Winerip on Poverty, Etc.

Micheal Winerip covers a new ETS report in the Times today, exploring the relationship between out-of-school factors like single parenthood, TV watching, reading at home, etc. and student achievement. The report--which I have no quarrel with, Education Sector co-director Andy Rotherham was a reviewer--finds, to the surprise of no one, that these things make a difference, in the way that one would expect they would.

Therefore, what?

Because this is the question that matters. Those of us who work on education policy for a living have endured listened to a seemingly endless series of arguments around these issues in recent years, where one side says "of course schools are important" and the other side says "of course poverty (or whatever other non-school issue interests them) is important," as if these are debatable questions. So let's state, unequivocally and for the record, that educational outcomes are significantly influenced by things that happen both in school and out of school. Anyone who believes otherwise is an idiot, and anyone who implies that someone else believes otherwise is arguing in bad faith.

Therefore, what?

If you're not willing to answer this question concretely, you really doesn't deserve a seat at the table. Winerip is clearly not up to the challenge. He says "What’s interesting about the report...is how much we know, how often government policy and parental behavior does not reflect that knowledge, and how stacked the odds are against so many children." This--"reflects"--is typical; variants include "recognizes," "acknowledges," "takes into account," etc.

But what would government policy that "reflects" knowledge of the ETS report look like? Winerip appears to have no interest in answering this question, and that makes the statement itself essentially meaningless, since it's clearly written in the context of a policy debate.

NCLB, by contrast, reflects an identifiable perspective and set of resulting policy conclusions that goes something like this: Poverty (I'll use this as a proxy for all outside factors, since it's the issue that comes up the most) matters, but estimates of how much it matters are often overstated, because they don't fully account for two things:

1) The extent to which impoverished students get fewer educational resources like money, highly effective teachers, challenging curricula, etc. This underestimation is not function of dishonest or sloppy research, it's a function of the fact many of these things are hard to fully quantify.

2) The extent to which overall educational quality is sub-optimal, a problem that disproportionately affects low-income, low-achieving students, since they're more sensitive than higher-income, higher-achieving students to differences in educational quality even if those differences are evenly distributed (which of course they're not).

NCLB supporters believe, therefore, that poverty-based barriers to achievement are surmountable, provided that we (A) give poor students more educational resources instead of less, and (B) define "surmountable" in terms of fixed goals, not relative performance. In other words, nobody believes (Richard Rothstein's frequent assertions to the contrary) that schools can, by themselves, make the achievement of poor children indistinguishable from non-poor children, in the sense that they would be equal in all ways. Rather, people believe schools, properly resourced and run, can do enough to help poor children learn essential knowledge and skills. Therefore, it's reasonable to hold schools accountable for that goal. Ergo, NCLB.

The logic is certainly debatable--in the sense that reasonable people can debate it in good faith--and the supporting data is far from conclusive. But it's backed up by significant real-world evidence of the efficacy of schools in general and of some high-poverty schools in particular. And the policy implications are right there on the table, which is what matters most in the end.

On the other hand, Winerip and those like him who have devoted years of their lives to mounting counter-arguments against the current accountability regime are unified in their resolute unwillingness to explain what actual policy conclusions we are meant to draw from their ideas. Again I ask: If not this, what? The NEA and AFT have at least produced some fairly detailed outlines of principles for a different federal law. But when God and the devil are in the details, that's not good enough.

While NCLB in totality is lengthy, the parts that generate most of the controversy are actually pretty short and written in plain English. If you don't like them, fine--serious people can disagree. But if you're not willing to say how they should be different and take responsibility for that position, then you're not, in this debate, a serious person.

Update: Side Effects May Vary, which seems to come at these issues from a libertarian / voucher perspective, complains that post above "seems to imply that there is simply no solution that does not involve the state." So let me clarify: That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying if you don't like the current law, be specific about what you want instead. The author says children are "languishing in a cruel trap guarded jealously by social planners like Carey and his ilk who venerate the contraption while condemning those of us who wish to extricate their unwilling subjects." Sure, okay. "Extricate"? What does that mean? Universal vouchers? I can't tell. Enlighten us.