EdTrust Response to Education Week’s "Quality Counts 2007"

Focus is necessary. Tunnel vision isn't. Part of understanding how much teachers have done for students is understanding how far they have come - as opposed to the improvement of students whose parents may have enriched their children's lives well beyond the school's best hope.

Demographics aren't destiny. But let's be real. Let's put all the data on the table. Closing the achievement gap will require a comprehensive approach and educators ought to be part of that conversation as well.

~
This from Education Trust:

Demographics Aren’t Destiny: What Schools Do Matters

...Now, please don’t get us wrong. In a country as rich as ours, it is an outrage that we allow so many children to live in poverty or grow up with inadequate health care. And all Americans, educators and otherwise, should be pressing policymakers to DEAL with these problems.

But our main job as educators is a different one: it’s about teaching those children, no matter their background. And this Commission--had it thought to ask principals in its own highest performing, high-poverty schools for advice--would have been told that in no uncertain terms...

“...Some of our children live in the most dire circumstances,” [a principal testified]. “But we don’t dwell on that because we can’t change that. We focus, instead, on what we can do to take these children where they need to go.”

Principals at high-performing, high-poverty schools all over the country say exactly the same thing: We focus on what we can change, not on what we can’t. They want to be judged not by the characteristics of the students coming in, but by what they do for them.

On the one hand, [Quality Counts] took some important steps forward by including, for example, indicators on pre-school participation and on postsecondary results. After all, what we do at all these levels matters. And it’s right to remind policymakers, like the Casey Foundation has in its annual Kids Count reports, that if they are serious about developing their states’ young talent, it is insane to ignore the huge contribution that better health care and better family supports can make.

That said, the masthead, if we're not mistaken, says Education Week, not Sociology Week. Yet the researchers created a “Chance for Success Index” that essentially said to states: If you have large numbers of poor or undereducated adults, just forget it. In so doing, Quality Counts diminished the critical role of educators and public schools in preparing young people to become contributing citizens despite the obstacles they face outside of school.