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Mano Singham, Ph.D, lectured to a small audience at Minsky Recital Hall last Friday on the topic of the education gap in American schools. The lecture focused on the gap between Caucasian and black students, and Singham argued that looking at that gap in isolation obscures larger problems about education.
The education gap, Singham argued, is “symptomatic of a larger problem in education as a whole.” The gap itself is well documented. Singham produced figures from various accredited studies from 2003, showing average test scores for white students versus black students in a number of areas. In the SAT, the average white student’s score was 1063; the average black student’s score was 857. In the NAEP math test, white students, on average, scored about a 308; black students, on average, scored around a 274. According to the scale of that particular test, a score of 288 equates to basic mathematical ability; a score of 336 is the goal.
Singham mentioned that many education workers and politicians seem to focus their energies on equalizing the two scores, without paying attention to the fact that, across the board, students of all ethnic categories are failing to meet the proficiency standard.
“What we’d be doing is solving the political problem,” Singham said, “but ignoring the problem of massive underachievement across the board.”
Singham pointed to several possible sources for the failure of all students to succeed academically, and then focused on particular problems facing minority students. Most students of all ethnic groups dislike school and dislike their teachers. Singham argued that this kind of attitude had become ‘normal’, leading to students underachieving in an attempt to ‘fit in.’
Singham discussed some cases where educational institutions had closed the gap, but pointed out that such success stories were inevitably ethnically neutral. Attempts to only raise the scores of minority students, he argued, simply don’t work. Even if they did, he said, “we’d be making it equal, but equally mediocre.”
When schools concentrate their efforts on raising academic aptitude amongst all students, regardless of ethnic background, they see improvement across the board. “All students improve,” Singham explained, “but black students improve more.”
Singham discussed several options available to schools as a way to combat this problem, including hiring better teachers and requiring teachers to undergo much more extensive on-the-job training.
“Effective teachers produce as much as six times the learning gains produced by less effective teachers,” he said. “Good teachers can achieve more with paper and pencils . . . than bad teachers can do with all the technologies in the world.”
Singham spent the second half of the lecture discussing societal implications of the achievement gap. In society, he argued, it is necessary for the majority of students to underachieve academically, to fill the need for low wage jobs. These jobs greatly outnumber academic jobs, and students with greater academic skills refuse to take such jobs, taking better-paying work elsewhere. If all students were to achieve high success academically, “It would completely disrupt the way society functions,” Singham said.
Singham went on to argue that schools are really ‘succeeding’, because they are priming students to not want to succeed academically by getting them to not like school. This mindset also ‘trains’ the student for a future in a job he/she will not want or like, doing menial work for small wages. Singham quoted a number of government documents, which expressed a desire for most students not to succeed academically, in order to have a significant and cheap work force.
Singham forcefully argued that this system is corrupt and inefficient, and that the education system is not serving the rights of its students. He proposed that the first step to solving this troubling situation is to better educate the teachers about what is happening, and to have them take steps to change the structure of our economic system so that raising academic standards will not be so disruptive.
Bangor Daily News