Producing Educational Inequality

In this section I examine current CPS policies in relation to educational equity. My focus is the most visible aspects of CPS policies: accountability, remediation and standards, and new programs and schools.

It is not surprising that Chicago’s system of high-stakes accountability and centralized regulation of students, teachers, and schools resonates with some educators and families. The “good sense” in these policies (Gramsci, 1971) is that they mandate decisive action to “turn around” a system that has profoundly failed to educate all students, especially children of color (Orfield, 1990). At last, schools are being held accountable for doing more than keeping students in school buildings six hours a day. In the absence of a public accounting of the social, economic, and political roots of the failure to educate so many of Chicago’s children, and in the absence of an alternative program, CPS leaders have successfully framed school reform as a choice between their agenda and the “failed policies of the past.” In a system of blatant inequities, the agenda of standards, tests, and accountability is framed in the language of equality and justice. All students and schools are evaluated by “the same test” and “held to the same standards,” and the retention of thousands of students is “ending the injustice of social promotion” (Vallas, 2000, p. 5). Moreover, the CPS agenda resonates with the call for personal responsibility and accountability in other social arenas, such as welfare “reform” and tough new juvenile justice laws. The current CPS policies have produced some visible results. There have been measurable gains in test scores, although scores flattened out in2001. The news media and anecdotal evidence suggest that some teachers and administrators who have held very low academic expectations for students or exerted little effort or responsibility have been forced to teach or have been removed. The news media have also reported examples of more systematic classroom instruction in response to standards and centralized oversight. And the district’s semiscripted curriculum and academic standard provide a framework for ineffectual or inexperienced teachers. As one veteran educator said, “At least now they’re teaching something.” However, the implications of these policies for teaching and learning require a closer look.

Accountability and Centralized Control

During three years of research at Westlawn and Grover, administrators and teachers consistently reported that “improving test scores” was their school’s main goal and that “standardized tests” were the main influence on their school. Although some teachers believed that strong test scores would be a by-product of good teaching, at both schools teaching geared specifically to the ITBS was a part of every classroom to some degree. It dominated some classes and was definitely a school wide focus from January through April. (See McNeil, 2000, for similar findings in Texas.) At Westlawn, the principal has required teachers to put aside classroom texts for 12–15 weeks and to work almost exclusively on test preparation, including the use of ITBS and ISAT test preparation booklets as a regular part of the curriculum. In 1998–1999, when Westlawn was put on a warning list after its scores dropped, the whole school spent the year focusing on test practice, test oriented lessons, and grade-level item analysis of the ITBS. That year, teachers chose to use funds from an arts program to buy test preparation books (see Lipman, 2000).

Although almost all teachers at Farley and some at Brewer resisted a narrow focus on the ITBS and the ISAT, and the principals quite openly opposed the district’s preoccupation with standardized tests. At all four schools, teachers of benchmark Grades 3, 6, and 8, in particular, felt pressured to align their teaching with the tests. This pressure remains a source of great anxiety for the Farley third-grade teachers, who feel compelled to tack between a focus on the tests and their customary rich literacy curriculum. One teacher described the tension as “devastating.” At Brewer, Grover, and Westlawn (especially in the benchmark grades), it was common for teachers to draw students’ attention to similarities between classroom exercises and standardized test questions, to admonish them to learn in order to “pass the tests,” to use specially designed test preparation booklets in lieu of texts or other curricula as a substantial portion of the curriculum, and to use items on the ITBS as a guide to lesson planning. A Westlawn teacher’s comment in the spring of 2000 was typical: “We are test driven … everything is test driven.” In the weeks before the ITBS, there are Iowa Test pep rallies. “Zap the Iowa” posters festoon the halls, and daily announcements exhort students to gear up for the test.

Standardized tests are most central, and accountability most rigorous, in schools with the lowest scores. This is the district’s design. Concretely, these are schools with predominantly low-income African-American and Latino student populations. Among the schools I studied, Farley, a high-scoring, multiracial, mixed-class school, was much less constrained by test preparation than either Grover or Westlawn and to a lesser extent, Brewer. Farley’s classrooms were more interactive; teachers spent less time on explicit test preparation activities; they encouraged more independent thought, rich and varied writing assignments, and in-depth conversation. In general, there was a more varied, experiential, and intellectually complex curriculum and a stronger culture of literacy than the more test-driven schools. In contrast, since 1998, Brewer teachers have pulled back from a conceptually rich mathematics curriculum to focus more directly on test preparation (Eric Gutstein, personal communication, April 15, 2001). Some Westlawn teachers developed richer literacy instruction over the course of my study, but this development seemed to grow out of their own professional development experiences (see Lipman, forthcoming). In short, instead of inducing the weaker schools to develop the curricular and pedagogical strengths evident at Farley, accountability policies at the schools that I studied promoted or reinforced a narrow focus on specific skills and on test-taking techniques.

