Poor
Teaching for Poor Children …
in the Name of Reform
in the Name of Reform
By Alfie
Kohn
[This is a
slightly expanded version of the published article.]
Love them or
hate them, the proposals collectively known as “school reform” are mostly
top-down policies: divert public money to quasi-private charter schools,
pit states against one another in a race for federal education dollars, offer
rewards when test scores go up, fire the teachers or close the schools when
they don’t.
Policy
makers and the general public have paid much less attention to what happens
inside classrooms -- the particulars of teaching and learning -- especially in
low-income neighborhoods. The news here has been discouraging for quite
some time, but, in a painfully ironic twist, things seem to be getting worse as
a direct result of the “reform” strategies pursued by the Bush administration,
then intensified under President Obama, and cheered by corporate executives and
journalists.
In an article published in Phi Delta Kappan back in 1991,
Martin Haberman, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, coined the phrase
“pedagogy of poverty.” Based on his observations in thousands of urban
classrooms, Haberman described a tightly controlled routine in which teachers
dispense, and then test students on, factual information; assign seatwork; and
punish noncompliance. It is a regimen, he said, “in which learners can
‘succeed’ without becoming either involved or thoughtful” -- and it is noticeably
different from the questioning, discovering, arguing, and collaborating that is
more common (though by no means universal) among students in suburban and
private schools.
Now, two
decades later, Haberman reports that “the overly directive, mind-numbing… anti-intellectual
acts” that pass for teaching in most urban schools “not only remain the coin of
the realm but have become the gold standard.” It’s how you’re supposed
to teach kids of color.
Earlier this
year, Natalie Hopkinson, an African American writer, put it this way in an article called “The McEducation of the Negro”: “In the
name of reform… education -- for those "failing" urban kids, anyway
-- is about learning the rules and following directions. Not critical thinking.
Not creativity. It's about how to correctly eliminate three out of four
bubbles.”
Those who
demand that we “close the achievement gap” generally focus only on results,
which in practice refers only to test scores. High-quality instruction is
defined as whatever raises those scores. But when teaching strategies are
considered, there is wide agreement (again, among noneducators) about what
constitutes appropriate instruction in the inner city.
The
curriculum consists of a series of separate skills, with more worksheets than
real books, more rote practice than exploration of ideas, more memorization
(sometimes assisted with chanting and clapping) than thinking. In books
like The Shame of the Nation, Jonathan Kozol, another frequent visitor
to urban schools, describes a mechanical, precisely paced process for drilling
black and Latino children in “obsessively enumerated particles of amputated
skill associated with upcoming state exams.”
Not only is
the teaching scripted, with students required to answer fact-based questions on
command, but a system of almost militaristic behavior control is common, with
public humiliation for noncompliance and an array of rewards for obedience that
calls to mind the token economy programs developed in prisons and psychiatric
hospitals.
Deborah
Meier, the educator and author who has founded extraordinary schools in New
York and Boston, points out that the very idea of “school” has radically
different meanings for middle-class kids, who are “expected to have opinions,”
and poor kids, who are expected to do what they’re told. Schools for the
well-off are about inquiry and choices; schools for the poor are about drills
and compliance. The two types of institutions “barely have any connection
to each other,” she says.
Adds
Kozol: “The children of the suburbs learn to think and to interrogate
reality,” while inner-city kids “are trained for nonreflective
acquiescence.” (Work hard, be nice.) At one of the urban schools he
visited, a teacher told him, “If there were middle-class white children here,
the parents would rebel at this curriculum and stop it cold.”
Among the
research that has confirmed the disparity are two studies based on data from
the periodic National Assessment of Educational Progress. One found that black
children are much more likely than white children to be taught with workbooks
or worksheets on a daily basis. The other revealed a racial disparity in
how computers are used for instruction, with African Americans mostly getting
drill and practice exercises (which, the study also found, are associated with
poorer results).
Yet another
study, by a researcher at Michigan State University, discovered that students
in more affluent neighborhoods were given more choice in their reading, more
opportunities to talk with one another about books, the chance to analyze and
write poetry and to learn skills in the context of real literature.
Well before
his brief tenure last year as New Jersey’s Commissioner of Education, Bret
Schundler expressed considerable enthusiasm about the sort of teaching that
involves constant drill and repetition and “doesn’t allow children not to
answer.” This approach is “bringing a lot of value-added for our children,” he
enthused. Our children? Does that mean he would send his own
kids to that kind of school? Of course not. “Those schools are best
for certain children,” he explained.
