Let’s brush up against the third rail
What is the third rail in today’s NYC DOE? Why, ‘equity’, of course. If you have a pulse and live in the continental US, then you know that NYC has been beset with complaints regarding the lack of ‘equity’ in our public schools. Chief among these complaints has been the hand-wringing over admissions to our specialized high schools, which is decided by a remarkably well-designed test known as the SHSAT.
According to our fearless leader, Richard Carranza, the SHSAT is woefully inequitable. He has made this determination based on the pitifully low percentage of black and Hispanic students admitted to said specialized high schools. It is worth noting that he has not one word to say about the content or scoring of the test itself. It seems that the ethnic composition of admitted students is prima facie evidence that the test is appallingly discriminatory.
What’s really going on here? Why do so few black and Hispanic students do well on the SHSAT? Time for a story from Mrs. Gradgrind!
I hope this does not reveal too much but…I teach middle-school English in a predominately black and Hispanic school. If I remember correctly, our current enrollment is 2% white and 3% Asian, with the remainder being black and Hispanic. Last spring, the school received a grant to fund free SHSAT test prep for interested 7th grade students. I attended professional development to teach in this program, and became interested in the design of the exam. The SHSAT is comprised of 2 sections, one on math and one on reading comprehension and language. I will discuss the reading/language section, as that is what I know best. The reading/language section of the exam is further divided into two subsections. One, the larger portion, is straightforward reading comprehension. Students read a selection of fiction and non-fiction and respond to multiple-choice questions about the main idea, the author’s point of view, the inferences that can be drawn from specific lines or passages, etc. In content and in format, it is almost indistinguishable from the state Common Core exams that every student takes every spring. The other section is about grammar. Students are asked to identify and correct grammatical errors in sentences or short passages and to revise short passages for clarity and organization. This portion of the test is virtually unprecedented in the standard middle school curriculum.
After attending training last spring, I taught after-school test prep for 7th grade students, and quickly realized that I need to devote all of my time to the grammar section. I needed to devote all my time to this section because my students had never heard of pronouns and had never been taught the difference between a comma and a semi-colon. I was assigned five hours for the spring, and told that instruction would continue in the fall, when these students returned as 8th graders.
That never happened. When we returned to school in the fall, nothing was scheduled. Then, we were told that we needed to put together a new roster of interested students. Then, we were told that we needed to wait to see how much funding was available. Then, the tests were upon us, and there was no time to provide any additional instruction. All of this happened even though funding for a full ten hours of instruction had already been provided.
This spring, I was once again asked to provide SHSAT prep classes for 7th graders. I did so, with the awareness that five hours in the spring would probably be it. I designed my lessons around high-yield topics, focusing only on grammatical concepts that I knew would be assessed on the SHSAT and that would be unfamiliar to my students. We did subject-verb agreement. We did verb tenses. We did pronouns. We did commas, apostrophes, and commonly-confused comparatives like ‘then’ and ‘than’.
The kids ate it up. In every one of those five sessions, they told me that this was entirely new to them, that they’d never been taught about the difference between the past and the past progressive or about when to use and comma with a coordinating conjunction and when to use a semi-colon. They told me that they wanted to learn these things. Several students specifically said “why don’t we do this in class?” In every one of those sessions, they were attentive, hard-working, and absolutely focused on taking notes. I am now confident that all of those students will be able to answer questions on the grammatical skills we discussed.
So, what’s the problem? The problem is that I was given five session in which to teach all of English grammar and syntax. I could have spent five sessions on commas alone. My kids didn’t know any of this. No one, in all their years of schooling, had taught any of this. Now, in October of their 8th grade year, they will sit for a test that assess their understanding of English language conventions – after five hours of instruction. We covered a lot, but there is so much more. We hardly touched on modifiers. We had no time at all for prepositions. We never went near the difference between compound and compound-complex sentences. When those bright and charming black and Hispanic students sit for the SHSAT in the fall, they will understand verb tenses and the difference between possessive and objective pronouns. They won’t understand much else, though, because they haven’t been taught much else. Most of them will, therefore, score poorly. They are unlikely to be admitted to specialized high schools, even though they have as much capacity to learn as any other child. The mayor and the chancellor will cause another stir about those horrible, racist tests, and will not stop to ask if there might be any other explanation for the poor performance of our minority students. They will assume that the only reason for black and Hispanic children to fail a test is racism—it certainly couldn’t be because the test assess things they were only taught for five short hours.
But, Mrs. Gradgrind (asks my imaginary reader) I thought you weren’t going to talk about the details of curriculum and lesson planning? I thought you were going to take a broader and more conceptual approach? Why are you ranting about semi-colons?
