In School Together, but Not Learning at the Same Rate

The article says "the poorer students were, the lower they tended to score on the test, even when they went to the same school as wealthier children" but then notes Success Academy succeeds with poor minority children, implying it's the school, not the impact of poverty. You might note that the New York Times report that Success Academy eases out students who aren't a good "fit" while public schools must educate everyone. From a New Yorker Magazine article on Success Academy's first high school graduating class (link to the article is below) - " This year, a Success high school, on Thirty-third Street, will produce the network’s first graduating class: seventeen students. This pioneering class originated with a cohort of seventy-three first graders." https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/success-academys-radical-e...

This article and its praise for the charter school model had me searching for a recent Times article about how charter school students fare in college: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/nyregion/can-a-no-excuses-charter-tea... Short answer: not that well. Rote learning doesn't fly in most college settings. Back to the drawing board...

Success Academy Cobble Hill has a long and proven history of discharging its weakest and most vulnerable students who then attend district public schools. This creates the statistical illusion that they out-perform the public schools in the area, but it is really not the case.

Charters have a reputation to target low performance students in a variety of subtle and not so subtle ways to dump them unto other public schools. Parents often are required to attend extra school meetings, sign promise notes to meet and have training programs for their own development. This may be a barrier to single parents who work two jobs without a support system. Once a student has been noted for poor attendance and tardiness, the subtle harassment starts with multiple phone calls, required meetings, interventions with support staff, often not family friendly intended to discourage parents/guardians. And then there are the charter schools that dump students before testing and graduation rates effect negative school statistics, telling false stories that the students will graduate or be promoted on time without extra summer school or extra years if they go to 'easier' schools.

Let's look into the effects of lead at home and its later effects on behavior and learning. Perhaps there is a cause and effect.

Much of the information provided in many of the comments is fundamentally untrue​. Success Academy does not and cannot “cherry pick” children; everybody who applies is entered into a lottery. Student attrition is actually lower at Success Academy schools than at district schools,: 10% compared to 14%. Approx. 16% of SACH children have disabilities. In fact, my child's 3rd grade class is an ICT class where many of the kids have speech therapy and other specialist support. I absolutely agree with the comments that the school is so successful in part due to the high parental involvement, as well as high expectations for the teachers and kids. What makes my heart break is that there are thousands more motivated and involved families in NYC, many of whom are minorities and/or economically disadvantaged, who are desperate to get their children into a school where their children can receive a great education too. And yet there are many who would begrudge them the opportunity; getting every new seat is always a struggle. It's hard to understand the kind of meanspirited mindset that would deprive these kids of the chance to shine.

This article does not touch upon the impact of home life on student performance. Higher income families likely have more opportunities to support learning at home while lower income families may not. This might be an important factor in the differential performance in diverse schools. The family support could be supplementing the classroom teaching, helping these students perform at higher levels.

It's an interesting phenomenon when we're presented with data we don't like that we try to explain away the data. Many comments about this report start there. That we have not figured out how to close the gap at scale shouldn't be taken as a personal criticism. It's a problem to be solved. There are examples of places that might have figured some things out, maybe we can learn from them, maybe we can try something new. But what we shouldn't do is decide that poor children and children of color just can't learn.

I see education of a child as a working partnership between school staff and parents. It takes the best efforts of both parties for real success. If one side is deficient in nurturing the child, the child suffers.

Should groups who wait to have two children until they graduate college, get jobs and married and are financially secure be expected to sacrifice the quality of their children's education so that less responsible parents' children can achieve at equal levels? Public education is an important and vital component to a free democracy but it does not remove individual responsibility from parents. We have seen in the last decades the call for heterogeneous classes in the name of fairness and diversity. If only a failing student could sit next to an achieving student, maybe he would learn through osmosis. Teachers were tasked with creating individual modifications for every student in their class to have all the different levels of students in their class achieve at the same proficiency. Imagine a high school math teacher with 170 students in five classes and two grades differentiating for each student. Superintendents are political hacks without a clue to the needs of the schools. NYC, $30,000 per student per year. Class of 33 students generates 1 million dollars a year in revenue for the school system. Who steals or misappropriates all of that money?

