How are our students ‘underserved’ by schools?

An essay by Rick Dalton, CEO of the non-profit organization College for Every Student (CFES), outlines his organization’s approach to improving the educational progress of low-income children. The suggestions Mr. Dalton offers in his essay – which are echoed in more detail on the organization’s website – all make sense, and are, in effect, the type of common-sense educational strategies that were in place in schools before they adopted the mindset that students from lower socio-economic backgrounds must be treated as victims of society’s inherent lack of fairness.

One of the most important of CFES’s goals is to raise the expectations we have of these low-income students, and to raise their expectations of themselves. This, I believe, has been a missing ingredient in education for a number of decades, with hundreds of billions of dollars – federal, state, and local – spent in search of costly, experimental substitutes for high expectations that simply can’t achieve the same goal: students who excel, and can go on to college to make something more of themselves.

Having high expectations is not easy in today’s climate, but it is the only strategy that will work. As with any approach to improving the lives of children, it must start at home. If parents don’t have high expectations for their children’s academic performance, then the schools face an uphill battle with that student from the get-go.

And don’t mistake parental expectations for parental involvement. It isn’t necessary for parents to be aware of every course, every test, every quiz, and to personally know each teacher. But when report cards come home, there should be gushing praise for good grades, and pointed, detailed questions about bad ones, and (though many would absolutely die at the thought of it) punishment for bad grades.

Appropriate punishment, that is: no video games or TV until those grades come up; no e-mailing or MySpace or hanging out with friends until homework is done; show me your homework assignments every night so I know if you’re getting it done; I’m calling your teachers if I suspect for a second that you’re not giving me the full story, and on and on.

The ideology that labels folks from lower socio-economic strata as “societal victims” argues that some parents – working fingers to the bone with heinous hours – simply don’t have time to keep such close track of their kids’ progress. But the fact that desperately poor kids from terribly overworked families are able to pull themselves out of poverty through dedicated schooling argues against this mindset. It comes down merely to the choices people make about how to spend their time (and money, for that matter). If a family watches any television at all, for example, that shows that they have enough time to dedicate to their kids’ education.

Aside from expectations at home, the schools must also have high expectations built into their every classroom and every interaction with students. It must be regarded as unacceptable that any student performs poorly. The rules and standards should be rigid and applied equally: homework is due no matter what; a wrong answer is a wrong answer; those who excel should be praised; those who perform below their abilities should be called out on it (no, not publicly); those who disrupt the classroom experience should face discipline; those who break rules repeatedly should face suspension and/or expulsion; administration should support teachers if parents try to reduce or eliminate a disciplinary action due to misbehavior.

Naturally, there are students who have genuine learning disabilities, and these need to be taken into account and addressed. This discussion, however, is not about them.

In the end, I must say that I agree with CFES on the whole; the problem is with the headline of the essay, which suggests our students need a financial bailout of some sort. This, clearly, is not the answer. Our per-pupil spending has exploded over the last decades, and the promised positive results have not been forthcoming, and in fact the very opposite is true. The answer is getting students to take ownership of their performance, and this means injecting the concept of personal responsibility into schools, and making it the standard by which students are judged. Students may well be victims of their lives’ circumstances, but our nation’s history shows that no ethnic or socio-economic group, however “victimized” by poverty, marginalization or bigotry, is unable to pull themselves out of poverty.

The mindset evidenced by Dalton’s repeated use of the word “underserved” to describe low-income students is therefore mystifying to me. His organization strives to embed personal responsibility in schools, and somehow still clings to the notion that students are underserved. In fact, students are overserved. Students shouldn’t be served in school at all; they are there to be told what they need to succeed in life, and it’s hard work. They should serve themselves, and be made to see that their education – and life as a whole – is characterized by personal effort and accountability for the outcomes of that effort.