Never Say Never: Schools can close the achievement gap, but with help
By ELISABETH HULETTE

In his book, “Class and Schools,” Richard Rothstein reveals that in “candid moments,” even the co-founder of the KIPP schools admits that his group of high-octane charter schools can only promise to narrow the achievement gap, not erase it. “The gap is fixed by differences in home literacy years before students enter school,” David Levin said. School can fix only so much.

It’s a sobering admission, especially from Levin. His KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter schools are notable for some of the greatest national successes in raising test scores of low-achieving black and Hispanic children. Their methods are heralded as models for high-poverty schools that have long faced glaring gaps between academic scores of blacks and whites, between the rich and the poor.

But if someone like Levin has doubts about federal promises to eliminate racial inequity in school achievement by 2014, is it really possible?

Plenty of people have said no. Education theorists believe schools cannot hope to make up for a complex set of economic failures. Even the optimistic framers of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) appear to be backpedaling. The obstacles do seem insurmountable.

In their landmark book, “Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children,” Betty Hart and Todd Risley found that children up to age 3 raised by middle- to high-income parents with higher education degrees had a far richer language learning experience than the children of working-class families and families on welfare. Children’s IQ correlated with their language development: 117 for an upper-class child, 79 for a child on welfare by age 3.

Their discovery makes closing the achievement gap look bleak. As Lois Bloom said in her forward to Rothstein’s seminal book, “Hart and Risley discovered that some things don’t matter. For example, race/ethnicity doesn’t matter, gender doesn’t matter. But what does matter, and it matters very much, is relative economic advantage.”

If this is true, and if achievement is fully or even exclusively dependent on class, then it’s also true that schools would have to fix an array of socioeconomic ills before they could hope to close the gap. The most uneducated parents must obtain the cultural and financial resources of the wealthy, white upper class, miraculously, and instantly.

No wonder some say it’s impossible.

But to deny the gap can be closed is to give up on children who have every right to hope for a real education. There is nothing biologically or cognitively wrong with low-achieving students. They’re just as capable of excelling in school as their more privileged peers.

They can overcome the achievement gap. We know they can, because it’s been done.

The KIPP schools raised test scores of their low-income black and Hispanic students in Houston and the South Bronx; Uncommon Schools did the same in Newark, and Achievement First did it in New Haven. Some early college high schools, charter schools and empowerment schools in New York City have been just as successful. The real question is: What would it take to replicate these schools’ successes on a national level? What would it take to eliminate the achievement gap at all levels and in all schools, even in the most impoverished and ill-educated parts of the country?

In his January 2007 New York Times Sunday Magazine article, “What It Takes to Make a Student,” writer Paul Tough wrote that in mandating the elimination of the achievement gap, the president and others “seem not to have apprehended quite yet…the magnitude of the effort that will be required for that change to take place.” NCLB, he wrote, is “a national undertaking on the order of a moon landing.” But he doesn’t say it’s impossible.

Consider what could happen if all classes were reduced to a manageable, small size; perhaps 10 students per teacher. What if all teachers were trained with the equivalent of a doctorate in education, passed certification exams on the level of the bar, and were paid accordingly, in the six figures? What if the school day were longer—from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., like the KIPP schools—with extra tutoring time on Saturdays? What if parents also attended classes, on how to give their children the language learning suggested by Hart and Risley and how to encourage a climate of achievement around their children?

It goes without saying that such a reform movement is far outside the imagination of politicians who hold federal purse strings. It’s true that public education has never seen that kind of financing and effort. As evidenced by the unfunded mandates that came with NCLB, politicians are happy to talk about raising achievement for low-income and minority students but are far less willing to give educators the resources they need to make it happen. Logically and rationally, we can say that the momentous feats needed to close the national achievement gap may never, ever happen.

But we can’t say it’s impossible.