The chasm remains: A Nation at Risk failed to address the unique problems of urban schools and minority children, whose test scores continue to lag behind those of whites - Feature

Education Next, Spring, 2003 by Paul T. Hill, Kacey Guin, Mary Beth Celio

MINORITY STUDENTS ARE BECOMING INCREASINGLY CONCENTRATED IN urban school districts, During the 1990-91 school year, 40 of the 57 districts that are members of the Council of the Great City Schools reported student populations in which minority students composed the majority. By the 1997-98 school year, the number had risen to 46 districts. Though there are 15,000 school districts in the United States, ten big districts educate 19 percent of all African-American children, and six educate 21 percent of all Hispanic students. Students in these urban districts are likely to be poor and to attend school with others who are poor. According to Education Week, 53 percent of students in urban districts attend high-poverty schools, compared with 22 percent of students in nonurban districts.

A Nation at Risk didn't have much to say to these school districts and their students. Its prescriptions made sense for students whose basic preparation for school was sound and for school systems that had the capacity to respond to pressure by offering more rigorous courses. But raised expectations alone are not a remedy for the problems of children who enter school unprepared to do the work that is normally expected. Similarly, requiring that schools teach more challenging materials is not sufficient for schools that cannot provide competent instruction. Nor is the prescription to raise standards for new teachers necessarily helpful to schools and districts that are the least attractive employers.

The gaps between minority and white achievement are as wide now as at the time that Risk was released, Moreover, gaps in "authentic" indicators like rates of high-school completion and college entry continue to be very large. In 74 urban districts studied by Education Week--districts where many if not a majority of the students are minorities--less than 50 percent of the freshmen entering high school in 1990 graduated four years later. Post-Risk reforms were intended to decrease academic failure, but in situations where standards are raised but instruction is not improved, they might in fact increase the dropout rate. Russell Rumberger of the University of California, Santa Barbara, suggests that some high schools might "push out" students who are expected to get low test scores. Melissa Roderick of the University of Chicago and Eric Camburn of the University of Michigan have also shown that students drop out due to their fear of nor being able to complete all required credits. They suggest that large, impers onal high schools and poor elementary- and middle-school preparation lead to early failure in key courses and thence to dropping out.

Quelling Entrepreneurship

Clearly, in our existing public education system, raised expectations are not sufficient to drive universal improvement. High expectations are necessary, as long as they are a reflection of what children really need to know rather than a utopian vision of what every child in a perfect world would know. But they need to be coupled with fundamental changes in the education system, especially in large urban systems.

A common observation among social-service workers and heads of philanthropic foundations is that big-city public school systems are the toughest and least malleable bureaucracies they deal with. Moreover, public education has little capacity to invest in new ideas. The vast preponderance of money in K-12 schools goes for salaries. Certification rules and the provisions of union contracts control employment. Even when government increases education spending, unions make sure that most of it is used for salary increases. When there are new investments-like California's recent efforts to reduce class sizes--they are allocated via political entrepreneurship and bargaining, not according to what works.

These facts make it difficult for new ideas and new people to penetrate public education. Public schools allow small-scale innovation by individual teachers, but these innovations are usually limited to one classroom or school, leading to complaints among educators about the futility of "random acts of innovation' There is no mechanism for a promising idea to capture a wider market, nor is there any incentive for other teachers or schools to adopt a promising idea.

Being an unfriendly environment for entrepreneurship hurts urban school systems in two ways: 1) they are nor oriented toward a continual search for better ways of serving students; and 2) they seldom can take full advantage of ideas and resources available in the broader society.

Big-city school systems are constrained by rules and the individual ownership of jobs. Districts can do anything that their funders and regulators (including courts with which they have consent decrees) will permit. In practice, the aggregate effect of these constraints is to make any action outside the status quo risky. Almost any reallocation of time, money, teachers, or students is likely to generate objections. Teacher union contracts in most cities also prevent schools from choosing teachers and assume that "fit" does not matter: teachers are interchangeable, and schools are created only by assembling standard parts. This attitude ignores the reality that schools with inferior or mismatched parts, such as less capable teachers, will likely produce inferior results.