Equity in Advanced Classes
By Douglas Reeves
March 1, 2024
Success in high school and college is a strong predictor of future employment, financial success, family stability, and health. It’s certainly true that a four-year liberal arts degree is not essential for this – skilled jobs in building trades and technical medical fields, for example, pay well and do not require a four-year college degree. But nearly every job offering middle-class wages requires some post-secondary education, at a community college, technical school or university. But students only have these opportunities if their high school experience prepares them for advanced courses beyond high school. An important new research report suggests that students from low-income families and non-white students are systematically denied these opportunities.
The Education Trust reports that schools with high populations of poor and minority students have fewer advanced classes and fewer seats available in those classes. There creates the illusion of diversity in some of these schools, because the hallways appear to be racially diverse, but in advanced classes, white and economically advantaged students dominate the scene. Sometimes this is due to policies that require students to qualify for advanced classes, so that if the students struggled in elementary and middle school, their chance to be qualified for advanced classes in high school are minimal. The problem, the study authors say, is not an achievement gap, but an opportunity gap. Students who are economically disadvantaged suffer from a lack of opportunity to learn long before they enrolled in preschool or kindergarten. But it’s not just about school readiness. The study concludes that half the equity gaps in high school advanced classes have to do with access, not readiness. Sometimes that is caused by a high school curriculum that is hopelessly fragmented, with purportedly high-interest classes crowding out advanced classes. Other times it is due to teacher assignment policies that have teachers qualified to teach advanced classes able to use seniority to move to schools with more wealthy student populations.
What about the readiness gap? Sometimes the early opportunities, like early elementary programs for high-achieving students, depend upon parental recommendation, and economically advantaged parents are more likely to be aware of these opportunities. What are the solutions? Here are three practical approaches the study suggests:
1. Automatic enrollment for students who qualify for advanced classes. If they are ready, they should be enrolled. That addresses 50 percent of the advanced class equity gap in a single move.
2. Universal screening for “gifted” or other programs for high-achieving students at every grade level. When screening is universal, all children, not just those whose parents pursue those opportunities, have a chance to receive those services.
3. Open up more access to advanced programs, K-12 – don’t wait until high school to make these opportunities available. That means building more capacity for these programs at every level.
I’d like to add three additional recommendations. First, focus the high school curriculum on preparing every student for some post-secondary training in technical school, community college, or four-year college. It is no accident that there is an inverse relationship between the breadth of a high school curriculum and the quality of student results. Schools that attempt to do everything, sometimes with 8- or 9-period days, leave students who need to improve their reading and math skills – the gateway to advanced courses – with barely more than half an hour of instruction each day in these critical areas. High-performing schools, by contrast, have fewer periods and more time devoted to each class. This means fewer choices – a tradeoff that high-performing schools are happy to make. They know that fewer choices as adolescents can lead to many more choices for a lifetime. This also requires decisive leadership that acknowledges that the “customer” is not the 14-year-old of today who may pursue the path of least resistance, but that student five and 10 years from now who will, perhaps only then, appreciate the rigorous demands of a great high school.
Second, intervention for students in need of support at every level – elementary, middle, and high school – must be decisive and mandatory. Look at the reading scores in almost any district, and you’ll find that the scores decline every year after third grade, and plunge in the secondary grades. It’s no accident that middle and high schools, if they teach reading at all, devote only a fraction of the time to this critical skill that students in the same district receive in first and second grade. This also means that when there is clear evidence of a literacy challenge, as there is in the majority of middle and high schools in the nation, then leaders must provide reading teachers – not just English Language Arts teachers – to the schools and a required reading and writing curriculum to be added to the ELA curriculum. To be clear, when students are pulled out of English to get reading instruction, they are not getting the extra support they need. Moreover, a student struggling with reading English does not need a French elective – he needs to learn to read or his educational future is in grave jeopardy.
Third, the greatest reason for failure of classes at all levels is missing homework, and students with Ds and Fs on their report card are never recommended for advanced classes. This continued misplaced faith in the value of homework is directly contrary to the evidence on the subject. When we fail children because they might be living with three families in a two-bedroom apartment, living without parents present, or otherwise in an environment where homework is impossible, then the practice of grading homework is really about grading the parents, not the students, and grading their wealth, not their academic performance. And please don’t tell me that, because they will have homework in advanced classes, we need to have toxic and punitive homework policies in earlier grades. I’ve watched some wonderful advanced high school and college math and science classes where homework is either not done or not graded.
Finally, let’s anticipate the objections to these ideas. If advanced courses are open to everyone, then they will not be as pretigious and elite as they were, serving only the “best” students. That is true. It’s a question of the fundamental function of schooling. Is it to expand opportunities for every student, or to simply rate, rank, sort, and select students based on the characteristics that they possessed before they entered school? It would be naïve not to acknowledge that there are substantial numbers of parents and more than a few school board members and other policy makers who maintain a belief in the sort-and-select mentality. Second, some teachers may object that with greater participation in advanced classes, they will have some students that are “harder to teach” and have larger class sizes than in the past. That is true. It’s a lot easier to teach 12 students in an advanced class when they all come to school well-prepared, have tutoring and other extra support, and will likely succeed no matter happens during the school day. But, to paraphrase President Kennedy’s challenge for the moon landing, “We do not do education because it is easy, but because it is hard.”
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