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Another Perspective
No Education Silver Bullets
The Hispanic achievement gap can’t simply be closed by more universal Pre-K or less immigration.
The Latino teens graduating from the Animo Leadership High School just outside Los Angeles probably aren’t familiar with the arguments for expanding Head Start and pre-kindergarten programs offered by advocates such as Nobel Laureate James Heckman. And the Latino middle-schoolers being prepared for high school and college success by the KIPP Summit Academy in the working class San Francisco suburb of San Lorenzo aren’t up to speed on attempt to link academic achievement and immigration trends offered the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald and other immigration restrictionists.
But their respective successes disprove the silver bullets offered by each side for solving the nation’s academic achievement gaps between white and minority students. The students also affirm the hard but necessary job of improving America’s public schools at every stage.
Animo is one of 18 schools operated by Green Dot Schools, founded by Rock-the-Vote impresario Steve Barr in 2000 in response to complaints from Latino parents about the low academic quality of local traditional schools. First-generation Latinos make up much of the student population. Yet 89 percent of the Latino freshmen in the Animo Leadership’s original Class of 2007 made it to 12th grade, according to the U.S. Department of Education. The nearby Los Angeles Unified School district promoted just 41 percent of its Latino freshmen during that period. Other Green Dot schools experience similar results and send 80 percent of their students onto college.
KIPP Summit, part of the famed KIPP chain of urban charters, also culls many of its students from a growing population of first- and second-generation Latinos. Yet the students take to the school’s demanding rules, attentive-yet-strict instructors and school days that don’t end until five at night. On average, 5th-grade Latinos scored 765 points on the state’s standardized tests in 2006-2007, more than 100 points above the average score of their peers statewide.
Pre-K advocates and anti-immigrationists pay little regard to such evidence. Instead, they are now latching on to an analysis of cognitive development among Latino toddlers conducted by researchers published last month in Maternal and Child Health.
Poor Latino children, according to the study, are born with more-robust birth-weights and suffer lower mortality rates than white children or black children of any socioeconomic status. Yet by age two, Latino kids scored several points lower on the Blakely Scale, a test of motor and cognitive skills development than their white peers. The possible causes for this disparity: The “lower school attainment of Mexican-American mothers” and the larger family sizes of Latino families compared to that of whites and blacks.
Pre-K advocates, already comforted by President Barack Obama’s decision to spend $11 billion in stimulus funds on Head Start and other programs, tout the Maternal study as a justification for even higher spending levels. Preschool California, an Oakland, Calif., activist group, for example, prominently displayed a report about the study on its Web site. Another advocate, Eugene Garza of Arizona State University, opines that “It seems like what might be the most helpful with Latino kids is early intervention.”
Anti-immigrationists find that the study bolsters one of their underlying conceits: That legal and undocumented immigrants from Latin America, already likely to be less-educated than native-born Americans, are even less-equipped for life in the states than earlier generations of émigrés. They avidly offered their usual prescriptions of further immigration restrictions and more-stringent enforcement of current rules.
“Our de facto immigration policy is currently weighted to a population that appears to require massive additional government education spending — even before formal schooling begins — to be made academically competitive,” declares Mac Donald in a recent column in National Review Online. “It’s time to acknowledge that many students never will be college material.”
But the Maternal study itself sides with neither group. Although the study does lean slightly towards expanding Pre-K options, it also notes that the impact of early childhood illnesses may have a greater effect than either family size or the mother’s educational background. The fact that the study is based on data from the second of two tiny cohorts in a relatively recent U.S. Department of Education study, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, hardly offers any long-term information on student academic progress over time.
In any case, the solutions offered by both sides are as solid as smoke from a fired gun.
There is sparse evidence that Head Start and other Pre-K programs may improve student achievement during the early years. The most-cited studies touting the programs, the Carolina Abecedarian Project and the Perry Preschool Project, have both been widely criticized for the use of non-standard research techniques such as combining I.Q. scores of four different cohorts.
Even among more rigorous studies that show the effectiveness of Pre-K, the gains go poof once children enter woefully-performing elementary schools. University of California, Berkeley Professor Bruce Fuller, lead researcher on the study and a Pre-K advocate, admitted in the San Francisco Chronicle that the “benefits of Head Start are less impressive.”
What anti-immigrationists offer as silver bullets is as useful as their cures for improving America’s global economic competitiveness. Three decades of results from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, the global test of academic performance, shows that American children of every race and ethnicity are lagging behind their peers. The Maternal study also notes that black toddlers from poor families in the study, almost all of whom are likely to be native-born, also test several points lower on the same test.
