Congratulating Ourselves for Being Us

All three of our children left the Atlanta Public Schools after 5th grade; Iain is now in 11th grade, so I've been watching the agony that has followed the APS cheating scandal and the angst about redistricting as an Interested and Concerned Citizen, not as a parent of children who were directly impacted.  I've had the same response to more recent news outside of Atlanta about struggles over textbooks and the battles over the Core Curriculum, being grateful that whatever issues my kids' middle and high school might have had, they weren't *those* issues.

But I do care about public schools, and so I was interested to see this graph in the MLPA Newsletter that arrived yesterday in the mail.

The accompanying text identified Morningside Elementary School -- our neighborhood elementary school -- as the highest scoring APS elementary school on the 2014 Criterion-Referenced Competency Test (CRCT), and Inman Middle School as the highest performing middle school (see below for a close up view of the upper left corner of the graph).

Of course, that's only the Y axis part of the story.  The label on the X axis is "Avg. FRL Rate."  FRL is not defined but I am virtually certain it is "Free and Reduced Lunch," the usual measure of socioeconomic status in public school students.  And the stunning thing about this graph is not that our neighborhood elementary and middle schools have higher test scores than other elementary and middle schools in APS, but how strongly correlated CRCT scores are with the percentage of children eligible for free and reduced lunch.  

The newsletter says "Morningside Elementary School (MES) is the highest scoring elementary school in APS and 3rd highest in the state!  Congratulations to our students, teachers, staff and parents for their combined hard work and commitment to our success."  I do not question the hard work and commitment of all of the above (I recall many hours constructing dioramas when our kids were at Morningside, and I am sure families of current students are doing the same), but really -- what this graph shows is that it isn't "hard work and commitment" that really matter but the socioeconomic makeup of the student body.  We are congratulating ourselves for having hardly any poor children in Morningside. 

There's a very famous and often cited study done by Betty Hart and Todd Risley, that looked at how families talk to their young children.  Their book, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, was published in 1995.  The researchers made audio recordings of how parents of 42 children interacted with their child from age 10 months through 3 years.  The children were from professional and working class families as well as families on welfare.  What they found was striking.

"The longitudinal data showed that in the everyday interactions at home, the average (rounded) number of words children heard per hour was 2,150 in the professional families, 1,250 in the working-class families, and 620 in the welfare families...By age 3 the children in professional families would have heard more than 30 million words, the children in working class families 20 million, and the children in welfare families 10 million."

This gap in exposure to language results in differences in acquisition of vocabulary that become apparent before age 2.  

(data from Figure 2 in the book, redrawn here.)

According to Hart and Risley,

"We could see in the professional families the American dream:  parents adding to and handing on to their children the advantages their families had given to them.  We saw the daily efforts of these parents to transmit an educationally advantaged culture to their children through the display of enriched language; through the amount of talking they did and how informative they were; and through the frequency of gentle guidance, affirmative interactions, and responsiveness to their children's talk."

By age 3, the poor children in the study were behind on many measures, and preschool was not enough to make up the difference.  

"We saw poverty of experience being transmitted across generations.  The welfare children, like the other children after the first 3 years of experience at home, had become like their parents.  We wondered that we could have thought their accomplishments at 3 would be other than similar to those of their parents.  We could see too why a few hours of intensive intervention at age 4 had had so little impact on the magnitude of the differences in cumulative experience that resulted from those first 3 years."

Most of the students who attend Atlanta Public Schools are poor, and many of them start school with these kinds of disadvantages.  I don't believe that parental involvement or the quality of teachers or school leadership accounts for the differences in test scores among students at these schools.  All the pressure that Beverly Hall and her team put on principles and teachers couldn't change the experience of APS students before they started school; nothing the schools could do could fully compensate for this, so many schools resorted to cheating.

So, fine, congratulations to Morningside Elementary School and Inman Middle School for their vertical distance above the diagonal line.  That's all I'm willing to grant them; the rest is just demographics.