Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson
Editorials
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Friday, July 13, 2007
OH, LORD. This is going to take some serious caffeine. Here’s still another story about still another educantist with still another idea about how not to improve education. The secondary headline gave it away, or so we thought:
Researcher: Hardships lead to less demands
Yep, here we go again. The same old routine: Little Johnny can’t read because he lives in a rough neighborhood, right? Teachers shouldn’t expect him to take tough courses because he has hardships, right? He’s raised by a single parent and he gets no help with his homework, right? And what is it going to take to combat all this? More money for teachers! All teachers in all schools! Good, poor or indifferent, it doesn’t matter! Pay no attention to those test scores. Just keep shelling out tax money.
Yep, we had our mouths all set to repeat our standard rant against the soft bigotry of low expectations in education. (It’s Editorial No. 342.) But then we began to read the article by our own Heather Hahn. It was about a lady named Stephanie G. Robinson, who’s with an outfit called Education Trust, Inc. She spoke to an audience of more than 80 educators from Arkansas and several surrounding states. Her message:
Teach the kids. They’ll learn.
“Kids come to school who are in poor health, kids come to us who are economically disadvantaged, and kids come to us who are growing up in rough neighborhoods,” she said. “Those are all very, very important and hard things to deal with . . . . We can’t change the way kids come to us. But we can certainly change what we do with them while we have them.”
Yes, but how? Here’s the word from Mrs. Robinson: Teach the kids no matter their background. Offer tough classes. Yes, there is often a gap between white, middle-class students and others—but it’s a gap in what they’re taught, not in what they can learn. Stephanie Robinson says teachers often fail to give challenging assignments to students who don’t get much help at home. To quote her: “We confuse experience with capacity.”
Mrs. Robinson has done her homework. She was the lead researcher in a project that studied what she described as “high-impact high schools.” Those are schools that raise the test scores of kids who begin their freshmen year scoring below their grade level—and then bloom. Those schools, no surprise, offered hard courses—like trig and calculus. Those schools take kids who score poorly as freshmen and put them in courses that involve lots of reading. (Bravo, dear lady! It’s all about reading. A kid can’t even score well in math if he can’t read the question.)
And here’s perhaps the most important thing those High Impact schools do: They put those students who are falling behind into classrooms with . . . . the very best teachers!
Of course. A good student is going to get As and Bs even if the kid’s got a teacher who just sits behind her desk handing out dittos. It’s the kids who are behind who need those special, lifechanging teachers we’ve all had at one blessed time or another. Well, sure. It makes sense when you think about it. Wouldn’t you send the sickest patient to the best doctor?
Alas, a lot of educators haven’t figured that out yet. Or as Mrs. Robinson said: “It’s still hard to combat the hierachy in high school.” We don’t doubt that a bit.
One solution would be, yes, merit pay. Such programs can even be designed to encourage the best teachers to work with the poorest students. Correction: not the poorest students, but those with the lowest scores before they’re given the best teachers in the most demanding schools.
It’s almost a natural result of merit pay plans: Teachers begin to gravitate toward the most difficult students. Those kids turn out to be the most rewarding students, literally. The more the students have to make up from test score to test score, the more points they gain. And the more improvement they show, the higher the teacher’s paycheck.
No, the teachers aren’t doing it for the money alone—any more than the rest of us who love our jobs are doing it strictly for the dough. But a raise is a sign that others recognize our accomplishment. It’s the kind of validation all of us strive for. Besides, we could use the money.
We don’t know if Stephanie Robinson is pro or agin merit pay. She’s an education researcher, so we wouldn’t bet a lunch on it either way. But she’s on solid, historically proven ground when it comes to this: Kids tend to meet standards, even when those standards are set high. The racial gap in our schools doesn’t mean certain kids can’t learn. The latest test scores show that not only can this state narrow that gap, but we are narrowing it. We can do this, folks. And so can those kids.
Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson. Good luck as you go around the country spreading the good word. And if you spot a rooftop along the way, feel free to shout from it.