Within the past year, the Times ran an article on Chicago Public Schools., whose Population is largely Black & Brown. At end of 2nd grade these students were 1 year behind. By the end of elementary school those children were at grade level, so they made up a full grade on test scores. Could NYC adopt Chicago system for a large group of school to see if similar results would occur. Notes: My 2 daughters(white) are NYC graduates over 30+ years ago & have good lives as do their children in schools of neither city.

Mader's comments are a throw away. She seeks to place the blame for for the racial achievement gap because the individual races are not getting the same treatment at the same school. The students are in the same classrooms, the teachers qualifications vary so much that ensuring all are the same is impossible but that means each racial group is getting the same variety so no advantage. Finally, she implies that the discipline gap is racially motivated (presumably because of disparate numbers). The reports finding are not a surprise as it reflects the economic class view of education. Everyone says that education is important, but how does that translate to actually helping the child by the parents. By setting specific goals and helping them achieve them. This could be illuminated if your broke out children of immigrants and see how they fare since this group is widely seen as being more aggressive on the subject. By the way, the disparate discipline numbers is a red herring since no one has ever said that the numbers in each school represent any meaningful number of individuals (or that they are not actually capturing serial offenders). Another way to see if class is the determinate is the scores of the Black and Hispanic who do make over $80,000. Which group did that mirror? And of course, as with all these articles avoid with a passion, there is no mention of the responsibility of the parents. Teachers can only encourage, they can't do the homework.

You cannot talk about Success Academy with out discussing certain of their practices which have the effect of pushing lower performing students back into public schools. Indeed, this article emphasizes that black and Hispanic students need to be treated the same as white students, yet there is ample evidence that poorer performing black and Hispanic students are more harshly treated at Success Academy in order to push these students out of the school. Eva Moscowitz has defended certain of these practices in The New York Times and on the PBS NewsHour, but her explanations and rationales only convinced me that such practices were in fact occurring, and were central to the achievements of the Success Academy.

Of course. Home environment--parents who value and emphasize education, who read good literature, who speak good English, who give their children educational opportunities like travel--trumps sitting a black child next to a white child and expecting osmosis to do the trick. A solution: smaller classes of whatever colors, higher teacher pay, neighborhood schools where parents may be involved in the schools and students in extracurricular activities.

Even in the segregated South, black students whose parents were invested in their schooling, and who taught them the value of sustained hard work and exhorted them to do well, learned very nicely, thank you, without white students around. Integration is better than segregation. But students whose parents do not parent, and who themselves aren't much interested in education, will not do well. And that's true whether we're talking about rural white America or urban black America. Teachers are in many ways 'in loco parentis'. But they are not parents, and society should not expect miracles from them.

I tried to get a conclusion from this article and could not. I suppose that's the point. One size does not fit all when it comes to education. I don't understand the criticism of Success Academy for focusing on the high-achieving students. These are the best and the brightest from low-income families, many of whom have been stuck in a cycle of poverty for generations. Let them move forward!

There are numerous factors that affect educational achievement. You can come up with many correlates, but they don't necessarily mean that they have a meaningful effect on educational achievement. The comments about Success Academy prove my point. The children in Success Academy are the progeny of parents enthusiastically engaged in their children's educational progress. The parents sought out the lottery for the schools. The parents follow up on the school's outreach to them. Parental involvement in a child's education is not only a correlate of student achievement. It is a factor that usually delivers successful achievement outcomes. Success Academy has practices that coerce parental involvement. Public schools do not have that option. That's why lots of other factors correlate with, and some even affect, student academic achievement.

Some years back, the OECD did a study of student achievement, and found that the strongest correlate with a child’s academic success was the mother’s level of formal education in mathematics. Some may see this as a sign that class differences will never be overcome. However, there is no reason why education in mathematics could not be provided to mothers (or fathers and parents in general, for that matter) especially if it focused on symbolic reasoning and avoided the mind-numbing “application to real life” condescension one finds in upper level arithmetic. It seems to me that our efforts to reduce the achievement gap would be better focused on the mothers, as opposed to lining the pockets of “diversity consultants” and educrats in general.

The quandary to me is , what happens if the things that help a child succeed are antithetical to modern thinking. The kids at Success Academy do very well for example. Suppose the reason they do well is because the kids who struggle aren't there? And I don't mean the class average goes up. Suppose that individual kids do better in a classroom full of other kids who are focused and without significant learning or behavioral challenges? ie, instead of scoring at a basic level--or worse, below basic--supposed they're scoring at proficient? Or advanced? Is it fair to handicap a child who could be scoring at a proficient or advanced level because we want to see everyone in every classroom? I don't know the answer. But it's the kind of question we need to be prepared to think about.