The result
is that “certain children” are left farther and farther behind. The rich
get richer, while the poor get worksheets.
To be sure,
the gap is not entirely due to how kids are taught. As economist Richard
Rothstein reminds us, all school-related variables combined can explain only
about one-third of the variation in student achievement. Similarly, if
you look closely at those international test comparisons that supposedly find
the U.S. trailing, it turns out that socioeconomic factors are largely
responsible. Our wealthier students do very well compared to other
countries; our poorer students do not. And we have more poor children
than do other industrialized nations.
To whatever
extent education does matter, though, the pedagogy of poverty traps those who
are subject to it. The problem isn’t that their education lacks “rigor”
-- in fact, a single-minded focus on “raising the bar” has served mostly to push more
low-income youths out of school -- but that it lacks depth and relevance and
the capacity to engage students. As Deborah Stipek, dean of Stanford’s
School of Education, once commented, drill-and-skill instruction isn’t how
middle-class children got their edge, so “why use a strategy to help poor kids
catch up that didn’t help middle class kids in the first place?”
Essentially
the same point has been made by one educational expert after another, including
two prominent African Americans in the field: Linda Darling-Hammond (who
observed that the “most counterproductive [teaching] approaches” are “enforced
most rigidly in the schools serving the most disadvantaged students”) and
Claude Steele (“a skills-focused, remedial education…virtually guarantee[s] the
persistence of the race gap”).
Rather than
viewing the pedagogy of poverty as a disgrace, however, many of the charter
schools championed by the new reformers have concentrated on perfecting and
intensifying techniques to keep children “on task” and compel them to follow
directions. (Interestingly, their carrot-and-stick methods mirror those
used by policy makers to control educators.) Bunches of eager, mostly
white, college students are invited to drop by for a couple of years to lend
their energy to this dubious enterprise.
Is racism to
blame here -- or perhaps behaviorism? Or could it be that, at its core,
the corporate version of “school reform” was never intended to promote thinking
-- let alone interest in learning -- but merely to improve test results?
That pressure is highest in the inner cities, where the scores are
lowest. And the pedagogy of poverty can sometimes “work” to raise those scores,
which makes everyone happy and inclined to reward those teachers.
Unfortunately,
that result is often at the expense of real learning, the sort that more
privileged students enjoy, because the tests measure what matters least.
Thus, it’s possible for the accountability movement to simultaneously narrow
the test-score gap and widen the learning gap.
What’s to be
done? In the short run, Deborah Meier is probably right when she remarks,
“Only secretly rebellious teachers have ever done right by our least advantaged
kids.” To do right by them in the open, we would need structural changes
that make the best kind of teaching available to the kids who need it most.
And we know
it can work -- which is to say, the pedagogy of poverty is not what’s
best for the poor. There’s plenty of precedent. A three-year study (published by the U.S. Department of Education) of
140 elementary classrooms with high concentrations of poor children found that
students whose teachers emphasized “meaning and understanding” were far more
successful than those who received basic-skills instruction. The
researchers concluded by decisively rejecting “schooling for the children of
poverty . . . [that] emphasizes basic skills, sequential curricula, and tight
control of instruction by the teacher.”
Remarkable
results with low-income students of all ages have also been found with the Reggio Emilia model of early-childhood education,
the “performance assessment” high schools in New York, and “Big Picture” schools around the country. All of these start
with students’ interests and questions; learning is organized around real-life
problems and projects. Exploration is both active and interactive,
reflecting the simple truth that kids learn how to make good decisions by
making decisions, not by following directions. Finally, success is judged
by authentic indicators of thinking and motivation, not by multiple-choice
tests.
That last
point is critical. Standardized exams serve mostly to make dreadful forms
of teaching appear successful. As long as they remain our primary way of
evaluating, we may never see real school reform -- only an
intensification of traditional practices, with the very worst reserved for the
disadvantaged.
A British
educator named David Gribble was once speaking in favor of the kind of
education that honors children’s interests and helps them to think deeply about
questions that matter. Of course, he added, that sort of education is
appropriate for affluent children. For disadvantaged children, on the
other hand, it is . . . essential.
Copyright ©
2011 by Alfie Kohn. This article may be downloaded, reproduced, and distributed
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