The Wall Street Journal last week ran an op-ed by Professor Paul Peterson of Harvard University reporting that the academic achievement of African-American students has progressed little if any in recent years, an outcome he attributes to lax federal education policy. The study attracted much attention in Washington, where the major federal education policy, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, known since 2002 as No Child Left Behind, or NCLB), is being considered for reauthorization. The House recently passed a new version of NCLB, renaming it the Student Success Act and loosening its regulations. Could further loosening spell even worse outcomes for African-American students?
I don’t think so. Not because I think loosening is better policy than tightening—though I believe it is. Federal education policy, loose or tight, is simply not the main driver of student outcomes. Though ESEA has sought to promote equity in education since its historic adoption in 1965, there is scant evidence that it has ever done so, in any guise, past or present.
While at Education Sector, a team of us had spent much of the previous year getting beneath the surface of the national data from the National Assessment of Education Progress, or NAEP. Since 1970, NAEP has served as the “Nation’s Report Card,” tracking the achievement of fourth, eighth, and 12th-graders in all major subjects. It is really the only national assessment that allows us to look at all students, in all types of schools, over time.
Like any assessment, NAEP has its issues and detractors. But one statistic that is largely undisputed is the persistent gap in achievement between white students and African-American students that the study reveals. In 1970, the gap amounted to three years of achievement by eighth grade: an African American eighth-grader achieved about the same level as a white fifth grader. With our country’s history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination, the gap was understandably large. In the years since the gap was documented, the federal government has worked to further desegregate schools, pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into low-income schools, mandated annual standardized testing, and imposed sanctions upon schools that fail to make academic progress. Today, 40 years after the achievement gap was first measured, African American students are behind their white peers two and half years in eighth-grade—a half year of progress after four decades of trying.
This is disturbing, to be sure. But it is not the whole story. It is a story based upon national averages. Beneath those averages are stories of remarkable and remarkably widespread progress. In our decentralized system of education, individual schools, public as well as private, have considerable freedom to find their own solutions to the challenges they experience. Public policy constrains that freedom, but that policy is set much more by the states than by the federal government. Schools also take their cues from other schools in their communities, whether as colleagues or competitors. It makes more sense, then, to ask how schools in individual states or communities are serving students than to consider the nation as a whole.
In an Education Sector paper (PDF) that I co-authored in June, we reported the rather stunning news that schools in a number of states had raised the achievement of economically disadvantaged students a full year or more in the last decade, actually 2003-2011. We also reported that progress was unrelated to economic resources—schools making the most progress were found in both rich states and poor states. The top gainers, after taking into account economic resources, were schools in Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Kentucky, and Georgia. Ten states in all raised the achievement of low-income students a full year.
My co-author on the report, Constance Clark, has since examined the achievement of African-American students at the state level. In a forthcoming paper, she reports that schools in eight states raised the achievement of African American fourth and eighth-graders a year or more in less than a decade. Again, progress had nothing to do with the economic resources of the states. What explains the progress? Clark reports that the states where African-American students gained most are largely the same states where disadvantaged students and all students gained most. States on all three top 10 lists include New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, Florida, Rhode Island, and the District of Columbia. Several other states, rich and poor, made the top 15 on all three lists.
There is evidently something good happening across all types of schools in these states. Students from diverse backgrounds are improving rapidly. We know, from state applications to the U.S. Department of Education for NCLB waivers, that the most improved states have been among the leading school reformers. They have been national leaders in establishing academic standards for deeper learning, in supporting teachers with ongoing professional development, and in offering schools in crisis effective assistance.
Much more needs to be understood, but the point here is not what exactly each state has done to promote reform. The point is that schools are overcoming seemingly intractable education challenges to educational equity. The gains that African-American students are making in several states would eliminate the achievement gap by 2020 if sustained. That is progress that history suggests is impossible. And it is progress that national data, like NAEP, often conceal. Yet it is very real.
A version of this blog post appeared on the National Association of Independent Schools President’s Blog.
Photo Credit: Asia Society