Introduction To My Next Book (Part 4)
This is the final part of my draft Introduction to “Confessions of a School Reformer.”
The research literature on children’s academic performance has shown time and again that anywhere from over half to two-thirds of minority and white students’ test scores—lower, middle, and upper class–can be attributed to family’s socioeconomic background.
Yet many educators in public traditional and charter schools in poor neighborhoods either ignore or dispute those research findings. These educators see such research as an incentive to prove scholars wrong. Such educators continue to operate on the principle that engaged and committed staff unaccepting of “excuses” (e.g., low-income family, all minority enrollment, neighborhood crime) could lift students out of poverty through helping students become academic achievers, entering college, and securing well-paid jobs. And the evidence of such positive outcomes is both available and rich.
The issue, then, of the degree to which family background and ethnic/racial school demography affect student achievement rubs against not only this body of evidence that there are schools graduating low-income minority students who enter higher education but also a discomforting and inescapable fact: Formal schooling occupies only a small portion of a child’s day. Consider that children and youth attend public schools about 1100 hours a year for 13 years (or just under 15,000 hours. That time represents less than 20 percent of a child’s and teenagers waking time for all of those years in school. Hence, most of student’s CONTINUE READING: Introduction To My Next Book (Part 4) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
