Education update

Separate and Unequal

Schools are no longer legally segregated, but because of residential patterns, housing discrimination, economic disparities and long-held custom, they most emphatically are in reality. 

“Ninety-five percent of education reform is about trying to make separate schools for rich and poor work, but there is very little evidence that you can have success when you pack all the low-income students into one particular school,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who specializes in education issues. 

The current obsession with firing teachers, attacking unions and creating ever more charter schools has done very little to improve the academic outcomes of poor black and Latino students. Nothing has brought about gains on the scale that is needed. 

If you really want to improve the education of poor children, you have to get them away from learning environments that are smothered by poverty. This is being done in some places, with impressive results. An important study conducted by the Century Foundation in Montgomery County, Md., showed that low-income students who happened to be enrolled in affluent elementary schools did much better than similarly low-income students in higher-poverty schools in the county. 

The study, released last October, found that “over a period of five to seven years, children in public housing who attended the school district’s most advantaged schools (as measured by either subsidized lunch status or the district’s own criteria) far outperformed in math and reading those children in public housing who attended the district’s least-advantaged public schools.” 

Studies have shown that it is not the race of the students that is significant, but rather the improved all-around environment of schools with better teachers, fewer classroom disruptions, pupils who are more engaged academically, parents who are more involved, and so on. The poorer students benefit from the more affluent environment. “It’s a much more effective way of closing the achievement gap,” said Mr. Kahlenberg.

Teacher layoffs - a destructive annual event 

The lives of public school teachers have never been more surreal. While they're being pilloried in film and in the press - for their unions being too strong, among other things - last week, 2,800 teachers in the Bay Area were told they might not have jobs in the fall. How's that for job security? 

There is no more counterintuitive and counterproductive element of an upside-down system than this, that every year of the past four - and nine of the past 20 - thousands of public school teachers are told that their positions are on the chopping block. Many of these teachers are rehired in August, but by then many have left. They've left the state and they've left the profession. 

There is no child psychologist who will tell you that children thrive amid chaos and uncertainty. Children need stability, regularity, continuity. And yet every year, we shake up their lives at will. 

We fire the newest teachers, increase class sizes and play musical chairs with teachers all over the district. Schools struggle to plan, to build, and each school's knowledge base is thrown to the wind. 

Bita Nazarian, principal at James Lick Middle School in San Francisco's Noe Valley, remembers what happened last year. In the middle of the year, she felt she had a crack team of educators, both veteran and rookie, at her school. James Lick was humming with possibility and esprit de corps. But then the March 15 pink slips came around. Fourteen of her best young teachers were given notice, and morale went through the floor. For the rest of the school year and through the summer, these teachers had to keep one eye on the classroom and one eye on job possibilities elsewhere. The entire school, especially students, felt this acute instability until August, when most were hired back. But by then the damage was done. 

For a young college graduate, the teaching profession is already a tough sell. The starting salary for a teacher in California is $35,700. Their maximum possible salary, after 35 years of service, is $80,720. With the federal No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, among other initiatives, they are given increasingly less freedom to design curricula and teach creatively. Add to that 80-hour workweeks (try carefully grading 120 five-page essays - I have, and it took me 32 hours), rampant political scapegoating, and this kind of job insecurity. How can we hope to attract and keep talent in this profession when, at every step, we make it so difficult, so insecure, so unvalued? 

In the next 10 years, 1.8 million teachers will be eligible for retirement. Who will take their place? Who will accept conditions as they are? Teacher turnover is startling high, and its costs are unconscionable: Fully 46 percent of teachers leave the profession before their fifth year. 

Nationally, teacher turnover costs the United States $5 billion. And the costs to students attending urban schools, who most absorb the consequences of this chaos? Incalculable. 

We have to put an end to this. In June, a ballot measure in San Francisco will propose new and extended taxes to ensure that teachers will keep their jobs. We must vote for these measures. And after that, we must build a new system, where classroom stability is sacrosanct.

Still at Risk: A quarter century ago, Washington set out to fix American education. There's still much work to be done.