Expected to Fail: Making the Familiar Strange

The achievement gap between White and Minority students – as demonstrated through achievement tests, years of schooling, high school graduation and, more generally, outcomes – is formidable and shocking.The NAEP (National Assessment of Education Programs) compiles an annual report card on the achievement gap including trends and graphs in an overall assessment of progress. The unequal results of schooling are endemic and seem to be built into some part of the system as they continually recur, impervious to minor tweaks on schooling.

Inequalities by race persist at all age levels

Inequity in schools and school achievement limit the opportunities students have to achieve equality in the economy at large as unequal preparation and access determines future positions in the work force. Real differences in resources (i.e., good teachers, computer access, private tutoring, material parts of schools) impact and skew the education system in an obvious and measurable way but are not completely at fault for unequal outcomes.  I often wonder and am even more frequently asked what other factors help explain low achievement, school misconduct, and other social problems in urban schools.

As a society and as learning communities, we’ve grown from the days where we quoted bogus studies about brain-size and differently structured DNA to explain differences in school achievement levels. Work in the sociology of education field rationalizes the achievement gap and school failure by mostly Black and Latino students by pointing to culture, politics, economics, and other social circumstances to explain real differences in educational outcomes. The schools we build and run are not necessarily neutral settings where information and rewards are equally accessible to all students. Social interaction between groups and individuals defines many of the outcomes available to students and the processes that lead to those outcomes. Expectations that schools, teachers, and families place on students are heavily influenced by the achievement gap statistics and attitudes we have related to poverty.

Rationalizations for the achievement gap such as the increasingly popular culture-of-poverty explanations by sociologists affect our schools and teachers as they walk into classrooms every day. [For a discussion on the Culture of Poverty and education and an interview with William Julius Wilson, please see “Thoughts on Education Policy.”] These rationalizations for failure are interestingly challenged through Sociology of Education expert Pedro Noguera’s work at Berkeley High School. The Diversity Project he spearheaded worked to accomplish something we should replicate throughout our failing schools; they worked on “Making the Familiar Strange.” These effects were exceptionally clear to me as I walked into an all-too-familiar parent-teacher night at the school that I work at in New York City.

Parent Teacher Night at Brandeis

I work as a tutor at Brandeis High School in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, serving a group of 42 students to succeed academically any way I can. On the surface, it simply involves preparing them for any test that will occur within the next five periods, but I actually spend most of my day being an advocate for them with their teachers.  When some of my students shared with me that they would have liked their parents to come to last week’s parent-teacher conference day – which they couldn’t attend due to work obligations – I stepped in and tried to see as many teachers as I could. No teacher I spoke with at Brandeis wants the students to fail at school or at life, and I’m certain they wish the kids nothing but the best.  However, the ways that a few teachers that I talked with explain failure is exemplary of how the culture of poverty discourse and the expectations that it reinforces are hurting the students it aims to help. The discussion I had with some teachers in some classrooms sometimes turned rapidly to socioeconomic or cultural issues that supposedly preconditioned the students for failure.  When I pressed a foreign-language teacher for examples of shortcomings or specific areas where the student could improve, the teacher insisted that the student had other siblings that had dropped out of Brandeis and that the student should probably be tested for something. Some teachers were sometimes incredibly aware of the existence of problems in the students’ home lives, but were often unsure what problems they were, using the information only as an explanation for their failure in class.

In support of my informal findings in a limited context at Brandeis, sociologist Martin Haberman’s writes in Pedagogy of Poverty: “[R]ecord-keeping is the systematic maintenance of a paper trail to protect the school against any future legal action by its clients. Special classes, referrals, test scores, disciplinary actions, and analysis by specialists must be carefully recorded.” The path of least resistance for the student in school is an unstructured and unchallenging classroom where teachers can create an impossibility for real failure since the expectation of success never exists. The teacher may be compliant because compliance means order and peace of mind within the classroom. And, I should add, because that expectation of success may never exist in the teacher. Haberman argues that unless the definition of good teaching (or even just teaching) is challenged and changed, nothing will improve for struggling urban students. “In the present system, teachers are accountable only for engaging in the limited set of behaviors commonly regarded as acts of teaching in urban schools – that is, the pedagogy of poverty.”

