A level playing field at school can't make up for a broken democracy
14-year hiatus from the classroom, I began a one-year job filling in for a teacher on leave from the same rural Vermont high school that I'd entered as a rookie 30 years before.
Almost from my first day, I was moved by the sight of what had always been a good school straining to be a better one. Multiple tutoring centers did a brisk business at every period and not infrequently after the buses had gone for the day. Hardly a week went by when teachers were not summoned to an early-morning meeting to discuss an individual student's progress. Study halls no longer functioned as de facto prep periods for their faculty minders or as down-time for sleepy kids. Foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the boy who woke at 2 in the morning to do his barn chores no longer had a place to lay his head.
By all official measures, the school was succeeding. Ranked as the state's poorest on the basis of the number of its students eligible to receive free or reduced-price lunches, Lake Region Union High School was outperforming many of its more affluent competitors on standardized tests. The year before I returned, its writing scores were the highest in the state. The next year, the free-and-reduced-lunch students performed above the state average in reading, writing, math and science on the New England Common Assessment Program exams.
But I also knew the school's sincere efforts were in the service of a cynical agenda. The battle cry of the school reform movement, that “poverty should never be an excuse for poor academic achievement,” all too often masks the blithe conviction that good academic achievement can serve as an excuse for poverty. As long as the test scores are at par, you see, we need not be overly concerned if the pantries are bare, the parents jobless or jailed, and the gap between rich and poor more appalling than it's been since 1928.
In the same county where Lake Region is achieving its impressive test results, an estimated 1 in 4 children is “food insecure.” It's a phrase that tries the imaginations of those who have the luxury of spicing their security with complaint. “What to cook for dinner, always such a dilemma.”
I threw myself into the mission with as much gusto as a man can summon in late middle age. I did my best to coach for the NECAPs — yes, we took time away from our lesson plans to do some teaching to the test — and resolved to keep my skepticism about the ultimate value of the tests to myself. There were good reasons for doing so. I knew that voters in the community were likelier to approve the school budget if the tests results were good. I also knew that some of the kids I coached and cajoled would go on to surmount the social conditions that stood in their way. I knew this because a few of them always had.A level playing field at school can't make up for a broken democracy - LA Times: