Читать книгу The Data Coach's Guide to Improving Learning for All Students - Katherine E. Stiles - Страница 15

Making significant progress in improving student learning and closing achievement gaps is a moral responsibility and a real possibility in a relatively short amount of time—two to five years. It is not children’s poverty or race or ethnic background that stands in the way of achievement; it is school practices and policies and the beliefs that underlie them that pose the biggest obstacles.

Federal and state policies will come and go. But one moral imperative is abiding. As Michael Fullan (1993) reminds us, “You can’t mandate what matters” (p. 21). And what matters is educators’ deep responsibility for the learning of every child. This assumption implies a shift from a compliance mentality—a sense of external accountability, something someone is making us do—to a sense of internal and collective responsibility. It also reflects the authors’ belief that it is impossible to use data as a lever for change without talking about race, class, and culture and our beliefs about the capabilities of children. It is the silence about these issues that has kept us from confronting problems and taking action.

The potential to dramatically improve the learning of traditionally underserved students has been demonstrated time and again. The Using Data Project schools serving African American, Latino/a, Native American, and poor students significantly improved student achievement within three years (Zuman, 2006). The Education Trust database Dispelling the Myth contains the data on thousands of schools that are serving students living in poverty and from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, yet are achieving at high levels (Education Trust, 2003). Glenn Singleton and Curtis Linton (2006), in their book Courageous Conversations About Race, report on the Del Roble Elementary School in Oak Grove, California, which dramatically accelerated the progress toward mastery of standards of African American and Latino/a students in a year’s time by “acknowledging that racial biases existed in their own work and that these biases made it difficult for some student of color groups to succeed” and then taking corrective action (p. 36).

Improvement strategies such as aligning curriculum to rigorous standards, frequently monitoring student progress, organizing schools to engage in short cycles of collaborative inquiry, providing professional development linked to student goals, and offering immediate extra help for students who need it—many of which can happen quickly—were implemented in the Using Data field-test sites and paid off with increased student-learning gains.

To examine one’s assumptions and beliefs about educating children—in particular, given the history of our country, African American children—is crucial to becoming a successful teacher of Black children.

—CampbellJones and CampbellJones, 2002, p. 136