Between a Rock and a Soft Place

“Racial quotas and preferences are a Soft system: blacks and members of other preferred groups are not being held accountable to the same standards as others. Not being held accountable, they do not achieve as much. John McWhorter, who is black and now a linguistics professor at Berkeley, remembers that in high school he ‘quite deliberately refrained from working to my highest potential because I knew I would be accepted to top universities without doing so.’ He goes on: ‘Imagine telling a Martian who expressed an interest in American education policy: We allow whites in only if they have a GPA of 3.7 and an SAT of 1300 or above. We let blacks in with a GPA of 3.0 and an SAT of 900. Now, what we have been pondering for years is why black students continue to submit higher grades and scores than this so rarely.’ Well, mercy me—what a perplexing problem!’’ This quote is from Michael Barone’s Hard America Soft America, Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation’s Future. It is worth reading. The point here is that people perform to the expectations. Placing low expectations on a group is essentially “killing them with kindness.” These low expectations are the worst sort of discrimination because they start with the assumption that the people from the group can’t perform to “normal” expectations so we will be kind and expect less of them.

The “Well, mercy me—what a perplexing problem” is a sarcastic way of saying that the foundational issue affecting the achievement gap which we as a society SAY we want to fix is that because educators believe in their heart of hearts that “those” people can’t perform to high levels they don’t expect them to. I believe that this self-fulfilling prophecy has been more responsible than any other factor in making the achievement gap so unaffected by the decades of work and billions of dollars thrown into the effort.

Barone’s book discusses more issues than education although he does have some interesting things to say on the subject. One point he makes is that the percentage of kids working while attending high school is much higher than it was in the 1950s when the average standard of living was lower. He cites research that found that the kids said it wasn’t the money but the structure and discipline provided by the job that they sought. They commented that the soft, low expectation environment of the education system was unfulfilling.

The sad thing is that the expectations of all students are far too low. In Colorado we have very low achievement test standards compared to most if not all other states. When you realize that American kids as a group do poorly in comparisons to their best international peers you have to accept that our Colorado kids are in a system that ranks as the poorest of the poor.

Am I advocating that we install Singapore math standards for our Colorado kids immediately. NO. I chose the Singapore example because they are the acknowledged world leader in math education. The process I envision is to base our standards on the best in the world but in a realistic way. That is, we need to realize that Singapore and the other competitors are not standing still, they are improving constantly. Being the best is a moving target.

A sensible approach would be to set a target for say 10 years out that is at a level 10 to 20% better than the performance of the best competition by subject area. Then develop “ramped standards” that increase 10% of the way to those targets each year. This would be a rigorous and demanding challenge but could be done. It would definitely require changes in many areas of the education system to accomplish.

I know our educators on a whole have become satisfied with the status quo and believe they are doing about as well as can be done. I don’t buy that at all. Our kids as a whole can learn as well as those elsewhere in the world if they are expected to in a system that supports that learning. As I have said in the past the most important element of positive change is leadership. The opportunity here is huge but the leaders need to be retooled quickly and the training of new leaders has to be retooled as well. The current ed school leadership training is inadequate and unacceptable. [See Levine, Educating School Leaders] If the current leadership cadre were race drivers they would be out of a job. You see the real world cares not what training certificate you have framed on the wall, it cares only if you perform well enough to win. The American education system isn’t winning and it is harming our kids and our country.

This is pertinent because Colorado is in the process of “updating” its standards in several subject areas. The standards will have public review in state board of education meetings in the fall. I have looked at them and can tell you that I believe the proposed standards are just a continuation of the status quo and not worth even considering. They certainly don’t facilitate better performance against the international competition. The best they could do is to improve our standing among the states which is not enough. There is little consolation in moving up to a higher place in the pack of poor performers. If we allow another round of poor standards to be put in place with a multi-year life we are further delaying the needed improvement in performance.

To become world class education performers will take facing the truth fully and working very hard to overcome the problems identified. In the current politically correct, Group Think system the truth is suppressed and the necessary changes are prevented. This is unacceptable.