teacher in California and you felt this Member needed to hear from you.

California’s National Education Association affiliate, the California Teachers Association, essentially defending the criminally abusive behavior of some of its members (even if it finds their actions repugnant) by pushing against two proposed Golden State laws that would make it easier to remove those who don’t belong in classrooms or around children.

Last week’s Dropout Nation Podcast on the need to reform American public education for the young men whose futures are slaughtered the way Trayvon Martin was murdered hit a raw nerve, especially with education traditionalists who would rather ignore reality than deal with the consequences of policies that perpetuate systemic academic failure. But it isn’t just education traditionalists alone. Far too often, we are too unwilling to consider how everyone in communities — including families — do not do enough to help staunch the decay of communities that comes from young men and women being poorly educated, and the tolerance of violence that perpetuates more damage. 

In this Voices of the Dropout Nation, Phillip Jackson of the Black Star Project provides his own body count of how low-quality education and civic decay has led to so many young black men being condemned to poverty and prison. Read, consider, and take action. 

Trayvon Martin is more valuable to America as a dead young black man then he ever was alive! As a dead symbol, the president can claim him as a son he never had, but as a living black man, the American criminal justice system claims one out of three young Black men born after 2001. As a dead symbol, Republican presidential candidates can claim that Trayvon deserves his right to live as an American; but many living young black men, like Trayvon, are stripped of their rights every day because of harsh, racially-targeted and overly-punitive laws.

Many in America know how to use the symbol of a dead young black man to achieve its objectives. When symbols are used correctly, the nation cleanses its conscience while the deplorable plight of young Black men remain the same. As a dead symbol, Trayvon might spark a national conversation on race. But as a  living young Black man, Trayvon probably couldn’t get a job at a fast-food restaurant.
No place in America is this stark contradiction of symbol versus reality for young Black men more evident than in Chicago, Illinois. While hundreds of people in Chicago protested the death of Trayvon Martin, few people protested the violent murders of more than 100 mostly young black males in Chicago in the past year, mostly at the hands of other young black men. Chicago media, foundations and elected officials have ignored the blood of black children running in Chicago streets while they congratulate those who speak in symbolic terms about race in America.

Chicago is ground-zero for the destruction of young black men in America! Here, only three out of 100 Black male high-school freshmen will graduate from college by age 25, according to the Consortium for Chicago School Research. Just 44 percent of young black men in Chicago will graduate from high school. Last summer, approximately 90 percent of Chicago’s young Black males 16 to 19 years old were unemployed, according to Northeastern University. And young black men in Chicago are arrested at two-to-six times the rates of other populations.

As dire as this crisis is, there are solutions, but they are not in symbols or soul-searching. They are comprehensive and substantial efforts and actions to ameliorate this stain on America’s reputation for fairness and equality.

Everyone, from families to governments, foundations, churches, and community organizations must do their part. It means rebuilding black families with fathers as an essential, prominent and functional component of the family structure. They must provide mentors, positive role models and viable paths for young Black men. They must reform education so that young black men can have an education they can value and be part of the global economy. And they must teach young Black men about how to succeed in entrepreneurship and in the working world.

The death of Trayvon Martin is a symbol of the plight of young black men in America — and its one to which most Americans can relate. But we ca longer be comfortable with young black men being symbols, or as in the case of Martin Luther King and Trayvon, being loved by society after they are dead. We must become comfortable with strong, vocal, positive black men who are educated and alive.