Inner-city Education in Chicago: Root Causes of the Achievement Gap

Inner-city Education in Chicago: Root Causes of the Achievement Gap

In the 2001 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, President George W. Bush took aim at what he called "the soft bigotry of low expectations" by demanding that public schools hold all students to a common standard of achievement.

Given the historical context of urban education, this was symbolically a crucial move. Fifty years ago, urban schools were expected only to equalize resources such as class size-the "inputs" of education-and even that expectation was seldom met in the inner city. Schools in low-income black neighborhoods had poorer facilities, bigger classes, and less experienced teachers; many of them operated on double-shift schedules, which gave children 20 percent less instructional time. In the large urban school districts of northern cities, there was no leverage for addressing these disparities, much less the wide race and class disparities in school outcomes. Brown v. Board of Education didn't help, because the schools were not segregated de jure. Demanding that all schools be held to a common standard of achievement would have been unthinkable.

While NCLB has its flaws as a program, it represents a critique of school policy that has broad currency and deserves to be taken seriously. This critique tells a simple story. In the old days, the story goes, public schools imposed a uniform curriculum and common academic standards. Then, for a variety of reasons, which may range from misguided progressive ideologies to racism and nativism, school leaders introduced reforms that relaxed this expectation. The schools differentiated the curriculum and tracked students based on academic prowess, assigning most poor and minority students to lower-track classes. Social promotion let schools pass children along without learning very much. These practices let schools off the hook with respect to the academic achievement of poor black children. To remedy the achievement gap, therefore, we should reverse these practices-end social promotion, impose exit exams, or, as NCLB does, set (common) expectations directly.

There is a grain of truth to this history, of course. But my research on inner-city education in Chicago suggests a different and more complex account.

First of all, as others have noted, disparities in achievement predate reforms such as tracking and social promotion. When the schools imposed common standards, many children failed to meet them. In Chicago, a century ago, some 20 percent of students failed their first semester of first grade, primarily because of disadvantages associated with poverty and immigration. The public schools' response to academic difficulty-the only tool they had in their toolkit-was to fail students until they either learned the material, dropped out, or were passed along out of pity or because the seat was needed for another child. It was common for children to have failed two grades by the time they reached the legal school-leaving age of 14.

This regime began to change because educators came to believe it wasn't working. Administrators were impressed with the financial cost of widespread grade retention. Teachers were more concerned about the problems of teaching and discipline in academically heterogeneous classrooms. To a school bureaucrat, a fourth grader was a fourth grader, regardless of whether the child was a precocious 8-year-old who'd skipped ahead, a 9-year-old at grade level, or an 11-year-old who'd already failed twice. Teachers knew better.

During the 1920s, Chicago educators began to use the tools of empirical social science to study new curricula and teaching methods that they thought might address the problems of school failure. They tried individualized lessons, homogeneous grouping, project-based learning, remedial classes-a variety of techniques that took student heterogeneity seriously. For a short time, the district office set up a demonstration site for applied instructional research-what local educators called "measured teaching." Before-and-after studies used achievement test scores to evaluate new curricula and teaching methods.

This work is naive and easy to dismiss. Little of it would pass muster by present-day standards of methodology. Teachers reported gains in achievement-reading scores jump five grade levels in 12 weeks!-that simply isn't plausible.

Yet these experiments deserve more than our condescension. They represent the first halting steps toward a science of education, the beginnings of a base of evidence that now seems important to us as a basis for school policy decisions. More than that, these experiments validated for teachers the idea that the schools could do something to help failing students learn. Repeating grades was not the only alternative.

In the end, it was money and politics that choked off this promising line of development. It cost money to address the needs of low-achieving students-money for smaller classes, special curricula, and so on-and none of this was possible during the 1930s. In Chicago, the economic crisis of the Depression was compounded by corruption and mismanagement in school governance. The collapse of the youth labor market closed what had long been an escape valve for low-achieving and disaffected students, intensifying the pressure on the schools.

It was not until the late 1930s, when the worst of the fiscal crisis was over, that the Chicago schools began a long-overdue overhaul of their policies for dealing with achievement differences among students. Although school officials continued to talk about promoting learning among low-achieving students, in practice, they did little to make that happen. Instead, the district eased the passage of low-achieving students through the school. Grading standards were relaxed; social promotion received official sanction. In the high schools, a lower-track English class was piloted in 1938; within twenty years, the schools had set up four or five levels of instruction for the core academic subjects, from AP classes to remedial. Although these reforms were cloaked with progressive rhetoric, they shared in common the assumption that the schools would do little to alter the distribution of achievement.

The advocates of standards-based reform, such as supporters of No Child Left Behind, are right that social promotion, tracking, and similar practices allow schools to evade the responsibility of raising achievement among our most vulnerable students. But a return to the regime of a century ago is no solution. A spurious nostalgia for the schools of that era may suggest we can fix inner-city education on the cheap. The Chicago schools made that mistake in the 1930s. We shouldn't make it again.

Schools Betrayed: Roots of Failure in Inner-city Education will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007.

Kathryn Neckerman, Associate Director of ISERP, is a sociologist who has conducted research on the role of race and ethnicity in urban labor markets, family structure, and education. She is the editor of Social Inequality (Russell Sage, 2004).