Lessons Learned: Fighting Inequity in Schools

By WENDY KOPP

Foundations, corporations, and individual donors have poured billions of dollars into efforts to overhaul the nation’s educational system, but they have not yet succeeded in solving a pernicious problem: the disparity in achievement between students in affluent neighborhoods and those in poor ones.

By the time children from low-income areas turn 9, their performance in mathematics is already one to two grade levels behind that of 9-year-olds in high-income neighborhoods. In reading, they are three to four grade levels behind. And this gap only widens to the point that a child who grows up in Watts is seven times less likely to graduate from college than a child who grows up in Beverly Hills.

Those differences don’t need to exist. There are plenty of successful teachers and school leaders in low-income neighborhoods who have shown us how to close the achievement gap. Philanthropists and social entrepreneurs should showcase examples of the successful classrooms and schools they have helped to build to make sure the public knows what is possible.

At the same time, we should take the steps needed to bring about broader change. After spending more than a decade obtaining private and government resources to build the nonprofit teaching corps Teach For America, I would offer several important lessons for grant makers and others who want to close the achievement gap:

Make the commitment. We must commit ourselves to a big idea: that one day, all children in our nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education.

We aspire to be the most just, most fair nation, a nation of equal rights and equal opportunity. We aspire to prosper economically and to have a strong democracy. We aspire to be a nation in which universities, Supreme Court benches, and corporate boardrooms are diverse; to be a country of racial harmony; to live in safe communities.

And yet to this point we have tolerated the fact that one’s place of birth in the United States largely determines one’s educational prospects.

The simple act of committing to big ideas and big goals often unleashes new solutions and unexpected momentum. I have seen this in classrooms and schools that have attained outstanding results that many would not have thought possible. And I saw it through my own experience, when within just one year after I graduated from college, despite my lack of experience and credibility, Teach For America generated 2,500 applicants, trained and placed 500 corps members, and raised $2.5-million.

Take a long-term institution-building approach. We must recognize that effective management and leadership at every level of our educational system is the key to making this idea a reality. Grant makers, among others, have latched on to promising strategies, like smaller class size or technology-based instruction, while ignoring the need for institution-building at the school-district level. Yet when people think about what makes great organizations work, they see it’s not a single strategy. It’s that the organizations have built the systems to achieve results, respond to change, and continually improve.

Building effective school systems will not be easy. It will take superior leadership at every level and a lot of critical thinking and hard work. It will require a hard look at the forces — from how school boards govern to how states regulate — that prevent school-district leadership from building effective organizations. But as difficult as it will be, the good news is that there’s no mystery about what it will take.

When I first started Teach For America, much to the consternation of our early supporters, I had no interest in building effective management systems. It was only through many difficult years that I came to see that whether Teach For America realized its mission would depend on our developing the capacity for solid organizational management.

Over time, I came to understand the critical importance of investing heavily in the recruitment and development of effective staff members at every level of our organization, building a strong culture on the basis of clear values, and instituting systems to foster continuous improvement and accountability for results. Leaders of successful schools have discovered the same thing. Their success is not a function of a particular curricular strategy or instructional approach. Rather, it is the result of a talented school leader doing what successful leaders do in any context: establish ambitious goals, attract and develop strong staffs, build powerful cultures, monitor the organization’s progress, and learn constantly from their mistakes.

Defining clear measures of success was critical to Teach For America, and education reformers have taken a major step in the right direction by calling upon our school systems to produce measurable results. There’s certainly a danger in relying on low-level standardized tests as the ultimate measure of school or student progress, and school systems and states will need to keep refining their measures of success. But as we work to improve those measures, we shouldn’t run from measuring results altogether.

With defined goals in place, school systems will need to strengthen their capacity to achieve results. One of the most important cornerstones of this effort must be an aggressive effort to attract and develop talent for every level of our system. Districts should start aggressive campaigns to recruit talented people from every high-potential source and select those candidates with leadership qualities. They should provide their teachers — those recruited with education degrees and from other backgrounds — with effective preservice training and continuous support.

To fill principalships, school districts can turn to some of their most successful teachers, some of whom will need the challenges of school leadership to persuade them to remain in the field of education. Thus, districts will find themselves with school leaders who have themselves attained significant gains in student achievement, who know it is possible to do so, and who have the moral authority to lead a faculty of other teachers to bring about the same results.

Commit more resources. To make our big idea a reality will require investing more resources in schools in the nation’s lowest-income areas. Children growing up in urban and rural areas face significant socioeconomic disadvantages that children in other areas don’t. They arrive at school already behind, perhaps because of lack of adequate nutrition or access to preschool programs, and through their school career they continue to face challenges that more privileged students don’t. Simply providing equal resources to such children will not guarantee equal results.

Achieving our goal will require longer school hours, higher salaries for teachers and school leaders who work these longer hours, and more staff members and services.

Money isn’t everything; tough financial situations force high-quality, innovative thinking. But we won’t be able to fully realize our vision of educational equality until we as a nation invest disproportionately in schools in areas with predominantly low-income families.

Many changes outside of schools could alleviate the pressure on school systems. Improved local economies, better social services, better health care, and universal public preschool would go a long way. We should commit ourselves to those goals. Until those changes happen, though, philanthropy should do all it can to make sure that school systems have the mission, capacity, and resources they need to put children born into significant disadvantages on equal footing with other children.

Wendy Kopp is president and founder of Teach For America. This article is adapted from her new book

One Day, All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach For America and What I Learned Along the Way (Public Affairs).