Why Students Don't Perform Well

You can poor millions into a school, provide all sorts of services, but if you're not changing what happens at home, it's probably for naught (with a few unique exceptions here and there around the country):

The inaugural class of third graders at the LeBron James-supported I Promise School in Akron will soon start eighth grade, and, for each of the last three school years, none of those students have scored “proficient” in Ohio’s math proficiency test.

That fact was alarming to some Akron Board of Education members who listened to an update during their meeting Monday on the school’s progress.

Meanwhile, the school — which, by design, only takes students who are two or more years behind grade level — was placed on a state academic watchlist for schools flagged for “Additional Targeted Support and Improvement (ATSI)." To be added to the watchlist, at least one of the schools' student subgroup’s performance must be in the lowest 5% of schools in the state. At I Promise, Black students and students with disabilities meet that criteria.

The school is 60% Black and 28% of the 554 students have disabilities.

No doubt they took some very difficult students, and on some measures the students have shown improvement: 

Stephanie Davis, who became principal in June, struck a hopeful tone in a statement provided by the LeBron James Family Foundation. She pointed to students’ “i-Ready” scores, which show students’ mastery of topics separate from tests.

“Our students have not yet met the grade-level mastery mark but they are demonstrating growth based on (i-Ready) scores,” she said. “Of our incoming 8th graders, 32% met their annual typical growth in reading while 11% met their stretch goal for the year. Despite not mastering the grade-level standards, 42% of students demonstrated growth in i-Ready math across their 7th-grade school year.

“When working with students who are achieving below grade level, growth is as important as a measure of progress as proficiency. And the type of growth that is important to us is not made overnight," she concluded. "It takes time.”

Growth is good, but how much time do you need?  And why did less than half grow sufficiently?  Extra millions have been sunk into these students over the past 5 years without appropriate growth and achievement. 

So who are the lefties gonna blame here?  Racist teachers?  Not enough money?  Republicans?  Not enough support?  Read the article for how much extra support was provided by LeBron James and his foundation.

Here's how you know the school isn't going to improve much this year:

He added that next steps include more professional development and training for teachers, along with a deeper focus on analyzing data and what best teaching practices might be.

Absent evidence that the teachers absolutely suck, focusing on teachers as a whole is not going to give you any bang for the buck.  Sure, get rid of those everyone knows suck, but then what?  Until you can change what goes on at home, most of your efforts will fail.  It's so obvious, but no one wants to admit it for two reasons:

1. because it eliminates the possibility of a silver bullet to fix everything, and
2. because it takes the focus away from the easy target of teachers and puts it on the unpopular backs of the parents.

Too many of those students are doomed to academic distress, and there's no political or social will to fix the problem.  Sad.

Update:  Remember what happened in Kansas City?

School reformers rejoiced when Federal District Judge Russell Clark took control of the district in ’85. He ruled it was unconstitutionally segregated, with dilapidated facilities and students who performed poorly.

To bring the district into compliance. the judge ordered it and the state over the next 12 years to spend nearly $2 billion to build more schools, renovate old ones, integrate classrooms and bring student test scores up to national norms.

But when the judge finally took himself off the case last year (1997), there was little to show academically for all that money. Although the district’s 37,000 mostly minority students enjoyed some of the best‐​funded school facilities in the country, student performance hadn’t improved.

It was a major embarrassment and an ideological setback for backers of vastly increased funding for public schools...

For decades, critics of excess spending for public schools had said, “You can’t solve educational problems by throwing money at them.” To which educators and public school advocates replied, “No one’s ever tried.”

Kansas City settles the argument. Judge Clark invited the district to “dream.” Forget about cost, he said. He urged administrators to let their imaginations soar and assemble a list of everything they might possibly need to boost the achievement of inner‐​city blacks. Using the extraordinary powers granted judges in desegregation cases, Clark said he would find a way to pay for it...

For more than a decade, the Kansas City district got more money per pupil than any other of the 280 major school districts in the country. Yet in spite of having perhaps the finest facilities of any school district its size in the country, nothing changed. Test scores stayed put, the three‐​grade‐​level achievement gap between blacks and whites did not change, and the dropout rate went up, not down...

Of course, the district’s biggest problems weren’t just administrative. The ideological biases of local educators, politicians and Judge Clark against accountability made them reject solutions that might have worked — merit pay for teachers, penalties for failure or vouchers for private schools.

Schools can only do so much in 6-7 hours a day; if what happens outside of school doesn't change, what happens inside of school won't change.  Sure, there are Joe Clark and Jaime Escalante and Bob Moses superheroes, who can have an impact here and there, but if you expect every public school teacher to be a superhero, you're not being realistic about the problem or the solution. And you can continue to throw money at the schools--I love it when I get a pay raise--but if you think that by itself is going to improve student achievement, I will politely ask to see your supporting data.