Immigration restrictionists also can’t prove that today’s émigrés are less-academically prepared than earlier generations; it’s only in the 1990s that education statistics have become reliable enough for research. More importantly, the traditional manufacturing-based economies of the last century didn’t require possession of a diploma, much less high levels of education.
About the Author
RiShawn Biddle the editor of Dropout Nation , is co-author of A Byte at the Apple: Rethinking Education Data for the Post-NCLB Era. He can be followed at Twitter.com/dropoutnation.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (31) | Leave a comment
More Articles by RiShawn Biddle
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Jeannine| 11.16.09 @ 8:02AM
Excellent article, Mr Biddle. Makes plenty of sense. Do you know of any research on how the Hispanics are doing in the private prep schools and Catholics schools?
Ken (Old Texican)| 11.16.09 @ 9:36AM
Wrong!
There are several "Silver Bullets"
1. Teach English exhaustively in the home/pre-k/elementary/and secondary schools.
2. Ebonics is just as limiting as Spanish as a primary language.
3. Break peer-pressure "ignorance coolness".
4. Hold out continually the hope of a meaningful future.
Stan Redmond| 11.16.09 @ 4:14PM
In otherwords. Stop voting for liberals that tolerate and promote the nonsense in public schools.
Pingback| 11.16.09 @ 10:06AM
Twitter Trackbacks for The American Spectator : No Education Silver Bullets [spectat links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Pingback| 11.16.09 @ 10:23AM
Pre-K Supporters and Heather Mac Donald Can Both Be Wrong… || Dropout Nation links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
rssg| 11.16.09 @ 3:55PM
Gee, how about this idea (especially true in a bad recession with rising unemployment).........how about we accept fewer immigrants, period?
Since most immigrants coming here are Latino (legal and illegal), and most have grade school educations, simply reducing the mass immigration we're living with will lessen problems in public school as well as hospital emergency rooms (unfunded healthcare costs).
Nah, we can't do that, we must invite half the world to come here so we can "prove" we are no longer racist. That's the mentality of left and right.
Louis Jenkins| 11.16.09 @ 4:05PM
Old Texican:
I'll add another item-parents need to be involved in their child's education. I don't mean going to PTA or selling tickets to raise school money, I mean standing over them in the evenings and making sure that they do their homework, and do it correctly. I mean finding extra work at their level- heck, it's available in the library or on line. I mean making the child read an extra page or chapter in their reading assignment, or get another book to read. Throw some extra math problems at them. And you're spending time with the child too, like every good parent should. Behind every successful man there's a woman backing him up, same applies to a student, there's a parent standing over them. And don't forget, give a reward or treat when the child does well. If we don't instill a good work ethic in them when they're young what will they be like when adults?
Blacque Jacques Shellacque| 11.16.09 @ 7:23PM
I mean standing over them in the evenings and making sure that they do their homework, and do it correctly.
Slight problem with this - the parents have to have this knowledge also, especially subjects that go beyond the basics. Border-jumpers are rather unlikely to fall into this category.
Richard Baker| 11.16.09 @ 8:35PM
My wife's Father remarried, after her Mother died, and remarried a Korean lady, who had 4 kids, in Korea while he was there on a mission trip as a Methodist minister. The kids, the oldest was 12, came to Iowa on a Friday and Monday morning were in the local rural schools. No one, except Mom, spoke any English and the kids worked hard, learned the language, and all graduated from college. Not too many Korean Iowans then but they started from scratch. One is a stockbroker on Wall Street, one is an engineer with John Deere, one is a Penn State educated hospital adminstrator in Chicago, and the fourth runs a financial planning business and who received a volleyball scholarship at Drake. When I hear Americans say that they can't make it here, my first thought is about those step-kids and how lazy Americans are. There is NO Silver Bullet. Hard work and never giving up make up the success ticket.
Reformed Theologian| 11.17.09 @ 6:42PM
I'm married to a public high school teacher--town of about 10,000, West Texas, 90+% Hispanic school population. Local businesses hire and fire the high school's graduates like they are on a conveyor belt. Why? Because the graduates can't read simple English, can't do simple math, won't come to work on time or regularly, and don't see anything wrong with this. My wife tells me that the kids in school won't work , do assignments, or pay attention because they know they will eventally be moved along and given that diploma that says "Graduate of Highschool" but isn't worth the printing on the paper. The biggest problem with these students is apathy. The only time they get excited is when they are caught texting in class and have to give up their cellphone. Parents are equally apathetic and most think the highschool's job is to raise their child for them. One mother actually came to the school principal's office ranting hysterically about the fact that her daughter had recently gotten a tattoo. The assistant principal was somewhat nonplussed, and told her there was nothing the school could do about it. The mother said, "What do you mean? Aren't you supposed to take care of this kind of stuff?" This incident is typical and represents the thinking of most local parents.
