Beyond the Achievement Gap

Richard Rothstein on the challenges facing American education
Richard Rothstein is a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and a former national education columnist of The New York Times.

Harvard Political Review: What is right with American education today?
Richard Rothstein: Well, that’s a very difficult question to answer. There are an untold number of things it does well to varying degrees; many things it does well and many things it does somewhat poorly. But, I’ll give you one stunning statistic that you would never know from reading the media about American education. The national assessment of education progress is a sample national test administered by the Department of Education in reading and math, primarily. It’s given to fourth, eighth, and 12th graders, and there is some aggregated data by race. The mathematics test scores of African-American fourth graders are today higher nationwide than the mathematics test scores of white fourth graders two decades ago. So if mathematics education had not improved for white fourth graders, the black-white achievement gap in math would have been fully eliminated. In eighth grade it’s almost as good. The scores for black eighth graders are not higher than white eighth graders but they are almost as high as they were two decades ago. So that’s an illustration you would never know from reading the press. … And, of course, the data I gave you is completely consistent with the claim that the achievement gap hasn’t narrowed at all.
HPR: Can you explain to readers the details of the Economic Policy Institute’s Broader, Bolder Approach to Education?

RR: The broader-bolder statement arose because decades and decades of experience with education and improvement have shown that school reform alone cannot raise the achievement of disadvantaged children to the level of middle-class children. The reason for that is not surprising; most of the influences on children’s learning occur outside of the school and not inside the school.
Children from different social classes come to school with very different capacities to learn, to take advantage of what school offers. And so if we want to make serious inroads on narrowing the black-white achievement gap, which is a major policy concern these days, we need to attend to the conditions outside school and outside the classroom that bring children to school ready to learn. The primary areas we focus on are: high-quality early childhood care, healthcare, and high quality afterschool and summertime. And what our statement argues is that unless we coordinate improvement in all those areas we’re not going to narrow the achievement gap. Improvement of the schools alone will not do it. The statistic I gave you before is interesting because it’s about math. Schools have a lot more influence over math than reading. Reading is much more a function of the literacy of the home. … So most of the data that you see about interventions in schools only choose math scores, because that’s where schools have influence.
HPR: How do you think the school system should be funded? Do you think the current system of local property taxes supplemented by a bid of state and federal agents is the best option?
RR: It varies enormously from state to state. Overall, nationally, schools get more funding from state governments than they do from property taxes.  There some states where property taxes are important and some states where state funding is important. On an average state funding is more important. Property taxes are a very good source of revenue, or at least they were until the housing collapse. So I don’t think we ought to be giving up the property taxes as a source of revenue.
The question is, how should they be distributed? Those are two different questions. There are some states which collectivize the collection of property taxes and distribute them more equitably to schools rather than having schools’ funding depend simply on the property values and the district in which the school is located. So that’s somewhat of a problem. …  If you look nationally at the inequities in school financing and school funding, only one-third of the inequity is intrastate. Two-thirds is interstate. So for all the problems property tax influences have on funding some schools better than others within a state, the poor schools in New Jersey get more money per pupil than the richest schools in Mississippi.
So if we’re really concerned about the equity of financing in this country the place to start is not the one-third that is attributable to property tax inequities. The place to start is the two-thirds that are attributable to interstate inequities. And that’s something only the federal government can address.
HPR: What do you think is the structural role of teachers’ unions in education reform?
RR: Well, blaming teacher unions for the failures of American education is the latest “fad du jour” — we go through fads. For example, a few years ago it was class size reduction, and a few years before that it was equal financing. Now it’s teachers and breaking teachers unions or weakening teacher union contracts. If teacher unions were a serious cause of the problems in American education then the best education would be found in places like Texas, Oklahoma, and Utah where teachers are not permitted to engage in collective bargaining. Yet we find the same problems that people complain about existing in those states. … That’s not to say that there are not changes in teacher union contracts that would be beneficial. It’s a very minor part of the problem; for example, even if you abolished teaching union contract protection for tenured of teachers, due process requirements for public employees in this country would still prevent principals from firing teachers without just cause. Establishing just cause is no less difficult under public employee laws than it is on teacher union contracts. So the real problem is that, and there are some bad teachers in any district, the American school administration does a very poor job of weeding those out.