Because the semi-colons are the symptom of a larger problem, dear reader. Some say it’s because of the Danielson. Some say it’s because of an excessive focus on group work, or on project-based learning, or on ‘rigor’. Some say it’s all the fault of a pernicious educational philosophy called constructivism, where students are assumed to have ideas and knowledge lingering somewhere deep inside them, that teachers must simply elicit and facilitate. Whatever the ultimate cause, there is a profound problem haunting he DOE; teachers are expected to not teach.
What does that mean? Well, that means we are not supposed to lecture. If a teacher were so bold as to talk to the class for fifteen or twenty minutes, explaining a grammatical concept and discussing a number of examples—that would be ineffective. You can’t engage students in learning by explaining things they don’t know. If a teacher were to give a quiz in which students were asked to find and correct errors in subject-verb agreement—that would be ineffective. Questions with only one right answer are a level 1 on the Depth of Knowledge framework. If a teacher gave a homework assignment in which students were asked to write 3 sentences using the verb ‘run’ in the present, past perfect, and future progressive tense—that would be ineffective. It wouldn’t provide multiple entry points for students with non-verbal learning styles.
But, Mrs. Gradgrind, (as my imaginary reader is thinking) what do you mean? Do you mean that prevailing educational philosophies cause teachers to ignore basic grammar? Well, yes. That is precisely what I mean. If you are an NYC teacher, you know that projects and ‘student-centered’ learning lead to good ratings. Lectures and memorization and quizzes lead to bad ratings. So what do you do? You give student projects and discussion activities oriented around fuzzy concepts like ‘themes’ and you certainly do not give quizzes on appropriate comma usage. You wouldn’t want an administrator to walk in on a ten-minute lecture on punctuation. Definitely ineffective.
But, Mrs. Gradgrind, can’t you teach grammar from within the DOE’s instructional preferences? Ha. You try it. Go ahead. Design on a discussion activity on verb tenses for students who have never heard a lecture on verb tenses. Come up with a rigorous project on punctuation for students who have never taken and passed a quiz on punctuation. It is entirely possible to have fascinating and rigorous and meaningful conversations about grammar; grammarians do it all the time. The trouble is, those grammarians have first mastered the basic rules. Our students do not master the basic rules because lessons on those basic rules would not be fascinating and rigorous enough to please our fearless leaders.
This isn’t all about teachers and their ratings, either. In my years as an English teacher, I have worked with 3 different city-provided curriculums. Not a one of them has included any framework for teaching basic grammar and syntax.
What does any of this have to do with equity?
Everything. There are good teachers in minority classrooms in this city. There are smart, knowledgeable people who walk in to classrooms full of minority students every day. Every single minority student in this city has access to teachers who know how to use f*ing commas. This knowledge is not conveyed from teacher to student because it isn’t supposed to be conveyed. We are supposed to facilitate. We are supposed to engage. We are supposed create projects. We are not supposed to simply…state what we know while students listen. Our minority students, therefore, complete endless projects and reflections. They spend countless hours drawing pictures and creating posters about how various characters in expurgated novels make them feel. They spend five hours listening to a knowledgeable adult explain verb tenses. In a typical NYC classroom, the students’ preexisting interests are king, and the teachers’ knowledge is devalued. Because lecturing isn’t entertaining and diagramming sentences isn’t engaging, we don’t do those things. We cater to students’ and administrators’ preferences and we pander to the idea of ‘student-led’ learning, and we forget that there are some things students can’t learn without being led. We are so obsessed with respecting students’ interests and prior knowledge that we forget that they are supposed to be learning from people who know more than they do. Wasn’t that, once, the whole point of school?
Those Asian and white students are different. They go to private test prep. They go to cram schools, and they use online programs where you can best your ass that the teachers lecture. They demonstrate. They talk about commas for hours on end without interruption and those Asian and white kids take notes. They learn how to use commas, even if their learning process wasn’t ‘rigorous’.
This is the inequity, Mr. Carranza. The structures and preferences of the DOE prohibit me from telling my students what I know—which is, after all, the most efficient educational method imaginable. Asian and white kids have after-school teachers who are allowed to actually teach. I am only allowed to facilitate.
Minority students fail tests because the DOE cannot or will not acknowledge that teachers know things that students need to hear. They fail because the DOE cannot acknowledge that drills and practice and quizzes must necessarily come before ‘rigor’ and ‘discussion’.
Let me lecture on commas, Mr. Carranza, and my black students will do as well as any Chinese kid in the five boroughs. Let me give weekly quizzes on verbs and my Hispanic kids will do as well as any Korean kid in this state. Limit me to projects and discussions and rigor and these unfortunate—but not untalented—children will continue to fail. That’s the real inequity, that I cannot teach them as I would in a saner and less progressive system.
Aye Carranza! 