Rothstein Redux

In today's NyTimes, Diana Jean Schemo writes about a "growing body of evidence" supporting one side of an argument that doesn't actually exist. But she also, perhaps inadvertently, provides an important glimpse into one side of a debate that's all too real. She writes:

The No Child Left Behind law, enacted in 2002, took a stand on this issue. The law, one instance in which President Bush and Congressional Democrats worked together, rests on the premise that schools make the crucial difference. It holds a school alone responsible if the students — whatever social, economic, physical or intellectual handicaps they bring to their classrooms — fail to make sufficient progress every year.

Yet a growing body of research suggests that while schools can make a difference for individual students, the fabric of children’s lives outside of school can either nurture, or choke, what progress poor children do make academically.

Schemo frames No Child Left Behind as one side of an argument between people who believe that factors outside schools affect students, and believe who don't believe that factors outside schools affect students. There is no such debate. No reasonable person believes that students' economic, social, and family circumstances are irrelevant to educational progress.

To say that NCLB "holds a school alone responsible" for student progress is to ascribe far more power to the law than it, or any law, could possibly have. There are whole worlds of responsibility for the dire circumstances of disadvantaged students who aren't learning well. All No Child Left Behind does is create a system that identifies which schools those students attend, and insists that we should try to make those schools better.

The real debate is whether trying to give disadvantaged students better schools is worth the effort. Some people clearly think the answer is no:

In his 2004 book, “Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap,” Richard Rothstein, a former writer of this column, argues that reforms aimed at education alone are doomed to come up short, unless they are tied to changes in economic and social policies to lessen the gaps children face outside the classroom.

A lack of affordable housing makes poorer children more transient, and so more prone to switch schools midyear, losing progress. Higher rates of lead poisoning, asthma and inadequate pediatric care also fuel low achievement, along with something as basic as the lack of eyeglasses. Even the way middle- and lower-class parents read to their children is different, he writes, making learning more fun and creative for wealthier children.

“I would never say public schools can’t do better,” Mr. Rothstein said. “I’d say they can’t do much better,” unless lawmakers address the social ills caused by poverty.

That's the whole issue in a nutshell. The debate is not between those who thinks schools can do almost everything and those who don't. It's between those who think schools can do hardly anything and those who don't.

Rothstein presents an essentially defeatist, anti-school reform argument. At its core, it's an attack on the value and efficacy of educators. It's also simply divorced from reality--what reasonable person could spend even a little time in one of the deeply dysfunctional schools that many urban students are forced to attend and say "they can't do much better," or spend time in one of the great schools serving those students and conclude that they already have?

Creating better schools is one part of a larger challenge to give marginalized, disadvantaged students better nutrition, housing, health care, and ultimately better lives. To set those individual goals against one another -- to argue that one should be ignored until some far-off day when all the others are solved -- harms no one more than the students themselves.