If you hope to have your child’s intellect tested to the limits, evidence is mounting that a New York City public school may not be the place to go. Last year, it was announced that students would only need the correct answer on 27 percent of the questions, 23 out of 84, on the Math A Regents exam in order to receive a passing grade. In 2003, the score required for passing was a not-exactly-lofty 55 percent. But after two-thirds of the students failed that year, the State decided that rather than focus on fixing the students, it was better to just dumb-down the test. Elected officials, like City Council Education Committee Chairman Robert Jackson, are even toying with the idea of destroying the admissions exam for the City’s elite public high schools, since not enough black and Latino students are passing while too many whites and Asians are. High schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, once the benchmark for high schools across the nation, may soon fall victim to forced educational diversity.
Things do not appear as dismal in the City’s elementary schools. Last year, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City School’s Chancellor Joel Klein announced that fourth-graders had aced the State’s standard math exam, with 77.4 percent of all students meeting or exceeding State standards—the highest number for a City class in the history of the test. “The dramatic increase in 4th Grade math scores we announce today is another encouraging sign that our reforms are taking hold,” said Bloomberg almost one year ago. “More fourth grade students are meeting or exceeding standards than ever since we started standards-based testing, and significant gains by Black and Hispanic students show that we continue to close the achievement gap as well. Our strong core curriculum, focused intervention programs and Summer Success Academy are making a difference.”
The mayor failed to mention his initiative to end social promotion the year before, by which he held back the lowest performing students in third grade only, ensuring an increase in test scores that could be announced during the stretch run of his reelection campaign. And that core curriculum? One of the nation’s top education historians finds the idea laughable.
“[The City] has no curriculum,” said Diane Ravitch, noted author and senior fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C. “Curriculum is supposed to describe what children are to be taught; the tests are supposed to be based on the curriculum, but try to find a description of what kids are to be taught in any subject; it doesn’t exist.”
And that is the problem with the so-called “progressive” education movement that has taken hold in the City and in public school systems nationwide. Though she notes that the problems with the City’s curriculum cannot be hashed out in a brief article, she points to the specific curriculum of “balanced literacy,” which has replaced the traditional phonics programs as the reading program of choice in City schools. Where students used to sound out each word, learning and memorizing them, they are now more or less left on their own to teach themselves how to read, told to paint a picture in their mind of what the words on the page might mean instead of being actually shown what to do with them. This is woefully inadequate, says Ravitch, and especially unfair to the City’s underprivileged Black and Latino students.
The City’s education bureaucracy is often quick to note the success of balanced literacy in public schools located in the City’s more well-off neighborhoods like the Upper West and Upper East sides of Manhattan. But those students, Ravitch notes, have the benefit of coming from wealthier parents than a student in the South Bronx and can typically afford outside instruction and tutoring that their poorer counterparts cannot.
At the heart of balanced literacy programs is the new trend of “child centered” learning, all the rage at influential teachers’ colleges like Columbia University. Rather than have a teacher actually teach a class, that teacher is instructed to stand aside while the students pretty much teach themselves.
“Affluent parents prefer child-centered schools, which may work well for their kids because they get lots of support and informal literacy instruction at home,” said Ravitch, noting that research has found that minority students will perform better on reading tests when exposed to a more traditional, scientifically sound phonics program. Balanced literacy, on the other hand, is typically derided in many studies and has no record of any real success teaching students to read.
In the past, one of the great criticisms of the City University (CUNY) system was their willingness to offer course credit for remedial work. Why, if you graduated from high school, would anyone need to take remedial reading and math classes? For Ravitch and others that question will be easy to answer in the future: remedial is needed because these students haven’t learned anything. And they note that while some proactive parents can fix things with a tutor, others, with smaller checkbooks, will just have to suffer.