A few hours of school each day won't necessarily negate years of exposure to factors which hinder achievement. One also needs to be careful about how the sample of children were selected. See below for some pertinent factors in one meta-study. http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/nov04/vol62/num0... November 2004 Closing Achievement Gaps Why Does the Gap Persist? Research ties 14 factors to student achievement, and low-income and minority children are at a disadvantage in almost all of them. The National Assessment of Educational Progress consistently reports that the average 8th grade minority student performs at about the level of the average 4th grade white student (National Center for Education Statistics, 2003). Because so many studies were involved—from the high hundreds to the low thousands—I had to rely on competent syntheses and meta-analyses to identify factors on which the research community had reached a consensus. I identified 14 factors that correlated with achievement… Factors That Correlate with Student Achievement Before and Beyond School: Birthweight Lead poisoning Hunger and nutrition Reading to young children Television watching Parent availability Student mobility Parent participation In School: Rigor of curriculum Teacher experience and attendance Teacher preparation Class size Technology-assisted instruction School safety

The schools can only do so much. If the importance of education and learning are not fostered at home, no amount of "integration" will close the gap. As far as a correlation between achievement and income, well, I'd love to see the NYT report some statistics on test scores among Asians, who have a 27% poverty rate in NYC, according to this HuffPost Article from 5/8/17. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/asian-american-poverty-nyc_us_58ff7... Every family has different values and those who value education will find a way to help their children succeed, regardless of their race. Why is no one crying over the dearth of Asian NBA stars or whites in the Hip Hop music industry...you can snicker and say it's not the same thing....but isn't it? I'm an Asian American woman...maybe NASCAR should offer me an affirmative action slot.

I think reporter Elizabeth Harris should read Kate Taylor's reporting on Success Academy Cobble Hill before she writes a sentence like "In its more diverse schools, like Success Academy Cobble Hill, the achievement gap is quite small, with students doing equally well despite racial and socioeconomic differences." Perhaps what Elizabeth Harris should have written is "In its more diverse schools, like Success Academy Cobble Hill, a model teacher was caught on video punishing and humiliating a low-income student who was not performing up to the standards that the charter school demanded. That student left. And that charter school has an attrition rate that is higher than average for the district despite being the top performing school in the district. Which is very odd." Given the documented got to go lists and the NAACP testimony in which a Success Academy parent explained how the charter network has staff identifying at-risk kids they don't want and how they convince their parents on the first few weeks of school to remove them, it should surprise no one that low-income Success Academy students would perform similarly to high income ones since the only low-income students who remain are those who will achieve in their school. That's a tautology, not a "study". And any study who points to a school that ONLY teaches the low-income kids who learn quickly with their method and sheds the rest should be treated as the waste of time that it is. It doesn't deserve this much ink.

This is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Again. You want educational success for EVERY child? Copy EXACTLY the facilities, food, curriculum, student-to-teacher ratio of the top private schools. Copy EXACTLY the way private schools refuse to give the standardized state tests. Copy exactly the non-teacher-to-student ratios in the top privates, as well. Where will the money come from? Like privates, public schools will save billions telling the testing industry to go away. College-readiness scores are not moving at all; all of those required state tests aren't doing anything to improve education. Firing the hundreds upon hundreds of non-teacher bureaucrats that hide out in every public district will save millions as well. Copy what works. Period. Urban publics especially don't work.

Well that's easy. Success chases away the hard to teach, low scorers.

Intelligence is a heritable trait, and it is highly unlikely that the aggregate effect of the thousands of gene variants linked to intelligence is exactly equal for all groups.

The elephant in the room is, of course, the performance of Asian students. Did you, my fellow readers, wonder why this article did not mention the Asian results at all? Well, it's because Asian kids consistently scored massively higher than blacks and hispanics of the same income. That's a really inconvenient truth for anyone who's bound and determined to blame socioeconomic inequality and racism for unequal outcomes in school. In actuality, this new data provides further evidence that Charles Murray's "The Bell Curve" was onto something in emphasizing the genetic component of academic success. This is an uncomfortable idea, but if we're not willing to follow the evidence where it leads, we're unlikely to solve the problem -- and we're doing a disservice to all those being left behind under the status quo.

