Unwarranted Pessimism on the Achievement Gap

Matt Yglesias is too pessimistic about the prospect of closing the achievement gap.

Referring to Paul Tough's recent NYTimes article, which concludes that the gap can be closed if we put disadvantaged students in schools that are better-run and have more money, he says:

This seems to me to involve assuming a can opener. Schools full of poor kids could do just as well as schools full of middle-class kids if they had more resources at their disposal than the middle-class schools had. But why would they have more resources? It's hard to imagine suburban homeowners voting for a politician who promises to raise their taxes in order to pay their kids' best teachers to go teach in inner city schools, thereby making it harder for their kids to get into selective colleges and reducing the value of the homes they own.

It's not hard to imagine, because it's happened in a number of places already. High-poverty school in Massachusetts get substantially more money than low-poverty schools, based on funding reforms implemented over a decade ago. The Maryland legislature implemented similar reforms a few years ago, also with broad support.

Suburban voters tolerate and in many cases support these policies, because (A) they're the right thing to do, and (B) wealthy suburban kids are still getting into good colleges, because they come from privileged backgrounds and go to good schools. You can have less money than a high-poverty school and still have enough money to teach your students well. The point of closing the achievement gap is not completely erasing class differences, it's giving disadvantaged students what they need to graduate and succeed in college, the workplace, and life. It's not a zero-sum game; nearly everyone can be well-educated if we give schools enough money--given whom they're educating--and spend it wisely.

Other states, obviously, still have inequitable funding systems. But there's plenty of precedent here, a significant number of states have done the right thing. And when the politicians won't do it voluntarily, disadvantaged districts have been able to go to the courts to forced their hand, as happened in New York just last week, when the state's highest court ordered the legislature to give New York City schools an extra $2 billion per year.

Moreover, there's an awful lot you can do without more money. While some of the reforms mentioned in the article are resource-intensive, many aren't. They have a lot to do with strong leadership, high expectations for all students and staff, and a disciplined focus on increasing learning results.

And these things, in turn, help tremendously with recruiting staff. The best way to induce good teachers to leave the suburbs and come into the cities is to create good schools that they would enjoy working in, schools that respect them as professionals and give them an opportunity to succeed at a job they really believe in. More money obviously helps, but there's a lot more to it than that.

So while poor kids could undoubtedly use an assumed can opener or two, in education and elsewhere, we don't need them to give those students a much better education than we're giving them today.