Who Values Education?

This post was inspired by recent events involving SF School Board Commissioner Ann Hsu. On an endorsement questionnaire from SF Parent Action, this was her response to a question on increasing academic outcomes for the most marginalized students:

“From my very limited exposure in the past four months to the challenges of educating marginalized students especially in the black and brown community, I see one of the biggest challenges as being the lack of family support for those students. Unstable family environments caused by housing and food insecurity along with lack of parental encouragement to focus on learning cause children to not be able to focus on or value learning.”

Despite her apology, she faced backlash, including SF Board of Supervisors President Shamann Walton asking Commissioner Hsu to step down.

We need courageous leaders who are willing to consider uncomfortable and politically unpopular root causes if we want to make real progress in closing the achievement gap. Was Commissioner Hsu wrong? How do we measure how much families value education?

Surveys

Survey-based approaches are purported to show that black and Hispanic families value education just as much as their white counterparts. One commonly cited survey shows most black and Hispanic respondents agree that “postsecondary education is necessary for success in today’s economy” and they “hoped their child will be able, at a minimum, to graduate from college.” But surveys like this fail to get at the crux of the issue: how much time, effort and resources do black and Hispanic parents contribute towards their children’s academic success? Better questions would be:

How often does your child miss school?
How often do you review class material with your child?
Do you ensure your child has all the supplies they need for school?
Do you check your child's homework, or ensure they've completed their homework?
Do you communicate with your child's teachers on a regular basis?
Do you send your child to any educational program or tutoring outside of school?
Do you provide your child with extra educational materials (like workbooks) to reinforce the concepts learned in school?
How many hours per week does your child study?
What percent of homework assignments does your child complete?
What consequences, if any, do you set for your child if they do poorly in school?
What standards, if any, have you established with your child about acceptable grades?
If your child performs poorly at school, who is responsible: you or the school?

Observational studies

A more informative approach involves observing families, and such a study was undertaken by UC Berkeley professor of anthropology John Ogbu, who examined the black-white academic achievement gap in Shaker Heights, an affluent Cleveland suburb. His study controlled for parental income, neighborhood and school quality. His conclusion? “Black culture, more than anything else, explained the academic achievement gap.” The black kids admitted they “didn’t work as hard as whites, took easier classes, watched more TV, and read fewer books.” Their parents were also less engaged: “They thought or believed, that it was the responsibility of teachers and the schools to make their children learn and perform successfully; that is, they held the teachers, rather than themselves, accountable for their children’s academic success or failure.”

Closer to home, a San Francisco Civil Grand Jury convened in the late nineties to investigate whether desegregation worked as a means of achieving academic excellence for all racial and ethnic groups of SFUSD. They conducted interviews with the Superintendent, district staff, Board of Education Commissioners, and principals and teachers throughout the district. They concluded that “while the Consent Decree has accomplished its desegregation purpose, it has been a failure in its more important goal of producing system wide educational success among its students.” Why?

One school board member cited "lack of parental expectation" and the report elaborated, “Many African-American students come from single parent homes or families struggling to make ends meet.”

Generally, the report emphasized the importance of the role of parents, and included observations similar to those made in Commissioner Hsu’s statement:

“The poorer academic achievement of students in the African American and Hispanic minorities is in large part attributable to societal factors that a program targeted on school performance can only partially address. When arriving students possess limited English proficiency, come from broken or uninterested homes and have grown up in poverty, schooling, even if beginning at the age of four years and nine months, cannot alone make up for such disadvantages. It is not enough to improve the schools; students must improve as well.”

“The first and best education begins with the family. The support, encouragement, example (and occasional prodding) of parents lies behind every successful student. No student can hope to achieve success without this support. Parental involvement in education should become a prime goal of the District.”

“Parents should be held accountable for the children's education, and should be strongly urged and induced in every possible way to devote a certain number of hours a month to fulfilling the commitment which being a parent carries with it.”

The latest SFUSD data agrees

Who is responsible for the gap in kindergarten readiness, if not parents?
Who is responsible for making sure students attend school regularly, if not parents?
Note the nearly eightfold difference in chronic absenteeism rates between Asian students on the one hand (8.4%) and African American students (63.4%). (Before anyone blames COVID-19, know that the gap was about tenfold pre-COVID.)

If we want to measure how much students and their families value education, the chart above is a good place to start.

Isn’t regular school attendance a good indicator of how much parents value education?

If all groups value education equally, why are there such large gaps in the chronic absenteeism rate?

Why are there gaps in math/reading performance and readiness at all levels?

Assuming all groups are equally capable, if all groups also put the same value (i.e., time, effort, resources) into education, then why is there such a large gap in outcomes?

If racism is to blame, why are Asian students outperforming white students on most measures?

Note that the group with the best attendance rate also has the best academic outcomes. Could school attendance be related to learning the material?

I will be first to admit I don’t have the answers. But I do know this: if every attempt to find the answers is met with vacuous cries of “racism,” there is no hope for progress in closing the academic achievement gap. I already see denialism creeping into this conversation. SFUSD leadership has started calling it the “opportunity gap” — next, expect to hear that the gaps don’t exist at all: that they’re only an artifact of “racist assessment tests,” that taking attendance is racist, and that the answer is to get rid of all tests and attendance-taking. Just like climate change will stop if only we stop recording the temperature, right? Unfortunately, refusing to look at the problem won’t make it disappear, and the kids with the most to lose are the ones who already have the poorest outcomes.