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February 22, 2005
Breaking the Inner-city Monopolies
LaShawn Barber tells of meeting Rev. Jesse L. Peterson at the CPAC:
... An outspoken critic of liberalism and godlessness in general and Jesse Jackson and the NAACP in particular, Peterson is a Christian and activist who wants to topple so-called black leaders from their perches of privilege. Like me, he believes that the collapse of the family and immorality are the biggest problems in the black community, not racism. ...
And to that add the still all-powerful combination of the reform-resistant teacher's unions and the leftist colleges of education, which dooms the majority of black kids to a second rate education.
It doesn't have to be that way. Houston educator Thaddeus Lott took charge of an poorly performing elementary school in the heart of a neighborhood riddled with poverty and drug use, and in just a few years he proved that not only could disadvantaged minority kids learn, they could surpass their wealthy urban counterparts.
One tragic aspect of this story is the fact that this is not breaking news—Lott took over Wesley Elementary in 1975. In 1998, Tyce Palmaffy in Policy Review recapped the story (emphases are mine):
We have come to expect mediocrity from schools whose students are saddled with such tragic circumstances. But since Thaddeus Lott became its principal in 1975, Wesley has graduated thousands of children whose reading and math scores rival those of their suburban peers. Before Lott introduced his educational philosophy, only 18 percent of Wesley’s third-graders were scoring at or above grade level in reading comprehension on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. By 1980, 85 percent were achieving at or above grade level. In 1996, 100 percent of Wesley’s third-graders passed the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) in reading. Statewide, fewer than 70 percent of third-graders in schools with similar demographics passed.
To achieve this astounding turnaround, Lott eschewed popular nostrums—computers, school-to-work initiatives, parental involvement—for the basics: a proven curriculum, rigorous teacher training, strict discipline, high expectations of teachers and students, and a fervent belief that any child can learn.
"It’s a myth," says Lott, "that if you’re born in a poor community and your skin is a certain color that you can’t achieve on a higher level."
Lott used a teaching method called Direct Instruction, which relies on scripted lesson plans that emphasize teacher-student interaction, along with mastery of each incremental step before moving to the next.
DISTAR’s phonics-based reading lessons are literally scripted for the teacher, who is required to ask 200-300 questions per day, often in rapid-fire sequence. The children’s high-decibel choral responses may sound like a high-school cheerleading squad hopped up on No-Doz, but they are learning the relationships between the sounds and the letters that constitute the English language. And there’s no quibbling with the results at Wesley.
During Lyndon Johnson’s "War on Poverty," the federal government began Project Follow Through, which spent $500 million and many years investigating the most effective pedagogy for disadvantaged students. It concluded that direct instruction was the only method that even came close to elevating poor readers to the 50th percentile in achievement. Child-centered approaches that diminish the teacher’s role in the classroom and reject the teaching of basic skills finished in the cellar. Ironically, researchers also found that direct instruction elevated students’ self-esteem far more than the child-centered methods that ascribe a central role to high self-esteem and maintain that self-esteem suffers in heavily controlled, teacher-directed environments. Disadvantaged students succeed more often with direct instruction, however, and Lott knows that achievement builds self-esteem, not the other way around.
Needless to say, Direct Instruction is bitterly opposed by the progressive educational establishment. Nothing could be more of a threat to the progressives' cherished vision of teachers as "guides on the side" and "facilitators", than the scripted and effective lesson plans of DI.
There are many "progressives" in the education establishment who built entire careers on suppressing the education of minority students. This is an outrage beyond words.
In subsequent posts I’ll have more on Project Follow Through, and some more recent news on Direct Instruction.
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