Why Johnnie Can’t Read—It’s All Dollar Talk

Much talk in the US about school reform and reaching the unreachable, those children growing in poverty who attend segregated, minority schools. Arnie Duncan, recently profiled in the New Yorker, restructured underachieving schools in Chicago, believing that different teacher and a new set of peers learning in different buildings would help the poor performers do better. The Chicago Tribune’s op ed page recently featured a debate about vouchers. Conservatives around the country damn teacher unions for protecting incompetents and refusing to tie pay to student achievement. Charter school’s are also touted as an answer, providing an escape from the strangling bureaucracy and indifference of big city systems.

None of these approaches has succeeded in reaching the hard-core, chronically under-performing student population. Duncan’s approach has failed in Chicago where the school’s have been marginally improved, if at all. Vouchers and charter schools perform a little better but are selective in admissions. They avoid the worst of the worst. No wonder they look good.

Teachers have dug their heels in on performance pay because they know the real key to success is lowering class size. In public and private schools where students perform at high levels, the class size in grades K-12 is somewhere between 10 and 20. In urban public schools, the class size is often 30+.

That means those kids who need the most attention and bring the least amount of middle-class acculturation to learning get the least individual attention. Studies have shown that even the most remediated children learn quickly once they have established a positive, personal relationship with their teacher, something few can do in a mob of 30+.

So why don’t school systems decrease class size? Because adding more teachers will cost a lot of money. If you have 3000 remediated students in a school system being taught in 30+-to-1 classrooms, you have about 100 teachers on the payroll. Put those kids in 15-to-1 classrooms and you have 200 teachers and salary expenses have doubled.

So school systems continue to short change the remediated, poor students, put them and their teachers in a box where they can’t succeed and then blame the students and teachers who are being manipulated for the failures of the administrations. Neat, convenient and completely ridiculous.