One of the most satisfying parts of being in a doctoral program is having access to great research and ideas. Recently I have been able to make time for reading research related to the areas I would like to study while in my graduate program at Teachers College: inequality, educational policy, access to high quality teaching, race, and English language learners.
I picked up an issue of Educational Researcher (the AERA’s official journal) and began flipping through the articles yesterday. Like most education journals, the trouble with me is narrowing down the articles to read because so much is related to the question of how to transform American schools so that they promote equity rather than continue to reproduce the social order and larger inequitable political forces at work in our city governments, schools, and American life more generally. I started with the first piece, and I am still lingering over it now:
Raudenbush, S. W. (2009) “The Brown legacy and O’Connor challenge: Transforming schools in the images of children’s potential.” Educational Researcher, 38(3), 169-181.
So the idea here is that since Brown v. Board of Education, we have been making gains in reducing inequality (generally and in schools). Something happened though in the 1990s (and that something is pretty concisely summarized in 8 paragraphs of the article) where we began to see that there was a “cumulative effect of the concentration of disadvantage among those living in the poorest neighborhoods” (171). While the application of the term “disadvantage” still creeps me out when it appears in research pertaining to actual people, communities, and cultures who even in concentrated poverty have many “advantages,” I do think that Raudenbush has it right that trends in physical and economic segregation over the 70s and 80s resulted in our present American reality that race all too often correlates to educational (and hence economic) disadvantage.
In this article Roudenbush posits that we can transform the “amount, quality, and organization of schooling” to make good on the “O’Connor Challenge” of our post-secondary institutions no longer needing affirmative action policies because our schools would “be producing enough strong minority applicants by then to achieve diverse student bodies at prestigious universities without the aid of affirmative action policies” (170). His hypothesis is that policy can mobilize schools to take on the awesome challenge of providing and ambitious instruction capable of changing the game for those students traditionally locked out of our educational system. Instead of the overarching, top-down educational reform policies of our past, he argues that we should increase the amount, quality, and organization of our schools through “a shared, systematic approach that emphasizes teacher accountability and schoolwide collaboration” (178).
There is a lot in the this article to chew on, and that will come in Part 2 of this post once I have another go-round with reading it. I will though leave with an excerpt from the summary that inspires me to dig in to the ideas it presents:
In sum, the shared assumption is that college success is a natural outcome of continuous engagement in ambitious intellectual work from early preschool through secondary school. The central premise is that nearly all children will thrive intellectually if exposed to ambitious instruction carefully tailored to frequent, objective assessments of student progress throughout the schooling years. Such instruction requires that the privatized, idiosyncratic notion of teaching that characterizes U.S. schools give way to a shared, systematic approach that emphasizes teacher accountability and schoolwide collaboration. In such a system, teacher expertise in using the system will vary, and schools will e organized to motivate and support advances in expertise. This conception of the effective school has broad implications for school leadership, parent engagement, social services, and teacher preparation. Clarifying how such an approach can be conceived, implemented, tested, and broadly shared requires a novel sense of how practitioners and researchers should interact, with implications for how universities should best organize themselves to support powerful urban schooling.
[polldaddy poll=2465454]
