Mayor Muriel Bowser announced last week that the District’s 2018-19 Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) results showed that our schools improved students’ English language arts (ELA) and mathematics performance for a fourth consecutive year. There are many things to celebrate within this year’s results — like double-digit gains at Ward 5’s Brookland Middle School, Dunbar High School, Langdon Elementary School, Langley Elementary School and KIPP DC College Preparatory — but we can’t ignore the inconvenient truth that roughly two-thirds of DC’s students are still below proficiency in ELA and mathematics.
What’s to blame for student underachievement? Well, it depends who you ask. We know student background, parental involvement and adequate resources all affect student outcomes, but analysts disagree on the role each plays. Yet ample data suggests that the most important factors affecting student learning are the teacher and teacher efficacy — and that these effects are long-lasting.
The classroom and the teacher specifically are what matter most.
Given our knowledge that the teacher has the most significant impact on a child’s learning, we must account for the beliefs, behaviors and actions of the teacher when assessing student learning. Sean F. Reardon, Demetra Kalogrides and Kenneth Shores of Stanford University revealed in 2019’s The Geography of Racial/Ethnic Test Score Gaps that sixth-graders in the richest U.S. school districts are on average four grade levels ahead of children in the poorest districts. What’s more, they found large gaps between white children and their Black and Hispanic/Latinx classmates, even when the socioeconomic level of students was similar. This is not to suggest that teachers alone are to blame for persistent gaps, but if we are going to accelerate performance for our most underserved students, we must acknowledge the important role that race and bias play in terms of how teachers engage with students.
Education nonprofit TNTP Inc.’s research report The Opportunity Myth, released in 2018, documented similar trends across several large U.S. school districts, where classrooms with predominantly white students received nearly four times as many grade-level assignments as classrooms that were predominantly made up of students of color. Students in the study spent more than 500 hours on assignments that were below their grade level. While those same students successfully completed roughly 71% of assignments provided to them by their teachers, only 17% of said assignments were rigorous enough to meet grade-level expectations. But why? Quite simply, teacher efficacy as well as interracial and intraracial teacher bias impacts student learning — although teachers of color have been found to have higher opinions and expectations for students of color than their white colleages.
Considering the extent to which race and socioeconomic status are inextricably linked — and how that connection is exacerbated in our schools through teacher quality and teacher bias, among other factors — policymakers must implement a bold standards agenda that seeks to address educators’ mindsets and revolutionize what and how students learn in our classrooms.
A standards agenda: Understand, diagnose, take action
One thing sums up K-12 schooling in much of America: perpetualism, where Black and Brown children are routinely among the lowest-performing students across various metrics. This is in part because policymakers have been reluctant to examine the intersection of race, bias and student learning. The District must commit to a comprehensive standards agenda, where everyone in the education ecosystem advances the idea that all students deserve access to quality, grade-level instruction and materials, regardless of background. In doing so, we must:
- Study gaps between what teachers should teach and what is being taught in our K-12 classrooms. We cannot address what we do not identify. All U.S. school districts should examine the alignment between grade-level standards and class instruction in various classrooms and at various schools, and document how that alignment fluctuates along socioeconomic and racial lines. Fortunately, the DC State Board of Education approved a proposal I put forward in the spring for the District to conduct this research in DC’s elementary grades this winter. With this data, system and school leaders will be able to determine which leaders and teachers need targeted support. School leaders can conduct similar analyses on a smaller scale among teachers within their school, and parents can ask their children’s teachers to juxtapose their child’s work with learning-standard expectations and exemplars to assess similar gaps.
- Raise awareness of and have real conversations about the intersection between race, bias and student learning. Student learning is directly connected to adult beliefs and actions. Local education authorities — in the District, that’s charter operators and DC Public Schools’ central administration — must examine the ways in which they have normalized racist practices around how students gain access to certain schools and how they should dress, talk, act, show “grit,” learn and more. Policymakers, too, must examine how we have merely maintained an inherently racist system and discuss honestly how we will work to dismantle it. School leaders need to prioritize time for their teams to examine personal bias and how it impacts teacher expectations and student learning. Several organizations provide support to parents to have similar dialogues about race, bias and student performance at their children’s school.
- Help school leaders and teachers deepen their knowledge of learning standards and content while addressing students’ unfinished learning. A hallmark of any standards agenda must be support, more so than accountability. Space and time during the school day must be safeguarded for leaders and teachers to do the necessary work of deepening content expertise through professional learning, unpacking standards, and completing the work of each lesson. DC Public Schools’ LEAP structures are a good model. As teachers grow in content knowledge and skills, they must be supported to adapt curricula to address students’ unfinished learning — gaps in knowledge — while always teaching grade-level content. This work takes time, is difficult, and is directly connected to teachers’ beliefs about what their students are capable of.
Students cannot learn what they are not taught. Every day in classrooms and policy rooms, well-intentioned adults make decisions about what students should learn, based on their own bias, informed by how they learned, dependent on what they have and have not mastered. At times these decisions are at odds with what they would want or expect for their own child.
We must disrupt the perpetual status quo of underachievement in our schools, daring to believe a world exists where Black and Brown students are not routinely the lowest-performing groups across numerous metrics. Such a revolutionary thought rests on transformative policies at the nexus of race, bias and student learning, and bringing it to fruition requires an unshakable belief that all students — even our poorest, even our most at-risk, especially our Black and Brown children — can learn.
Zachary Parker represents Ward 5 on the DC State Board of Education.
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This is spot on! Thank you for naming race and bias as an integral element of the beliefs that we adults carry and must dismantle – – and then proposing actions to get us there.