Bad teachers, sitting on their duffs, locked in place because of tenure? Sure, there are a few, but the big problem isn't with the teachers, believe me.
Richard Baker| 11.17.09 @ 7:04PM
Reformed Theologian:
Was a math and science teacher here in Florida and I agree with your wife. The parents don't really give a hoot and expect someone else to solve their problems. I had a parent-teacher conference with a woman who was a local attorney. Her son was out of control, running around the room, and totally uninvolved in school. I told the Mother that her son was a troublemaker. She said, "How long have you known my child?" I responded, "long enough to know he's a troublemaker." She was incensed. Poor baby. She expected us to remake her kid for her. What an idiot she was and she went to Law School? I understand your wife's comment.
Lilkidmom| 11.18.09 @ 9:40AM
My son teaches first grade in a local elementary school which is in a distressed community. He is always trying new ways to reach his kids, but some are just so out of control that they make it impossible to give proper attention to those who want to learn. Most days, these few troublesome kids end up in the principal's office and rightly so. A teacher can only do so much and given the state of our culture in much of this country, with it's "me first" "give it to me NOW" mentality, it's a wonder they can keep their sanity. When I was a child, I can't imagine a FIRST GRADER doing some of the things my son has told me about! No wonder so many new teachers don't last five years and others take early retirement options. Many parents don't appreciate their child's access to a FREE education, so their children don't either. I am so tired of teachers always being blamed for the poor test scores and performance, when the real culprit is their students' lack of discipline, self control and respect for authority. These things should have been taught to the kids in their homes from the day they were brought home from the hospital, but sadly, some of the parents are lacking in these qualities as well, so how are the kids supposed to learn them? Answer: it falls on the teacher to instill these things in the kids, on top of being expected to fulfill their primary obligation of imparting the knowledge necessary for a successful adult life. We can't hold teachers primarily responsible for the state of our schools and the students' poor achievement test scores. The student's home life and upbringing also play a critical role in their attitude toward learning. This disaster has been a long time in the making and blaming teachers is the cowards way out.
champions online resources | 11.20.09 @ 8:55AM
In otherwords. Stop voting for liberals that tolerate and promote the nonsense in public schools.
Trackback| 12.5.09 @ 8:30AM
credit fix, on credit fix, links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Lucy | 12.29.09 @ 1:37AM
I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Lucy
http://maternitymotherhood.net
Pingback| 2.4.10 @ 6:00PM
Dropout Nation » Blog Archive » Urban Parents Don’t Care About What Gary Orfield Thin links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Frank| 2.26.10 @ 7:47PM
The Black/White Academic Achievement Gap can be effectively addressed and narrowed in this decade! History teaches us that "men and nations behave wisely, when they have exhausted all other alternatives" (Abba Eban). Please preview our book "Between the Rhetoric and Reality" Lauriat Press; Simpkins&Simpkins;, 2009. It can be previewed on either "Amazon.Com, or borders".
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poptropica | 4.9.10 @ 9:25PM
I’ll have a Poptropica full written walkthrough very soon, but in the meantime, here are some answers to some of the frequently asked questions about Mythology Island. Having trouble? Post a question in the comments and I’ll try to answer it!
Getting Hercules to Help You Poptropica
Hercules won’t help you until you have all five items from Zeus’ quest. Once you have the five items, bring them to Athena. Zeus will appear and steal them. The big jerk! Once this happens, talk to Athena and she will tell you that Hercules will help you. You’ll need to have the magic mirror from Aphrodite because Hercules doesn’t want to have to walk. He’s so lazy!
Getting the Hydra Scale poptropica
You can see how to do this in the videos, but basically you need to jump up when the Hydra is about to strike. He will rear one of his heads back to attack and his eyes will bulge out. poptropica
When this happens, jump up in the air and then try to land on top of his head. That head will get knocked out. When all five heads get knocked out, the Hydra will be asleep and you can click on him to get one of the scales. poptropica
I’ll have a full written walkthrough very soon, but in the meantime, here are some answers to some of the frequently asked questions about Mythology Island. Having trouble? Post a question in the comments and I’ll try to answer it!poptropica