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Scaling the ladder of success
I am currently reading A Chance to Make History: What works and what doesn't in providing an excellent education for all by Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America. I am finding this book tremendously heartening because Ms Kopp thinks that great strides are being made in terms of ensuring that all children have access to an equal education. Here are some excerpts on this topic (pp 3-8).
Twenty years ago, the prevailing assumption in most policy circles was that socioeconomic circumstances determined educational outcomes. We had not found a way to provide children growing up in poverty an education that overcame its effects on any significant scale, and many assumed that fixing education would require fixing poverty first.
During my senior year in college, a hit movie, Stand and Deliver, made a national hero of Jaime Escalante, a teacher in East Los Angeles who coached a class of students to pass the AP Calculus exam. At the time, it seemed stunning that a teacher could get kids in a high-poverty community to excel at that level - so stunning that the Educational Testing Service questioned the validity of the test results of Escalante's students, creating the drama that attracted the attention of Hollywood. Movie audiences around the country were moved by the depiction of a charismatic and heroic teacher who could miraculously beat the odds with his students. We saw Escalante as an outlier - not as an example that could be widely replicated....
In the early 1990s, there were in fact a small number of widely-heralded examples of schools that changed the trajectories of children growing up in poverty. One of the most acclaimed was Marva Collins's Westside Preparatory School in Chicago, which she founded as a private school in 1975, initially to educate her own children and their neighborhood friends. the school's results were extraordinary - its students, including those who had been labeled as learning disabled by their previous schools, excelled academically, and many went on to attend the nation's finest universities. Yet while a handful of schools like Westside Prep were changing the lives of their students, the working assumption at the time seemed to be that if the school leaders left, the success would not continue. Indeed, in the case of Westside Prep, the school ultimately closed its doors in June 2008, citing enrollment and funding challenges....
Twenty years ago, we had a few visible examples of classrooms and schools in low-income communities that were changing the trajectories of children. Today, there are too many to count. In the Teach For America network alone, there are hundreds of teachers who, even in their first and second years of teaching, are proving it is possible for economically disadvantaged children to compete academically with their higher-income peers. Moreover, today dozens of communities also have growing numbers of schools that are putting whole buildings full of students on much more promising paths, year after year....
In fact, in dozens of communities around the country, there are growing numbers of classrooms and growing numbers of schools that are demonstrating that we don't need to wait to fix poverty in order to ensure that all children receive an excellent education. We can partner with children and their families, in a way that is replicable, to provide an education that changes their likely paths - an education that is transformational.
Although there is certainly much more to be understood about how to provide urban and rural children with opportunities that will put them on a path to college and life success, today we do know that it is possible to provide children growing up in poverty with an education that transforms their academic outcomes and, in turn, life options. And we can describe what it takes. Unlike twenty years ago, the question today is not whether success is possible but instead whether success is 'scalable'. Can we develop entire school programs that provide educaitonal opportunty for all students?
Even to this question, there is growing evidence that it is possible to realize significant progress. Just seven or eight years ago, New York City, Washington, DC, and New Orleans were on virtually everyone's list of exterme microcosms of our failure to provide chidren with the opportunities they need and deserve. Todya, while the school districts in these cities have a long way to go, each has shown that it is in fact possible to scale the success we are seeing in some classrooms and schools.
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