Episode 106: Debunking the Myth of the 'Golden Age' of American Education

In this episode of our podcast, Dr. Almitra Berry delves into the concept of the "golden age" of American K-12 education, questioning its existence for all students. The discussion centers on educational equity, evaluating metrics like high school graduation rates and college attainment, and highlighting how these often overlook systemic inequities impacting marginalized students. Dr. Berry, an educational consultant and advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion, offers five actionable steps for educators and community members to address these inequities and enhance educational outcomes for all students. This episode is essential for those interested in promoting diversity and inclusion within education and tackling systemic racism in schools.

#almitraberry #educationalequity #systemicracism #marginalized #DEI #diversityequityinclusion

Transcript

Dr Almitra Berry: 0:00

Welcome back, equity warriors. Thanks for tuning in to today's episode of the 3e podcast. Are you a subscriber? Smash that subscribe button if you're not, and then share the episode, share the show with someone else. Every subscriber, every subscription, every download, does something or another that I don't quite understand to algorithms, and it helps us grow the channel. So if you know someone who's interested in education, share the show, and if you know someone who you'd like to share the show with, but maybe they have a hearing deficit, there is a transcript for this episode and every episode now, just check down in the notes, whatever player you're on, it's there. So this morning, I was going through my morning briefs, looking at what's going on in the world of education, and I came across an article titled, When was the golden age of American K 12 education, and how can we tell now the author is a man by the name of Michael J Petrelli. He is very influential. He's an education analyst. He is president of the Thomas B Fordham Institute. He's a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute. And when you hear the name Hoover, maybe some bells are going off. Both Fordham and Hoover are conservative institutions. In fact, the Hoover Institute, even though it is located at Stanford University in California, in the central part of the Bay Area, is thought to be, you know, that's a pretty liberal area, but the Hoover Institute has been challenged on bias. So there's a part of me that questions immediately, what's the angle? Right? And was education ever really great for all children? Was there a golden age for all children? But I didn't approach reading the article that way. I want to share with you what's in there and talk through some of the things that we need to be thinking about as educators, as concerned citizens and people who care about education. So his question, when was the golden age of K 12 education? Really, some people might point to as he does first. Maybe it's high school graduation rates. Maybe you've heard me talk about high school graduation rates. Here's the thing, high school graduation rate is a pretty it's a number that is very susceptible to bias. So many states are rewarding or grading schools based on several metrics, one of those being high school graduation rates. Well, how do we graduate? Think about the system that you work in, what's required to graduation. To graduate, you show up, you pass a certain number of classes at a certain level, certain classes that you have to take, and then others. You get all your units, and voila, you're done. You graduate. But we all know as educators that we have a tremendous amount of flexibility in how we grade students. So if the only requirement is that a certain number of teachers give you a certain letter grade for you to graduate, and there is no accountability, and I'm going to use that term loosely, there's no accountability for a standard that you're graded on. It's easy, ridiculously easy, to over inflate high school graduation rates. So let's look at another metric he brings up post secondary completion, how many kids go to and graduate from college? In fact, here in Texas, one of the metrics that schools are scored on is how many of their graduating students go on to a four year college, which and I have called this out in conferences and meetings where the state has been presenting that's pretty unfair to judge a school by the number of students or percentage of students who go on to a four year university. Not every child a can afford it. This is a country that doesn't value education enough to make sure that every child who is capable of and interested in going to college to a four year institution has the means to go. We have, we have capitalized education, post secondary education, to the point where you either are going into debt to go, you're lucky enough to get a lot of scholarships, and for marginalized learners, usually those are scholarships that are based on athletics. Okay, so there's all these other things going on. Flawed metric, whether or not everyone goes, what percentage of students go. And in fact, you know, if you look at the data, and he brings the data in, there has been tremendous progress from roughly the late 1990s to the mid 2010s in the number of students of color, particularly Latino students and students black students, their rates of college attainment. Grew tremendously we had access, but I bet if we looked at the debt that was racked up by those students of color who were finally able to go to college, it would be tremendously high, putting those same children, those same young adults at risk for economic failure later on. Okay, so let's skip college attainment rate and even consider what about students and children? Students are still young adults who instead choose to go to a trade school. We don't measure that. What about those who choose to go to military. Nobody's looking at that. And if we want to look at, what about students who graduated after 2016 so those students who would have gone to college and graduated somewhere during the covid era, we don't have that data yet, so it's hard to say. Next indicator he looks at is student achievement. And how do we measure that? In my own research, all the way back to 2010 I guess it was when I started looking at student