education. In Cultural Literacy: What
Every American Needs to Know, Hirsch
argued that all young people needed
to possess “mainstream cultural
knowledge” to successfully navigate
society’s institutions and opportunities.
The research, he said, was clear: People
who scored high on tests of cultural
literacy did better educationally and
economically. If the United States was
serious about enabling social mobility,
Hirsch argued, it had to ensure that all
of its children had access to knowledge,
which was the key to power.
Middle-class kids are more likely than
poor children to bring such knowledge
to school. Affluent kids have a huge
head start because of their relatively
large vocabularies, exposure to language
through their parents’ and peers’ conversations, and enrichment activities
(like trips to the zoo) that they’ve
enjoyed practically since the womb.
Many poor children, on the other
hand, will build relevant background
knowledge only if they’re exposed to it
in school. And if they don’t build this
knowledge in the early grades, they’ll
fall even further behind as they get
older.
Poor Kids, Promising Results
So, if progressive education—at least
the kind that downplays the teaching of
knowledge and skills—is not the best
approach for the neediest kids, what is?
What kinds of curriculum, pedagogy,
and culture are seen in schools that
teach disadvantaged children effectively?
One of the most compelling investigations of high-performing, inner-city
schools is David Whitman’s Sweating
the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and
the New Paternalism (2008). Whitman
looked at six highly successful secondary schools—four charter schools,
one Catholic school, and one regular
public school. All are achieving phenomenal results as measured by test
scores, graduation rates, and success
in college; and all serve predominantly
poor and minority students.
These schools are not cookie-cutter
copies of one another; each has its own
distinctive flavor. But, as Whitman
(2008) reports, they share some key
commonalities: “They . . . have rigorous
academic standards, test students frequently, and carefully monitor students’
academic performance to assess where
students need help” (p. 3).
None of this is surprising. Such traits
have been identified by researchers
who have studied effective schools for
more than three decades. And these
insights parallel what scientists have
Many poor children
will build relevant
background
knowledge only if
exposed to it in school.
learned from 40 years of study about
how students best learn to read, much
of it funded by the National Institutes
of Health (National Institute of Child
Health and Human Development,
2000). Poor kids, in particular, need
instruction that is direct, highly
structured, and buttressed by regular
assessment to determine whether the
learning is sticking.
Whitman pointed out other staples
of successful high-poverty schools:
uniforms or a dress code, an extended
school day, and summer school. But his
unique contribution was to identify a
secret ingredient in the schools’ success
that is often overlooked: They are all
benignly paternalistic:
Each of the six schools is a highly pre-
scriptive institution that teaches students
not just how to think but how to act
according to what are commonly termed
traditional, middle-class values. . . . The
schools tell students exactly how they are
expected to behave and their behavior
is closely monitored, with real rewards
for compliance and penalties for non-
compliance. Students are required to talk
a certain way, sit a certain way, and dress
a certain way. (Whitman, 2008, p. 3)
These are not practices generally
found in schools serving affluent
students. Naomi Calvo put it to me
bluntly: “The types of reforms that
are considered best practice for disadvantaged kids are exactly what
middle-class parents hate. I don’t know
how you are going to have a meeting of
the minds on that.” When asked about
the attributes they want their children to
develop in school, affluent parents tend
to name creativity and thinking outside
the box. Poor parents, by contrast, “don’t
use language like that,” Calvo said. They
speak in more concrete terms and are
focused on making sure their kids can
read, do math, and get ready for college.
Solving the Dilemma
Is there a solution to this culture
clash? Finding compromise is tough. A
school can’t be both paternalistic and
loosey-goosey, both structured and
open-ended. Students either call their
teachers by their first names, or they
don’t. Either they wear uniforms, or
they don’t.
Most likely, diverse schools will need
to eschew progressive pedagogy in favor
of a traditional curriculum, augmented
by something special to attract parents
of all classes and races. Language
immersion programs appear to be especially popular at such schools, as are
math and science initiatives.
Take, for example, the Denver
School of Science and Technology
in Colorado, a charter high school
located in a trendy, mixed-income
neighborhood. Almost 70 percent of
its students are black or Hispanic, and
40 percent of its 2009 graduating class
was first-generation college-bound.
It’s the highest-performing school in
Denver, hands down. Its students, many
of whom enter the school at least one