Expanding the argument of how the expectations on minority students ultimately affect their school outcomes, educator Joe Nocera talks about “White Flight” from urban schools. Over the past half century, middle-class parents all across the United States have abandoned the public school system in the big city because of diminished expectations of the schooling offered. Nocera details his own experience and outlines the fears that middle class parents have of the peer group their children will be involved with in high minority urban schools. The school-abandoning phenomenon – which is also practiced by Black middle-class parents – has drained voices and resources from the public school and reinforced the low expectations placed upon it. Prospective public-school middle-class families have bought into the idea of a culture of poverty and frightened of the consequences of negative outcomes for their children have taken them to private school or relocated the whole family to put them in public schools elsewhere.

Making the Familiar Strange – Pedro Noguera and BHS

Pedro Noguera

As mentioned earlier, Pedro Noguera, cognizant of the implicit adherence to this culture of failure by the teachers and school itself at Berkeley High School,  sought out to “make the familiar seem strange and problematic” as part of the Diversity Project. The taskforce was charged with improving the school. In one of their initial meetings Noguera writes that they “understood that the biggest obstacle to be overcome involved the explanations and rationalizations of this phenomenon that already existed in the minds of most people. Data on the attrition of minority students and on their performance in academic classes had been publicized and made available to the entire school and community for many years.” In order to make the school realize what it was doing, Noguera and the Project challenged the teachers to question their assumptions on why the students were succeeding and why they were failing. One of the first activities of the Diversity Project took the teachers through the neighborhoods where most of their students lived. The cultural and community resources embedded in these neighborhoods had been previously ignored. Even teachers that grew up in those very neighborhoods now saw them as breeding grounds for academic failure! The Diversity Project asked the teachers to look at these neighborhoods and their denizens in a different way.

Another interesting activity accomplished by the Diversity Project was to divide the teachers into four rooms that challenged “familiar” concepts within their schools and forced them to understand them as “strange” outcomes. One such strange concept was published in national newspapers because of both how familiar and strange it was.

The analysis of 9th grader GPA by zip code and median household income (shown below) shows the shockingly straightforward relationship between household income and mean GPA. The more the 9th graders family earned at home, the better the grades he or she received at school. Other room presentations showed teachers the frequency of minority students in remedial classes, the racial differences in choosing extracurricular and after-school activities. (White students were disproportionately represented in activities that could enhance one’s academic performance, i.e., debating team or academic clubs.)

Berkeley, California

While the research conducted in the definition of the culture of poverty highlights some important issues needed to reconstruct confidence and reinform minority students, the realities of expectations that teachers and school systems have on the students shaped by belief in this culture of poverty or belief in insurmountable obstacles is also often at play in the classroom. Noguera’s work shows the value in working with the schools to transform their expectations and make them appreciate their current role in the reproduction of inequality and the opportunities accessible through change.

From my own experience, I have learned that when the hopes of teachers are encouraged and transformed into real actions for improving the quality of teaching, the possibility of bringing about substantial change in schools can be realized.

Conclusions

The “Culture of Poverty” and lower expectations may have affected some City teachers for decades. For some teachers, their understanding of achievement gap research informs their idea of where “urban students” come from and leads to generalizations that end up damaging student opportunities and academic outcomes.

Recommended reading for the Education Policy wonks among us

One of the important lessons here is that systemic reaction to research is an important consideration in publishing. Education policy needs to be informed by great research in education, and the achievement gap is certainly an issue that needs that kind of focus and exploration. However, realizing the crucial role that expectations play in the classroom education policy should also work to condition teachers to use this research as a rallying call against racial injustice and not as an excuse for continuing failure. Pedro Noguera’s goal of “making the familiar strange” should serve as a fine example for all teachers and administrators on how to properly react to familiar, pervasive failure.

