Читать книгу Kids Left Behind, The - William H. Parrett - Страница 7

Foreword

For many years, most Americans—including most American educators—have believed that schools can’t make much of a difference in the lives of the children they serve. Especially if those children are poor or members of minority groups, their destiny was thought to be low achievement, no matter what their schools did. Sure, maybe one or two could be saved. But surely not all or even most. Why? Because, in the end, “socioeconomic factors” like poverty, low levels of parent education, and the like would always win out.

The view that schools can’t make a difference has covered up a multitude of sins. While many Americans believe that the underachievement of minority or low-income students is largely about them and their families—that is, that all kids are taught the same things, but some simply manage to learn less—the truth is actually quite different. Certainly, these students often enter school behind. But instead of organizing our educational system to ameliorate that problem, we organize it to exacerbate the problem. How do we do that? By giving less to these kids who come to us with less. Indeed, we give these students less of everything that both research and experience tell us make a difference.

Thus, instead of helping to close gaps between groups, what we do in schools often has exactly the opposite effect. Children who come to us a little behind leave a lot behind. African-American and Latino students leave high school with skills in math and reading that white students have when they leave middle school. And the gaps between poor and rich are also cavernous.

What’s so devastating about all of this is that we now know that it doesn’t have to be this way. For around the country, there are schools that are proving every single day of the school year that poor and minority children can achieve at high levels—if we teach them at high levels and provide them and their teachers with the support they need to get there. Demography is not, in other words, destiny—or at least it doesn’t have to be.

It is hugely important for both educators and the general public to know how powerful schools can be. And indeed, the stories of schools that serve very poor children, yet produce very high results provide exactly the tonic of hope and inspiration that can help restore the luster of a public education system that has lost considerable public confidence over the last two decades.

But these schools are important for far more than inspiration. The educators in these schools have unlocked some of the mysteries that still plague schools more generally. How, indeed, do we enable all of our students—including those who seem disaffected and disengaged—to master the high-level skills and knowledge they need to secure a foothold in our increasingly complex economy and society?

There have, of course, been some studies of these high-performing, high-poverty schools. But these are often small and idiosyncratic. And until now, nobody has tried to look across these studies and distill some of the key lessons that can provide a foundation for improvement efforts in other communities.

With this book, Bob Barr and Bill Parrett have done an enormous service to educators who want to jump-start improvement efforts in their own schools or communities. In one volume, they’ve looked across all of the many studies and distilled the major findings in a highly readable fashion.

There’s a lot here. But then again, real improvement never follows from just one new program. Indeed, in our own studies of high-performing schools, what’s immediately obvious is that the educators in those schools think differently about almost everything.

The Kids Left Behind will give you plenty of food for thought.

—Kati Haycock, Director of the Education Trust Washington, DC