achievement. Actually, it was before that, working on my master's degree and then my doctorate, looking at student achievement, it was really hard to measure. And when I look at how we measure student achievement, high stakes test scores, let's use that one from state to state, and then looking at how states built their tests, ridiculously flawed metric. There was no way that. The only way we can measure equally measure student achievement from state to state is with a national assessment. The only thing we have is the NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Great data, great long term trend data. The problem is, not everybody has to take it. It's voluntary. Only certain districts take it. So we can't really see in a broad perspective what student achievement looks like, but just for shits and giggles, so to speak, let's take a look at what the NAEP data tells us. Back in 2013 or 15 is when we had sort of the peak 2012 to 2015 this peak in achievement based on the nape for nine year olds, so fourth graders and eighth graders, nine year olds and 13 year olds, and that was a high point. The thing is, the scores were trending down. And that high point may be a little false, depending on how you look at it, but if we take that, is that really the right answer is that really when American students were at the peak of achievement, because if those are the people, the kids, the generation, the cohort we're talking about, it means that we're talking about the youngest millennials and oldest Gen Z, ers, the zillennials. Now as the parent of a millennial and two millennials, I'm not sure that I consider them to be the smartest generation. Love my children. Yes, I do, but the smartest generation ever, and as a parent, when they were in school, I don't, I cannot possibly endorse the fact or in in assertion that that was the peak of our education, because I could see so many things that were wrong with education at the time, with how children were being served. So maybe, depending on where you are, that was great achievement time, but in so many schools with marginalized learners, that was not our best. It just wasn't. And if we want to talk about when our students were or when our system as a whole was at its best, I don't know if that has ever happened. Let's look at some other things that have happened. We've got a tremendously changing student population, the largest percentage of students coming into our schools, the growing population of students coming into our schools are students who are multilingual. They're coming to school with a language other than English, and that has its own nuances and challenges to it. So if we start breaking down data and looking at students based on racial groups or ethnic groups by language groups, then we see very different data. Even though in reading, there have been times when all racial groups were making progress, even though the nation as a whole was flat, we have not properly served all of those children. There were times when both black and Latina students were making significant gains, and we they call them significant but an increase of 5678, points, when historically, those groups have been the most marginalized. Organized when, even though Black children have been part of public education since its inception, they have always lagged. Is an increase of five points significant when we consider the gap over history with that population. So I'm going to say no, I'm sorry, the years from 2010 to 2015 were not the best in American education. Another way to look, and another item he brings up is to look at cohorts, right? So start testing students in kindergarten to see where they come in. Well, I'll agree with him on that if we benchmarked every single kindergartner in the first week or two of school, hey, even the first month of school, we would get a snapshot of where children enter our systems, and we would have a much better sense of how far back specific groups of children are entering our schools. We know from research and data that children who come into school from lower lower wealth homes have less language, they are further back from the starting line than children who come in from homes who are that are more affluent or educated. So that would give us a better way to look at how we were growing, but ultimately, we want every single child to enter kindergarten at or above grade level. So if we're not doing something to bring those children up to grade level as they enter kindergarten, then we're not solving the problem. And I would say, as long as that's an issue, we have not entered an era where we have a great education system and it isn't just reading. I know I talk all the time about reading, and I have to bring in I always apologize to my math and science people, when we look at math data, it's about the same. We're not doing any better by any metric for our children of color. So what do we need to do? You know, as educators, we have to, especially if we're anti racist educators, because I digress, let me go back, if we care, truly care about making our education system great for every child, it means we have to name that elephant that's in the room. Because as I look at all of the numbers and all of the language in that article, there's one thing that never comes up, and it's the thing that especially conservative organizations don't want to name, and that is systemic racism. When you look at the data, and he sort of in a very quiet and nuanced way, says that education was great for white kids all along and forever, and maybe it was even better for white kids in the 20 teens. I would expect that from someone from those organizations. What I don't expect is that we swallow that and just accept that it's okay for black and brown children to continue to struggle in a system that was not built properly to serve them. It is not equitable for our children of color to not see teachers who look like them. It is not equitable for you as educators to not be properly equipped to educate, to connect to all of the children that you see in your classrooms. I'll say again, as I always do, I am not anti white educators, but I believe it is the responsibility of this nation, especially when it comes to public education, to make sure that every educator is properly equipped and has the right mindset to serve the children that