Sportive Thoughts

Educators, policy makers, sociologists and citizens have long noted the academic disparities present between various tracking groups. Children raised in low socioeconomic status,¹ Black and Latino children are often found on the lower end of academic achievement, as compared to children raised in high SES and Whites.² Yet those concerned about these achievement gaps (AG) are comforted by the near closure of the boy-girl AG.³ Elsewhere, schools have seen improvements—but not widespread corrections—of economically and racially based AGs. It is imperative that all those involved with education ask, what helped improve those gains in test scores and what more can be done to equalize the education experience in the United States? I will work on the claim that synchronizing the educational values and expectations of students, family, educators and policy-makers is the necessary first step towards implementing improved cirricula and overall educational experience.

Initially, one needs to be clear on precisely who is attempting to implement changes in education. The long history of unequal education in the United States has been addressed in very different ways. Even the celebrated Brown v Board shows a plurality of perspectives that sometimes did not align. Oliver Brown, the plantiff, was a parent whose daughters attended a segregated school district; his concerns as a father differed somewhat from his daughter, who only wanted to go to school with her friends⁴. Civil rights activist McKinley Burnett and lawyers Charles Bledsoe and John Scott wished to challenge segregation as a whole, and sought Mr. Brown's help in filing suit on his daughters' behalf. Clearly, even in the nascent equalization movement, a plurality of views governed what individuals saw as important for a child's educational experience.

For the purposes of this paper, three viewpoints will be considered: students and their families, educators, and policy-makers. Students are first and foremost the benefactors of public education. No matter how the aims of public education are defined, the entire school system is designed to have an effect on all⁵ children K-12. On the one hand, the various achievements earned by students are evidence that such a universal effect has not been achieved. Yet, if we think that educational outcome is the only concern of the child, we will sorely miss the importance of a student's first-hand experience within the school system. Hence a fuller assessment of student's educational experience will include children's socialization, growth as individuals, and formation of expectations and values. In addition, the immediate impact on family members should also be taken into account.

Educators are the persons responsible for student achievement. Their role is seen, in part, as mediators of knowledge; educators are supposed to impart on their pupils the information, problem solving skills, and values required by society. Although, we should ask that if it is society for which children are being prepared, why do not family members take on the primary role of education? The answer to this question—that public education is intended to prepare a child for any given social role according to her ability—highlights the fact that educators have the additional job of preparing children for a social and cultural role beyond their home environment. Social preparation is often left as an undeclared standard,⁶ making inevitable social transitions all the more awkward. In the textbooks and the tests, students are not being prepared for . The educator thus has the extra challenge of mediating unknown expectations to his students.

Lastly, policy-makers have a stake in public education in that their effort to design and manage the school system to cleanly integrate many diverse citizens into a national body. A well-educated populous is economically productive, healthier, and less violent than a not-so-well-educated populous. In addition to civil well-being and order, policy-makers have the responsibility of allocating public resources. Not only the money spent on education, but also the curriculum development, teacher hiring, local and regional organization incorporate many complex issues with a direct effect on the classroom. Unsurprisingly, policy-makers impose many expectations on teachers and students alike; and from the public policy perspective, the goal of closing the AG will inspire game-changing strategies which place radical new expectations on revamped classroom environments.

The key concepts—educational values and expectations—are not objectively quantifiable in the same manner that test scores or household income are. But we can plausibly match certain values and expectations with specific efforts taken in response to the AG. The steadiest example might be found in the education of girls and women during the later 20^th century. There were two stages in improved education of women. First, there was the slow erasure of the belief that men are naturally more intelligent than women. Some still hold this belief, or a modified version where men are supposedly more intelligent in certain subject matters than women, but for the most part it is a passé notion. This improvement might be called an improvement in expectations. Second, there was a concerted effort to encourage women's participation in higher education and the workplace. This might be called an improvement in values about and among women, where it was not only acceptable but also laudable that women become high achievers alongside men.

Both these qualitative changes in educational expectations and values accompany quantitative changes in academic achievement. Interestingly, these qualitative changes also accompany improvements in boys' academic achievement; roughly, as girls vastly improve their prospects in school, boys slightly improve as well.⁷ In accordance with my central thesis, it is plausible that coordinating the expectations and values of girls to be similar if not equal to that of boys helps foster a more positive learning environment where both boys and girls improve. We see larger strides taken by girls because they are in a position to catch up; but we do not see girls overtaking boys in recent years because the entire goal has been equalization. The case seems to be a promising success story, and key to national improvement of education across class and race barriers will be similar equalizing efforts.

We must then invent a model to test new approaches to education. The modus operandi in this model education system will be the synchronization⁸ of educational groups' expectations and values. This synchonization might occur within three structural domains, where concrete methods can be applied and measured. In the classroom, students should be expected to use their natural knowledge in the classroom, to ask questions, to be helpful to each others' learning, and bring home a positive assessment of their daily activities; teachers should encourage those expectations, as well as provide an active role-model for students' academic life. Within the school district, parents should be expected to encourage children's educational success, communicate questions and concerns to teachers, and positively engage with the school system. In turn, faculty and administration should be expected to communicate between individual schools, interact with students from other schools, and be thoughoughly familiar with community concerns. On a regional level, school districts should be expected to share successful strategies, become familiar with needs and differences across regions, and foster regional cooperation in the public education.

My hypothesis is that top-performing school systems approximate this ideal model, and that improvement in educational outcomes of select groups occur when segments of the school system approximate the model with respect to the group. Testing and proof of this hypothesis will be very limited due to a research bottleneck caused by time constraints and other factors; thus an extensive review of related literature should provide the most immediate insight into these research questions. More research is needed on the effectiveness of specific overhauls in the education system and those efforts' relation to quantifiable changes in academic achievement.

The layout of my final paper will be as follows. Section One will review information regarding the several achievement gaps, their social and economic effects. Section Two will look at successful, unsuccessful, and inconclusive attempts to close some AGs within the Chicago Public School system. A goal of this section will be to dispel the notion that successes are the result of only one or two qualitative changes; dynamic school and systemwide changes are most successful. Section Three will propose solutions, and ground those proposals in practices that already work.

1Low socioeconomic status (or “SES”) is defined here as membership in a family earning less than $25,000 a year. High SES is defined as membership in a family earning more than $75,000 a year. One problem with these definitions will be the fact that they do not take into account the income per member of household.

2McKinsey & Company, 2009

3AAUW, 2008

4KTWU, 2004 http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/jan-june04/brown_05-12.html

5Particularly for Chicago, it is important to note who is in the public school system and who is not. From the 1970s through the 1990s, “White flight” drained much of the diversity and funding from CPS. The result was a system composed of mainly minority and low SES students. Thus, even though public education is intended to be accessible to all, the system rarely serves all children.

6The language of much material on the aims of education emphasizes “benchmarks that are responsive to the demand of the 21^st century” while ignoring the actual social opportunities and constraints that all people face (Koch, Christopher A., “American Diploma Project” http://www.isbe.state.il.us/ADP/default.htm. Accessed: July 7, 2009)

7AAUW, 2008

8Sometimes evidence of synchonization is contextual, the biggest example is the degree to which parents choose housing based on the quality of the local school. Likely, many parents choose similar housing when they have similar educational expectations for their children; the neighborhood is already partially synchonized.

Synchronizing Expectations and Values in School Districts by Jared A. Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.