The Smart Society. Peter D. Salins

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      Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Assessment of Educational Progress.

      The project of fixing America’s educational system should begin with a strategic analysis of where, in the interaction of children and schools, we find our most serious academic problems; and where, in the educational pipeline, those problems can be most effectively addressed. While the achievement of major educational gains for all categories of youngsters remains challenging, the gaps to be closed can be parsed into just two broad categories, and these can be addressed at just a few promising intervention points, all replicable at a national scale, and all affordable—measuring affordability in terms of their long-term, rather than short-term, cost-benefit ratios.

      The largest academic achievement gap, one that has long consumed the energies of U.S. national, state, and local education agencies, remains the one separating poor minority children from mainstream whites (see table 2.7). Closing that gap has so far proven to be beyond the reach of the most prevalent education reform policies. To date, despite the expenditure of billions of dollars and the implementation of countless experimental reforms—affecting teachers, class sizes, school organization, high-stakes testing, and so on—progress has been very limited and geographically sporadic. Not far behind poor minority children in school performance is a growing cohort of lower-income white children—most often those raised in single-parent families, a phenomenon largely ignored by reformers obsessed with ethnically correlated performance differences.

Table 2.7

       NAEP Test Scores by Race and Location, 2011

      Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Assessment of Educational Progress.

      Increasingly noticeable is the academic achievement gap between girls (higher) and boys (lower) among schoolchildren of all class and ethnic backgrounds, as indicated in table 2.8. Some recent reports on male/female school performance disparities ascribe them to likely differences in brain wiring, and therefore conclude they might be lessened by using gender-differentiated teaching strategies, and perhaps hiring more male teachers. This is most certainly wrong; effective schooling can be—and should be—gender-blind. When Lawrence Summers, as president of Harvard, suggested something similar, that women’s underrepresentation in mathematics and the sciences was due to gender-based cognitive differences, he was booed off the stage and ultimately lost his job. Cognitive determinism is no more defensible when it is used to justify why so many boys are lagging academically. For children growing up in poor families—white or black—a better explanation is that being raised in fatherless households disproportionately undermines the school performance of boys. Girls often have a positive role model—and achievement motivator—in their mothers, while boys in the absence of fathers are apt to look to delinquent older males (who most likely show contempt for any evidence of academic striving) for guidance.¹⁸

Table 2.8

       NAEP Eighth-Grade Reading Scores by Gender and Race

      Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Assessment of Educational Progress.

      The one American school cohort that is not being left behind academically is made up of upper-middle-class white children. Even here, girls do better than boys, but the boys easily do well enough to succeed in college and later in their working careers. Obviously, it is no surprise that socioeconomically advantaged kids do well in school, and disadvantaged ones do badly; we have always known this intuitively and statistically have confirmed it repeatedly since СКАЧАТЬ