are in their classrooms. Part of the reason we have the demographic disconnect in our teaching force is because we have generation after generation of children of color who go through our schools, who are not equitably educated, who do not enjoy equal outcomes with their more affluent white peers, and because of that, we are not creating the next generation of educators to reflect the population of students that we have. So what do we do if you are an ally, if you are an anti racist educator, you have to be proactive. If you are a leader, you have to be proactive. If you are on a school board, if you are a member of the community who supports education, we have to be proactive to improve education. Outcomes for our learners of color and those of low wealth. So I'm going to give you five things you can do. And I know five is too many. I know that already, but as I read them, I want you to think of one. Pick one that you can do, pick one that resonates with you. All right, so here's number one, implement targeted interventions. Targeted interventions. That means, if you know that you're in a school where the majority of your kindergarten students come in and they are not kindergarten ready, maybe they have not had high quality preschool. Maybe they have low lexicons. Maybe they don't have a lot of words in their vocabulary. They don't know how to sit still, they've not been read to all of those things that make it challenging for a kindergarten teacher to get in there and teach focus on providing interventions so that we can catch those kids up quickly, so that they can exit kindergarten ready, truly ready for first grade, if we're talking about older learners. What about high dosage tutoring? What about personalized learning plans to catch those students who are behind up and making sure that in every instance, instructional materials are not only culturally relevant, but that they are inclusive, and I know that that's a higher bar for those of you in southern states and some northern states now that have law and policy that prohibits your talking about race and gender. So doesn't mean we can't teach them to read what I think and calculate. We're just going to have to be creative and determined to do so. That's number one, targeted intervention. Number two, another thing you could do is to work on addressing those systemic inequities. This is a little more for you that are on the political side of education, community organizers, parents, we need to be advocating for funding for schools that serve low income and students of color. Equitable funding for those schools, depending on what state you're in, your funding formulas can be a little more equitable. Some of your funding formulas are awful. Your task is to advocate so that funding is equitable, so that we can reduce barriers to opportunities. We want to make sure that all students have access to advanced coursework and to extracurriculars, and not just access to advanced coursework, not like it's offered and they can take it, but that they can be successful once they're in there. So that sort of falls back onto number one. So let's talk about creating some partnerships there. That's two systemic inequities. Number three is to take a good, hard look at early childhood education. We need to improve that. If as a nation, we really care about our children, then we should be supporting initiatives that make sure that every single child, especially children from underserved communities, have access to high quality early childhood education, not babysitting education as a mom when my littles, well, they're not littles. When my adult children were little, when my grandson was a toddler, I spent time teaching them because I had that knowledge. I had that flexibility to do so not every parent does, and so we can't rely on parents to provide the education that's needed, especially when we keep raising standards for kindergarten. We have to prepare children to be ready for kindergarten, and that comes with early childhood education. In those early childhood education programs, we need to make sure that they have good, strong curricula, again, that is culturally relevant, that is inclusive, that we have early assessments to make sure that if there are any learning needs, anything that might become a gap before they get to kindergarten, that we are assessing, we're identifying what those are, and then we're addressing those gaps. So number three, early childhood education. Number four is family and community engagement. We have to have partnership with our communities, with our families, with the people who care for the children who are coming to our schools. Sometimes that means providing outreach and education for our adult community that supports our children, sometimes we have to teach our parents and caregivers how to engage in education, because culturally, some groups of people do not believe it is their position, that it is their place to interact. Interact with or interfere with what goes on in the schools, and that requires educating communities so that they understand how education works in the US four. That's four, family and community engagement. Last one is to monitor and evaluate progress. We have to keep looking at data. We have to look at data that is disaggregated, by race and disaggregated by socioeconomic status, so that we are looking at how students progress, and identifying pockets of demographics of students that we know based on historic data are going to need additional supports, and then providing those supports, providing that targeted intervention, that early childhood and education, all of those things, looking at what we're doing, if it's intervention or early childhood education, if it's community engagement, looking at the effectiveness of those interventions and strategies, and then making adjustments as we see fit. So I've given you five, like I said, That's too many. I want you to pick one, just one. Take it, run with it. Stay on it, let me know how it's going and join me again next episode again. If you've got a question, a topic you'd like covered, or a special request, join me on the Patreon channel or text it to me. Look down in the notes for the link. I want to hear your stories, and remember, don't worry about things you cannot change. Change the things you can no longer accept.