Changing Community Attitudes Toward Education

For all the things that we try to improve in our schools, some deeper realities have not changed in many classrooms around the country. Sure, the laptops are there, along with smaller class sizes, bilingual teachers, learning specialists, and many other tweaks to education policy have been implemented. However, despite all these improvements, the achievement gap between affluent White students and others has persisted. In New York City, the nation’s largest school district, the Department of Education, headed by Chancellor Joel Klein and closely monitored by Mayor Bloomberg, has worked on changing everything but what matters might end up mattering the most.

The changes proposed by New York City Department of Education all follow sound education policy in theory. For example, the City review process of schools represents strong accountability within the school district by closing big comprehensive high schools and replacing them with smaller schools. However, despite this improvement in accountability, the community’s support for the students that use the public school system has shown little to no change. Where one would expect outrage and a state of emergency, one finds apathy and complicity that speak volumes of where we find ourselves in the process of closing the achievement gap.

On February 4 of this year, Javier Hernandez of The New York Times wrote an article about the closing of “an Upper West Side behemoth” – Louis D. Brandeis High School. (Never mind that the article was written by another Manhattan behemoth that may also become outdated and “anachronistic”–luckily for the Times that stones from failing Upper West Side high schools don’t reach their glass offices 40 streets downtown.) That February 4 morning, Brandeis students awoke to the news that their school was in the Times for the first time since 1993 when the paper reported on an 8-student arrest that followed a disturbance at the school. The article describes the students as the city’s “most disadvantaged,” from “the poorest regions of the Bronx, Manhattan and Brooklyn,” and having landed at the school “after failing to list any preference on their school choice forms.” Their own teacher, Mr. Bhattacharjya, argued that the school failed “because the students we have come from socioeconomically disadvantaged families, making it impossible for them to get any homework help.” Almost 2,300 City kids, some as young as 13, woke up to read that they and their families were being described as the City’s unfortunate and directionless poor. The story was reread to them throughout the school day as teachers at Brandeis sought comfort and shared outrage from their students.

The situation at Brandeis certainly has been alarming and newsworthy for the last two decades during which the newspaper chose not to report on the school. The state of urban education has been alarming and newsworthy throughout the whole country, as we have allowed the systemic failure of our schools and students to determine the impossible access to opportunity, higher education, and profitable jobs for much of the population. While I support some of the new policy changes being explored in schools and districts across the country, I also know that if we do not pair those changes with outrage toward the current conditions and the achievement gap between rich and poor students in this country, nothing will end up changing. Real change can only happen when newspapers like The New York Times stop publishing articles that treat these students as part of another community, not the one that The New York Times represents. We must be advocates and champions for these students and refuse to allow excuses like socioeconomic difference to determine access to equal opportunity.

The New York Times and many others that fail to understand the commitment we need to make to our kids often propose in-vogue new “can’t miss” solutions to our old problems. It is important to look more at ideas that we can possible stick with over time. One such idea for making a really lasting improvement has been put forth by education policy scholars David Tyack and Larry Cuban in their book Tinkering Toward Utopia. Tinkering argues that although some researched solutions fall short of more revolutionary aspirations, they are still incredibly important as they allow more and more students increased access to opportunity. Far from ignoring important research in the sociology of education and education policy, it must be understood that change needs to be paired with long-term commitment, and there is a need for engagement at multiple levels. Education policy cannot just be about the latest fad.

Real improvements in educational outcomes will entail a long term commitment to closing the achievement gap from many different actors. It is not only the system of education, but also the attitude and apathy of the community that create and tolerate that system that we must work to change. While perfecting outdated systems is helpful and necessary, the most meaningful and transformative change of all may need to happen outside the school. This is something to which The New York Times and others should be more attuned.