Nicole Mader is co-author of the study so I will not presume to explain her own research to her. That said, I'm baffled by her conclusion that somehow the disparity in student achievement indicates a failure of integration, when these elementary school students are presumably in the same classes and have the same teachers. A dispassionate observer might ask if other factors, such as parental involvement or home learning, play a role in this disparity -- but that wouldn't be politically correct to ask, and therefore she doesn't seem to entertain the idea. Also, to follow up on a point made by several other commenters: why is there no mention of Asian students? They comprise a substantial portion of the city's population; many come from poor immigrant families. If this is an issue of failed integration, wouldn't we expect to see an achievement gap with these students too?

I skimmed this. The only variables seem to be race and income. What about SAT score and education level? Would these findings (about race and income) be the same for parents' SAT scores and level of education (including college ranking)? I know scads of high SAT score, highly educated people who have no money. I mean people like Vassar-educated writers and activists. They have high education but low income. Perhaps the parents' intelligence and education matter more than the parents' income. A poor parent can still read Homer to her children and tell them something about Athenian culture.

Nothing in this article mentioned how the well-researched ‘trauma’ of poverty impacts the achievement of lower-income kids, who are sadly more often than not black or Latino. It’s extremely hard to do as well as your well-heeled little classmates when you, along with your parents, are worrying about food on the table, being warm enough at night, having a place to study, or even having a place to securely called home. Want to make a big dent in the achievement gap? Then make a big dent in income inequality by paying living wages - $15/hr. MINIMUM.

Every NY Times reader should check the data at the NY State website: data.nysed.gov In 2016 in NYC public schools, nearly 87,000 3rd through 8th graders who were the most economically disadvantaged scored proficient on the state tests. That is over 14,000 economically disadvantaged students per grade who performed as well as affluent students on the state math exam during the year of the study (2016). All of them in public schools. So when you read that a charter school previously caught humiliating and punishing low-performing at-risk students has "closed the achievement gap", take it with a grain of salt. Have they really closed the gap, or are they just cherry picking among the 87,000 economically disadvantaged 3rd-8th graders in NYC who also do well in public schools? Here is a hint: When a charter school has got to go lists, when a charter school's model teacher is caught on video demonstrating how low-performing students are treated, when a charter school has one of the highest attrition rates of any charter network, it behooves you to be skeptical of their claims. When a charter school network that claims to have closed the achievement gap loses at-risk students at a rate that is higher than almost every other charter network in NYC, it isn't because so many low-income parents just don't like high performing charters as much as they like mediocre ones. It's because the high performing charters don't like their kids as much as they like higher performing kids.

Why does the control group for comparison always seem to be whites? Our city is very diverse with plenty of Russian, Chinese and Indian residents. How are they doing compared to white, black and Hispanic students? In the end, the difference is the parents. If the parents value education, then their children, on average, will do well.

The advantages of being middle class (or higher) cannot be overstated. My kids' school loves to pat themselves on the back when standardized test scores come in, holding a big meeting in the auditorium where they project a PowerPoint presentation showing how fantastically the students are doing versus the rest of the state. Every year I roll my eyes. Really? What did they expect? The student body, though very ethnically and racially diverse, is solidly middle class. The parents all have college degrees and many hold advanced/professional degrees. The news would be if our kids did NOT do well. Add to that the fact that it's a private school with no special ed students or disciplinary problems (just expel those troublemakers!) and you've got an easy job on your hands. Having said that, I know plenty of people - PLENTY - who came from immigrant households with uneducated parents who worked multiple jobs and who never read to them who grew up to go to good colleges, some Ivy League. They excelled academically despite their perceived disadvantages. Have never figured out why some schools can achieve this and other fail. Very complex issue, to say the least.

The comments on this article highlight part of the problem: the narrative about Black children and "academic achievement" is mired in a deficiency narrative. Comments about "poor" parents being less educated. Not caring about their children's education. That may be true for some, but not necessarily for all. Someone can have a nursing degree and still have her children qualify for free or reduced price lunch. The teaching profession is dominated by white women who, for the most part, have limited to no experience with Black communities, parents, or children. I hazard to guess most didn't take an African-American history class in school. They lack cultural competency or understanding. Ditto for the administrators. They are sometimes afraid of their students and the students' parents. They bring their biases and prejudices into the classroom and year after year, and generation after generation we see the limits of their "good intentions." Yes, of course, Black parents and students could be doing more about education, BUT the American education system was never designed to educate Black children! Brown vs. Board was the beginning of the end for Black teachers; I had more Black teachers in the 70s and 80s than my children do today. I highly recommend Lisa Delpit's Other People's Children. Change Your Thinking: is it an achievement gap OR an opportunity gap?

