High-poverty Urban Schools Research Articles

Implementing High Standards in Urban Schools: Problems and Solutions

Instead of starting with a deficit view of learning, Mr. Lee argues, educators working high-poverty urban schools should strive to create cultures of quality based on high expectations. The key is to link standards to the students' own ethnic, social, and cultural lives. IT IS HARD to argue with the call for higher standards for urban schools. Kati Haycock of the Education Trust describes how stunned members of the Education Trust were when they observed how little is expected of students high-poverty schools -- how few assignments students are given and how low the expectations are. She goes on to say that careful research shows the positive impact of more rigorous coursework even on formerly low-achieving and she calls for a relentless focus on an academic core, the alignment of assessments with standards, accountability systems for all students, and intensive efforts to assist teachers improving their practice, along with extra instruction for students who need it.1 Certainly most Americans would agree with Haycock that students who attend high-poverty schools have been sold short. And they would also agree that at least part of the remedy for this situation is to raise our expectations and to direct all available resources toward helping students fulfill them. Yet there are some real problems with this remedy if it is based on a deficit model of learning. The typical curriculum for the urban poor treats students as passive, empty vessels to be filled with knowledge. Paulo Freire calls this the banking approach to education, which students are asked to absorb, file, and store what educators think they need order to overcome perceived deficits.2 Many educators who work with the urban poor believe that such learning will produce equity, with students more literate and better able to advance to college and to compete for jobs. Associationist Psychology and Standards This deficit view of learning, even as embodied academic standards that are performance-based, usually embraces an associationist psychology that favors a which knowledge exists apart from the learner and not, as modern cognitive science would have it, relation to the learner's current mental schemata, motivations, and life experiences. Teaching of this sort supports a form of stimulus/response behaviorism that ignores the need to help students construct their own understanding. Since 1989, when new mathematics standards were published by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the standards documents of the professional organizations the disciplines have recommended a student-centered pedagogy. But especially urban schools, these recommendations have usually been ignored favor of what Martin Haberman has called the pedagogy of poverty, which consists primarily of control techniques that include giving directions, making assignments, and monitoring seatwork.3 Such emerges from what Lauren Resnick and Meghan Hall refer to as the associationist instructional theory that Thorndike and other psychologists promoted early the 20th century on the basis of laboratory research that mainly involved animal learning.4 As Resnick and Hall explain, for associationists, knowledge consists of a collection of bonds, each of which involves a link between an external stimulus and an internal mental response. The goal of teaching is to strengthen the correct bonds and diminish the strength of the incorrect ones by means of a system of rewards and punishments. Associationist teaching matches up well with a deficit model of urban education that believes students are cognitively, linguistically, and culturally need of remediation that stamps in the dominant culture and stamps out the deficiencies that characterize a minority, impoverished culture. Teaching based on associationist theory employs a form of recitation which teachers ask narrowly focused questions designed to trigger correct responses with little extended thinking. …

Measuring teachers’ content knowledge of language and reading

In the context of a longitudinal, four-year study of reading instruction in low-performing, high-poverty urban schools, we surveyed teacher knowledge of reading-related concepts, and established a modest predictive relationship between teachers’ knowledge, classroom reading achievement levels, and teachers’ observed teaching competence. There were significant associations among these variables at the third and fourth grade levels. To obtain this result, measures of teacher content knowledge in language and reading were refined in a three-stage process. Our purpose was to explore the type and level of questions that would begin to discriminate more capable from less capable teachers, and that would have a predictive relationship with student reading achievement outcomes. After experimenting with measurement of K-2 teachers’ content knowledge (Form #1), we piloted a Teacher Knowledge Survey with 41 second and third grade teachers in one study site (Form #2). We then refined and expanded the Survey (Form #3) and administered it to 103 third and fourth grade teachers in both project sites. Teachers’ misconceptions about sounds, words, sentences, and principles of instruction were pinpointed so that professional development could address teachers’ needs for insight and information about language structure and student learning.

Notes: Privatized Delivery of Instructional Services for Urban Public School Students Placed at Risk

The privatization “revolution” of the last decade of the 20th century has not left public education unchallenged. While much of the recent debate has focused on “school choice” and voucher plans, there has been growing discussion of privatization within public schools. Most studies have noted the lack of evidence of student achievement gains under privatization models. In this research note we evaluate the effectiveness of private delivery of instructional services to public school students by analyzing the impact on student achievement of reading and math instruction delivered by a private company in a large urban public school system on the East Coast. Analyses of score data from the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (Fourth Edition) indicate differential effects of instructional service delivery by this private company, depending on subject matter (reading vs. math), grade level, and student characteristics (especially gender). The impact on student achievement is particularly notable in mathematics, but we found no evidence that reading comprehension achievement is significantly improved by this private remedial reading program in high poverty urban schools. This study underscores the importance of formal evaluation of privatization efforts to ascertain impacts on student achievement, since there has been considerable expansion of privatized delivery of instructional services to urban school districts, using Title I (Chapter I) funds, with little solid evidence of the effectiveness of these programs.

