Yesterday, I wrote about the lack of diversity at UW-Madison and how that prevents our university from reaching its full potential. I was responding in to Gerald Cox's column in the Badger Herald on Monday which talked about the need for parental support in helping children to succeed in school. The article is poorly mistitled (props to Jason Smathers for that one), as Mr. Cox's main point is not that the "Education system fails black pupils," but rather that, "The number of black students admitted to our university will not substantially increase until black communities and families are unified in a determination to increase it themselves."
Yesterday, I talked about the problem and discarded two issues (one being Holistic Admissions, the other being high school curriculum) as ways of fixing the achievement gap (and thereby our lack of diversity) in public schools and universities. Today, I want to address the solutions.
The first solution is the one that Mr. Cox states at the end of his column: it truly comes down to what happens at home. If you want to understand why some kids do better in reading than others, you need only look at who is being read to at home, who is going to the library with their parents, and who is getting regular help on homework to make sure that they don't fall behind. In the United States today, the discrepancy between those who get parental support and those who don't is often determined by socio-economic status. To deny that there is a link between race and poverty is both ignorant and irresponsible. No, not every person of color is poor and not every white person is wealthy, but in 2004 black households in America had a median income of just over $30,000 while the same figure for white households was $48,000. Whatever the reasons are - be it that poor parents are working too many hours to try to make ends meet, or that they simply don't have the resources to give their children the supplemental learning materials they need - kids end up paying the price.
I should hope that this is deeply troubling to all of us. We believe that our background should be no barrier to what we are able to achieve in life. Kids should not have to suffer because their parents can't give them the support they need.
Here is the place that government can help. Ideally, all parents would give their kids the help they need to be successful, but until Utopia arrives we should talk seriously about expanding a proven school program that can help bridge the achievement gap and bring the "pusuit of happiness" one step closer to reality.
I'm talking about the Student Achievement Guarentee in Education (SAGE) Program. SAGE is a state funded program designed to reduce class sizes in Kindergarten through 3rd grade classrooms to a ratio of fifteen students per teacher for core academic subjects. Governor Doyle has been a huge proponent of this program, and if the State Assembly was controlled by Democrats you can bet that his funding requests for the program would have already been met.
What we need to do is fully fund SAGE statewide. No kid that goes to public schools should have more than fourteen classmates when he or she is learning the fundamentals. There is a cost to this program, a significant one at that, but it is nothing compared to the cost society pays to incarcerate felons in our corrections system.
Want to know the best predictor of which kids will commit crimes when they get older? You need only to look at their 3rd grade reading test scores. If a kid is reading at grade level in 3rd grade, he or she is FAR more likely to stay out of the corrections system. In Wisconsin, one of the biggest problems facing educators is that African-American boys are not reading well in early elementary school. SAGE has been shown to bridge that gap. African-American males are the demographic that see the most scholastic improvement when SAGE is implemented. So the question then becomes, "Why haven't we as a state made a commitment to this sound, effective program?"
Yes, Mr. Cox, you're right. It does all start at home. But it takes a village to raise a child, and we have a responsibility to make sure that every child in our state has a fair shot at success, no matter what side of the tracks they're from.
Yesterday, I talked about the problem and discarded two issues (one being Holistic Admissions, the other being high school curriculum) as ways of fixing the achievement gap (and thereby our lack of diversity) in public schools and universities. Today, I want to address the solutions.
The first solution is the one that Mr. Cox states at the end of his column: it truly comes down to what happens at home. If you want to understand why some kids do better in reading than others, you need only look at who is being read to at home, who is going to the library with their parents, and who is getting regular help on homework to make sure that they don't fall behind. In the United States today, the discrepancy between those who get parental support and those who don't is often determined by socio-economic status. To deny that there is a link between race and poverty is both ignorant and irresponsible. No, not every person of color is poor and not every white person is wealthy, but in 2004 black households in America had a median income of just over $30,000 while the same figure for white households was $48,000. Whatever the reasons are - be it that poor parents are working too many hours to try to make ends meet, or that they simply don't have the resources to give their children the supplemental learning materials they need - kids end up paying the price.
I should hope that this is deeply troubling to all of us. We believe that our background should be no barrier to what we are able to achieve in life. Kids should not have to suffer because their parents can't give them the support they need.
Here is the place that government can help. Ideally, all parents would give their kids the help they need to be successful, but until Utopia arrives we should talk seriously about expanding a proven school program that can help bridge the achievement gap and bring the "pusuit of happiness" one step closer to reality.
I'm talking about the Student Achievement Guarentee in Education (SAGE) Program. SAGE is a state funded program designed to reduce class sizes in Kindergarten through 3rd grade classrooms to a ratio of fifteen students per teacher for core academic subjects. Governor Doyle has been a huge proponent of this program, and if the State Assembly was controlled by Democrats you can bet that his funding requests for the program would have already been met.
What we need to do is fully fund SAGE statewide. No kid that goes to public schools should have more than fourteen classmates when he or she is learning the fundamentals. There is a cost to this program, a significant one at that, but it is nothing compared to the cost society pays to incarcerate felons in our corrections system.
Want to know the best predictor of which kids will commit crimes when they get older? You need only to look at their 3rd grade reading test scores. If a kid is reading at grade level in 3rd grade, he or she is FAR more likely to stay out of the corrections system. In Wisconsin, one of the biggest problems facing educators is that African-American boys are not reading well in early elementary school. SAGE has been shown to bridge that gap. African-American males are the demographic that see the most scholastic improvement when SAGE is implemented. So the question then becomes, "Why haven't we as a state made a commitment to this sound, effective program?"
Yes, Mr. Cox, you're right. It does all start at home. But it takes a village to raise a child, and we have a responsibility to make sure that every child in our state has a fair shot at success, no matter what side of the tracks they're from.
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