The Achievement Trap

The Jacke Kent Cooke Foundation, along with Civic Enterprises, LLC released a report on Sept. 10 on the Achievement Trap: How America is Failing Millions of High-Achieving Students form Lower-income Families. You can read their Press Release and look at the entire Report. I have excerpts of both below along with my opinions. [Emphasis mine]

A disturbing talent drain in our nation’s schools, squandering the potential of millions of lower-income, high-achieving students each year was exposed today before the U.S. House of Representative’s Education Committee. New research cited at the hearing shows that students who demonstrate strong academic potential despite obstacles that come with low incomes, are currently ignored under No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

In actuality, these same students were ignored long before NCLB. Our public government school system has been teaching to the middle for decades. This is part of the reason for the decline in our educational system. A larger part is the poor curriculum used in our schools today.

Joshua S. Wyner, Executive Vice President of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, which wrote the report with Civic Enterprises. “But we are missing an important opportunity to promote high achievement for all students, no matter what their income and background. The needs of high potential and high-achieving students should not be pitted against the educational needs of underachievers.”

Unfortunately, Mr. Wyner is missing an important opportunity here. Instead of asking Congress to further regulate the already over regulated government schools, he should have been asking for deregulation and the breaking up of this monopoly. As long as our education system is designed as a monopoly that forces students to go to a bureaucrat assigned school these students will continue to be ignored. Empower the parents instead of the bureaucracy.

In elementary and high school, lower-income students neither maintain their status as high achievers nor rise into the ranks of high achievers as frequently as higher-income students.

There are many reasons for this. I know many readers will claim it is due to a lack of money in the lower income neighborhoods, thus limiting the opportunities that lower income kids receive as opposed to those in higher income neighborhoods. This argument is rather disingenuous. The school officials that claim they need more money to provide more choice are the same people who want to maintain the government monopoly that denies parents choice. Money does not equal an increase in performance. Just look at Washington D.C. Schools and you’ll see why that approach is not the correct solution.

But this highly visible national struggle to reverse poor achievement among low-income students must be accompanied by a concerted effort to promote high achievement within the same population. The conclusion to be drawn from our research findings is not that high-achieving students from lower-income backgrounds are suffering more than other lower-income students, but that their talents are similarly under-nurtured. Even though lower-income students succeed at one grade level, we cannot assume that they are subsequently exempt from the struggles facing other lower-income students or that we do not need to pay attention to their continued educational success. Holding on to those faulty assumptions will prevent us from reversing the trend made plain by our findings: we are failing these high-achieving students throughout the educational process.

The quote highlighted is very telling, “their talents are similarly under-nurtured”. To put this in words everyone will understand, schools are throwing high achievers into the same class as low achievers. They then teach to the middle trying to bring up those at the low end leaving those at the high end to fend for themselves. This is the model throughout the overwhelming majority of our public government schools. This model must be broken.

If we break this model, what will we replace it with? The answer to that question is simple and has been repeated here many times. Here is how we help all children, overachievers, underachievers, and all those in between:

• Designate an equal amount of money for each school-aged child
• Empower parents to choose which school their child will attend
  • Public – in or out of current district boundary
  • Private
  • Charter
• Remove all current mandates
• Require all financial data to be on the internet for all public/charter schools
• Require yearly testing of all students – all schools (These tests should be created by an independent authority and not the current State or Education Bureaucracy)
• Require raw and aggregate testing results to be on the internet in a timely manner, i.e. in time for school selection for the upcoming school year – all schools
• DO NOT reauthorize NCLB, it will no longer be needed
• Abolish the Dept. of Education, it also will no longer be needed