Beyond Proficiency
During the past decade, our Nation has taken important steps – most notably through enactment of No Child Left Behind – to improve educational outcomes lower-income and minority children. While NCLB needs to be improved, the simple process of establishing standards to measure student success has, for the first time, provided clear evidence that enormous numbers of low-income and minority children are failing to achieve proficiency in math and English.
The next administration will need to improve national strategies for helping low-income and minority students, including more rigorous and uniform achievement standards and increased funding for programs designed to meet NCLB’s goals. But educational equity in the US will not be realized unless we also raise our sights from proficiency to excellence.
A recent report by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, the Achievement Trap, documents the existence of 3.4 million students from families in the bottom economic half who are achieving in the top quartile academically (based on national standards). The report demonstrates that these students lose ground educationally throughout K-12 and that, of those who graduate from high school achieving at high levels, fewer than half ever receive a bachelors’ degree.
And yet, there is today very little focus on advanced learning in NCLB or any other element of federal education policy. This reflects a deeply ingrained, troubling perception about America’s lower-income students: namely, that they cannot achieve at advanced levels. In practical terms, it exposes a significant gap in America’s education policy and practice that, if not resolved, will prevent us from bridging the very achievement gaps targeted by NCLB.
Among the steps the next administration and Congress can take to resolve this problem are:
• Set standards and provide educational support for increasing the number of low0incoem and minority students who reach not just proficiency, but advanced levels as well. The federal government can start by simply enforcing the NCLB provision that require states to report the number of disadvantaged students scoring at advanced levels.
• Expand disadvantaged student access to a rigorous high school curriculum. According to the US Department of Education, only 7% of seniors graduating from high schools with high minority populations have taken a “rigorous” high school course load.
• Increase low-income and minority students’ access to high quality college-going advice. A promising national model being incubated in eleven states is the College Advising Corps, which places recent college graduates in low-income high schools to teach students about how to apply and pay for college.
• Ensure that federal aid and tax relief for college and graduate students is targeted to those with financial need and is adequate to keep pace with rising college costs. Recent increases in Pell grants and cuts in subsidies to loan providers are steps in the right direction.
Those responsible for education in America too often fail to recognize that lower-income students can excel in Advanced Placement classes, do score at advanced levels on state-based exams, and deserve to be advised how to apply and pay for the most rigorous college that will accept them. By recognizing and acting upon these realities, the new administration can engage students of every race, ethnicity, and income level not just in gaining proficiency, but in the pursuit of excellence as well.
-Joshua Wyner, Executive Vice President of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and Co-author, The Achievement Trap: How America Is Failing Millions of High-Achieving Lower-Income Students
This post was submitted by Joshua Wyner.
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