Transforming High-Poverty Urban Middle Schools Into Strong Learning Institutions: Lessons From the First Five Years of the Talent Development Middle School

Transforming High-Poverty Urban Middle Schools Into Strong Learning Institutions: Lessons From the First Five Years of the Talent Development Middle School

Transforming High-Poverty Urban Middle Schools Into Strong Learning Institutions: Lessons From the First Five Years of the Talent Development Middle School

The Johns Hopkins Talent Development Middle School model aims to transform high-poverty, urban middle schools into strong learning institutions that reliably provide every student with a standards-based education and every teacher with the training, support, and materials she or he needs to deliver it. Two of the model's developers discuss 10 lessons learned from implementing, refining, and evaluating this model in 5 high-poverty middle schools in Philadelphia and discuss obstacles they have encountered and breakthroughs they made in developing the knowledge base, materials, and infrastructure needed. Taken together, the lessons suggest that "improvement now" in curriculum and instruction and in student achievement is a realistic goal even in high-poverty, urban middle schools. However, such improvement requires multiple layers of sustained technical assistance and implementation support and also requires local partners who can help the model to become integrated into the fabric of the school district.

Young African American and Latino Children in High-Poverty Urban Schools: How They Perceive School Climate

This article reports findings of a study of third-graders' perceptions of school climate, a key variable of the Comer School Development Program. A self-report survey was individually administered to 1,000 African American and 260 Latino children participating in an evaluation of the Comer process; data were factor-analyzed. African American children viewed teacher-child relations as the most important dimension of school climate. For them, besides acknowledging best efforts, caring teachers listened to children and were available to comfort and help with school and personal problems. Latino children stressed teacher fairness, caring, and praise for effort as well as the importance of moral order. Both groups emphasized following school rules and performing well, values consistent with the Comer process. INTRODUCTION Several studies published during the Reagan-Bush years (1980-92) indicate that African American students in K-12 public schools are disproportionately represented in grade retentions, school suspensions, and dropout rates (Bennett & Harris,1981; Campbell,1982; Hess & Greer, 1987; Hess & Lauber, 1985; Kaufman, 1991). Similar findings have been reported for Latino children (Chapa & Valencia, 1993; Reyes & Valencia, 1993). These studies conclude that prior to leaving school during the adolescent years, these students are frequently poor academic achievers in the elementary grades and experience academic suspensions for related disciplinary problems. An important trend in the current research focusing on what and how children learn is an increasing appreciation for the overriding importance of developmental factors and continuity. However, this trend was not apparent when Kenneth Clark published Dark Ghetto in 1965. At that time, Clark perceived compensatory programs such as Project Head Start as having mistakenly blamed poor parents and families for their children's educational difficulties. The blame, he believed, fell squarely on school teachers and administrators for not assuming proper responsibility and accountability for the education of low-income and minority children. By 1991, Head Start had endorsed its Transition Project, which focuses on maintaining continuity between the Head Start preschool program and public elementary schools. As a result of this initiative, Head Start staff are trained to work proactively with primary grade teachers to facilitate children's successful entry to and adjustment in the primary grades (Kennedy, 1993). Increasingly, both elementary and secondary educators acknowledge the important role of family and community in the educative process as active, positive contributors inside and outside the classroom (Lightfoot, 1978; Slaughter-Defoe, 1991; Strickland & Ascher, 1992). It is far more common today for emphasis to be placed on the need for collaborative partnerships between schools and families at all grade levels in an effort to ameliorate the academic and learning challenges occasioned by deepening, chronic, and persistent poverty (Comer, 1988a, 1988b; McLoyd, 1990; Slaughter, 1988; Wilson, 1989). This dual focus on developmentally appropriate practices in the primary grades and collaborative relationships between children's teachers and families is entirely consistent with the approach to school reform advanced by the School Development Program (SDP) model developed by Dr. James P. Comer (1980, 1998a) at the Yale University Child Development Center. Comer originally piloted his model in public elementary schools serving primarily low-income minority children in New Haven, Connecticut, during the late 1970s. Reflecting on these early efforts, Comer (1980) notes: The New Haven School System itself developed a number of compensatory education programs. Head Start and Follow Through programs, designed to overcome learning lags, received considerable support.... We were fully aware that an education program could not correct what was wrong with Dixwell Avenue or low-income communities through the nation. …