Robert Pondiscio - How the Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice

The person who has had the greatest influence on my career in education was not a professor, policymaker, researcher, or fellow teacher. It was a ten-year-old girl named Tiffany, a fifth grader in my class during my second year of teaching at PS 277, a low-performing elementary school in the South Bronx. Walk into any classroom in any struggling urban school in the United States and you will spot a child like Tiffany. Her eyes are on the teacher, paying careful attention and following directions. She is bright and pleasant, happy to help and eager to please. Her desk is clean and well organized; her homework neat and complete. She has grown up hearing about the importance of education. She believes it, and her behavior shows it. She gets praise and good grades.

She also gets screwed.

Because she goes to a school where most of her classmates read and do math well below their grade level, Tiffany is not your problem, as an assistant principal pointedly told me when I expressed concern about how little of my attention she was getting. The message to a new teacher could not have been clearer: Focus your efforts on the low achievers, the disruptive, and the disengaged. Get them in the game. Tiffany will be fine.

Since leaving the classroom, I have applied the Tiffany test to any new education reform initiative, policy prescription, or innovative teaching idea: Will this make it more likely or less likely that kids like Tiffanypromising low-income children of color in places like the South Bronxwill get what they need to reach their full academic and life potential? The answer rarely comes back in the affirmative. The broad thrust of education reform efforts, stretching back decades, has been aimed at closing achievement gaps between children of color and white and Asian children, between those who grow up in poverty and those who are more fortunate. The biggest losers in classrooms shaped by these well-intended policies are children like Tiffany. Children who are ready for new intellectual challenges pay a price when they sit in classrooms focused on their less proficient and less engaged peers. We can insist that the answer is differentiated instruction, personalized learning, or policies that valorize student growth over proficiency on standardized tests, making every student the teachers problem. But these remedies are unsatisfying and naive, mere homilies. If the vast majority of Americas nearly four million teachers cannot easily and effectively implement a proposal, it is no solution at all. It fails the Tiffany test.

When you have a not your problem child sitting in your class in the age of testing, accountability, and gap-closing, you understand that despite her good grades and rock-steady performance on state tests, she is subsisting on starvation rations in history, geography, science, art, and musicthe stuff that makes education interesting and engaging. Her finish lineread on grade level; graduate on timeis the starting line for more fortunate children, including your own. Tiffany and the multitude of children like her represent the low-hanging fruit the typical struggling school leaves dying on the vine. But she is maddeningly, damnably, undemocratically not your problem.

A question has gnawed at me ever since I was Tiffanys fifth-grade teacher. If we are committed to equity and social justice, if we wish to keep faith with the American dream and believe that education is the indispensable engine of upward mobility, should we attempt to serve all disadvantaged children equally and labor to close the achievement gap because that is whats fair? Or should we do all in our power to ensure that receptive and motivated students can reap the full benefit of their talents and ambitions because that is whats just? The latter, of course, is what well-off families effortlessly secure for their children, either by paying tuition to opt out of the public school system or by buying homes in affluent zip codes where their property taxes function as de facto tuition for excellent neighborhood schools.

What might it look likewhat might America look likeif parents ability to steer their children into the best possible school setting was not a function of money and privilege but was something closer to the default setting in K12 education in the United States?