What happens at home is at least as important as what happens in school. It is not enough for a parent to say I want what is best for my child. My Mom was a nag when it came to school, but it worked. Same for my nieces and nephews and their kids. Also, don't automatically blame the school if your kid fails. Children and parents must take responsibility. BTW: any Asians in this study?

My kids my kids go to PS 8 so I can attest that all the classrooms are diverse so Ms. Mader’s point is totally out of context and not relevant. Bad reporting. I can also attest that I as a mom downloaded lots of sample exams and we had at home test prep that went on for a month before the exams. So that full level of proficiency that my kids scored didn’t necessarily come from the classroom. Tired of the media discounting what happens at home and making the schools take the hit for everything. Not fair to the teachers who work so hard.

Might culture play a role? Families hold very different things as important. Culture is rooted in history. The gap may have nothing to do with schools, curriculum, etc.

"Nicole Mader, the co-author of the study, said the lingering achievement gap demonstates that just having different kinds of students together in the same building is not enough to have true integration. Students must be in the same classrooms, have the same quality of teachers and be disciplined in the same way." I don't understand why the study's results necessarily reflect on integration at all. Couldn't the poor students' low scores simply have resulted from factors outside of school? (Not having highly educated parents as role models, not getting proper nutrition at home, not getting outside academic help such as tutoring, etc.) Ms. Mader seems to discount that possibility entirely.

This is a complicated outcome resulting from historical inequity, a lack of parental education, the replication of habits that are not conducive to educational achievement in our modern school system ("culture"), pedagogical approaches in public schools that don't cater to students with said culture, a lack of time on the part of parents and family members, and so on. It's this heady mix of race, class, culture, school quality and it's not clear to me how separable these variables are. Clearly the Success Academy (for example) works in large part because parents are more motivated and willing to let the school take on elements of child-rearing and acculturation that we ordinarily don't think of public schools taking on.

"Students must be in the same classrooms, have the same quality of teachers and be disciplined in the same way." Maybe not. Perhaps the involvement of parents counts too. And perhaps wealthier parents either have the time to get involved, or have the interest or skills to get involved.

"Same classes, same discipline"--Good start, but not enough, even there. The indirect, cooperative forms of discipline used at many of our best schools will be familiar and effective for students going to expensive pre-schools, seeing this type of discipline at home, less so for students from less advantaged households. It is critical to recognize and adapt to behavior differences from differing backgrounds. My wealthy town is highly segregated, with 90%+ white students in the charter schools, 60% Hispanic in the public schools. I've seen several students from our local projects leave the charter schools due to cultural expectations.

Can you please include the data regarding Asian American students as well? By including data on Asian American students, we can gain a more complete picture of the student population and perhaps appreciate yet another layer of complexity in analyzing this problem of academic performance.

What I want to know is how many of the teachers in these schools were of color? Take the time to listen to Malcolm Gladwell's story of the terrible loss of African-American teachers due to the usually lauded Brown vs. The Board of Education ruling. Children of color don't see themselves succeeding because they don't see teachers like them. And we know about unconscious bias in white teachers. http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/13-miss-buchanans-period-of-adjus...

Success Academy has a history of removing their poorly performing students before the tests are given. This is one reason they have such high results on their tests. Success Academy gets rid of students who don't toe the line. It's artificial to compare the cherry picked students of SA to the students of other public schools.

There is a big difference in what happens in the homes of different social classes. Wealthier parents are more likely to be well educated or at least self-educated and were successful in business. These parents can help their children with homework and encourage hard work in school. Poorer parents may not be educated well enough to help their children with homework. Worse, they have to work several jobs to support their families and are not around to help with homework, if they could. They may tell the kids to do their homework, but may not be present to enforce it or help with it. Kids who go to charter schools are those who won the lottery to go to class in a place where the school itself picks up the slack of the difference in the home environment. Children in wealthier homes hear many more words, are read to more often and share learning experiences with their parents more often than kids in poorer homes. If they themselves don't have the time because of work, they pay others to do it. It is hard to erase those differences in every school.