Clearly, some teachers oppose this orientation. A fourth-grade Grover teacher described her unwillingness to give up her “main instructional goal”: for her students to become “good thinkers” and people who “love to read.” This stance was the norm at Farley, and reflective of a handful of teachers at the other three schools. Some did the kind of “double entry teaching” that McNeil (2000) describes in Texas: test-preparation alongside the “real” curriculum. Yet there was palpable pressure on everyone to raise test scores, and thoughtful teachers wrestled with the contradictions between a narrow focus on test preparation and broader educational goals, including cultural relevance, critical approaches to knowledge, and meaningful intellectual work. (See Lipman, 2001; Lipman & Gutstein, 2001, for further discussion.) As one Brewer teacher put it, “I think that we are having a rough time, that sometimes we may lean a little bit more towards CPS policies and other times we lean a little bit more to ‘screw CPS’ and focus on critical thinking skills.” Despite resistance, the lowest-scoring schools, Grover and Westlawn, were most dominated by standardized tests. My data suggest that, to the extent that the new policies prompt schools such as these to practice education as test preparation and basic skills (as opposed to an intensive effort to build capacity for more thoughtful, intellectually challenging pedagogies), they widen educational inequalities by institutionalizing a narrowed curriculum in low-scoring schools. (See McNeil, 2000, for similar findings.) It is germane that Newmann, Bryk, and Nagaoka (2001) concluded that CPS students in classrooms that organized instruction around “authentic intellectual work” (17) as opposed to basic skills produced more intellectually complex work (and greater gains on the ITBS).

Although the pressure to raise test scores has pushed some of the weakest teachers to focus more on instruction (frequently by following the district-scripted curriculum), there is some evidence that those pressures are also driving out some of the most respected and committed teachers, including teachers committed to critical and culturally relevant education. When the district put Grover on probation, it replaced an ineffectual veteran administrator with a new principal who, over a period of three years, removed at least ten teachers whom she considered incompetent. However, most of them were replaced by full-time substitute teachers or teacher-interns. At the same time, from 1998 to 2001, the school lost five young, energetic, and knowledgeable teachers (including one winner of the prestigious Golden Apple Award for superior teaching) and a highly respected veteran who was identified as “a school leader” by every teacher I inter-viewed at Grover. Two who left were known for their deep commitment to the Grover families and community. Several taught with an explicit orientation to developing sociopolitical consciousness and connecting curriculum with their students’ experiences. At Brewer, an eighth-grade teacher who taught her students to examine U.S. history critically and assigned intellectually sophisticated projects quit at the end of the year after she felt compelled to spend a quarter using ITBS test preparation materials. Some of these teachers left CPS; three left teaching altogether; others transferred to schools with less accountability pressure. All were disheartened by a narrowed curriculum, the emphasis on high-stakes tests, and “deskilling” of teachers. A departing Grover teacher’s comments were characteristic: “The children are being knocked down to a test score, and the teachers, with their variety of skills and talents, are just being wasted because they are just so zoned into this test.” All of the teachers I interviewed at Farley said that if the school became dominated by standardized tests (as in other schools), they would leave CPS or leave teaching altogether. This is significant because strong, socially conscious teachers such as these are a potential nucleus of substantive school change.

An even more troubling issue is the widespread knowledge that the centraloffice encourages a form of educational triage — focusing extra instruc-tionon students with the potential to raise a school’s scores above the 50thpercentile.18 Teachers and administrators at Grover, Westlawn, and Brewerattended workshops at the district’s central office, where they were told to pay less attention to students well above the 50th percentile and to those with no hope of reaching it. As one teacher put it in May 2000, “We had … the head of our district, our region, come and tell us, ‘When you are walking around your classroom and the kids are working, the kids whose shoulders you need to lean over and give a little extra help are the kids who have stanine four and five.’” This practice, in force at Grover and Westlawn and at other schools across the city, runs counter to claims that current policies promote equity.

Based on their performance on standardized tests, tens of thousands of students have been sent to summer school, retained in grade for as long as three years, precluded from eighth-grade graduation, and assigned to transition high schools. These consequences have fallen heavily on African-American and Latino students. For example, in 1997, 4 percent of Whites,18 percent of African Americans, and 11 percent of Latinos were retained (Designs, 1999). In 2000, Parents United for Responsible Education won a civil rights complaint against CPS for adverse discriminatory impact of the retention policy on African-American and Latino students. In 1998, the district ratio of African Americans to Whites was 5:1, and the ratio of Latinos to Whites was 3:1. However, in transition high schools for overage eighth-graders who failed the ITBS, the ratio of African Americans to Whites was 27:1, and the ratio of Latinos to Whites was 10:1 (PURE, 1999). Interview data from Brewer’s eighth-grade class in 1998 also suggest that the retention policy is both capricious and potentially damaging for students affected (Lipman & Gutstein, 2001). Capable students with strong grades and attendance — including top students who had won prestigious awards — failed the eighth-grade ITBS, and some lost placements in competitive college prep high schools.19 Others dropped out after failing summer school or quit rather than cross gang lines to attend the transition high school. Moreover, while citywide test scores have increased for nonretained students, retained students’ scores have not improved (Roderick et al., 1999). Students retained in 1997 are doing no better than the previously “socially promoted” students, and in many cases are doing worse; nearly one third of retained eighth graders in 1997 dropped out by fall 1999 (Roderick et al., 2000).

In short, a closer look at accountability as it is lived in schools suggests a more complex and troubling picture than that projected by CPS leaders. In the schools that I discuss here, accountability policies steer teaching toward test preparation, especially in low-scoring schools, and often undermine and demoralize committed, socially conscious, culturally relevant educators. Indeed, my data suggest that improved scores may have more to do with test preparation than with learning. This inference is supported by findings of the Committee on Appropriate Test Use of the Board of Testing and Assessment, National Research Council: “The NRC Committee concluded that Chicago’s regular year and summer school curricula were so closely geared to the ITBS that it was impossible to distinguish real subject mastery from mastery of skills and knowledge useful for passing this particular test” (Hauser, 1999, p. 1). This picture challenges the claim that the new get-tough agenda promotes educational equity, and it brings into question the contention that accountability improves learning.