Creating a policy environment for effectively closing achievement gaps and accelerating overall student learning is the number one priority for the Kentucky Board of Education. To that end, at our annual retreat earlier this month KBE members spent an entire day hearing from a number of speakers from Kentucky and across the United States about their successful efforts to close gaps and boost achievement. Among the most interesting to me was a presentation from the TNTP organization on the "Opportunity Myth."
The Opportunity Myth report was issued more than a year ago, and while I missed it at the time, Education Commissioner Wayne Lewis and leaders at the Kentucky Department of Education have been busy trying to share this vitally important research and its implications with school and districts leaders across the Commonwealth. Consistent with my own observations from thousands of classrooms visits over the years, the Opportunity Myth demonstrates that in far too many schools students are not being challenged with rigorous, grade appropriate content and lessons. And sadly, children of poverty and children of color are far more likely to be deprived of meaningful and challenging learning tasks.
In this post I'd like to summarize the findings of the Opportunity Myth research, reflect on the reasons for this problem, and urge educators to take this work seriously and explore its implications for their own school improvement efforts. As always, ideas I share on this website are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of anyone else affiliated with Western Kentucky University (where I am professor of educational administration, leadership, and research) or the Kentucky Board of Education.
The Opportunity Myth: Too many lessons below grade level
TNTP (formerly known as The New Teacher Project) conducted research in 4 school districts and one charter school network, involving about 250 teachers and almost 4,000 students. The districts were chosen to represent a wide range of sizes, student demographics, and geographical diversity. Researchers administered student and teacher surveys, but in my opinion the most important component of the study was an analysis of student work samples and a series of classroom observations.
The "Opportunity Myth," according to the authors, is the idea that if students come to school prepared and do the work that is presented to them by their teachers, they will succeed and be academically ready for the next level of learning. This is a myth, TNTP says, because student work samples revealed that while students accurately met the requirements of their classroom assignments 71% of the time, their work met grade-level academic standards only 17% of the time. This, in spite of the fact that 83% of students reported earning A's, B's, and C's in English language arts and 78% reported earning similar grades in math.
Simply put: teachers were routinely giving assignments that did not require students to do grade-appropriate work. And this pattern was much worse when classrooms were made up of a majority of minority students. In fact, in 4 out of ten classrooms with a majority of students of color, students never received a single grade-level assignment (compared to only 12% of majority white classrooms that never received a grade-level assignment).
While this study is limited to the four districts and one charter network included in the research, the findings are consistent with many of my own observations visiting both high- and low-performing schools throughout my career. In many instances, teachers are completely unaware of how low their expectations are for student performance, or how inconsistent their lessons are with the rigor of state standards. And this may help explain why so many students are well below proficient levels in reading and math, and why achievement gaps continue to persist. Low-rigor lessons may also be more common in traditionally high-performing schools than we realize, but students with affluent, educated parents may simply be gaining more content knowledge outside of school that helps enhance their scores on standardized tests. So for schools of all kinds, the Opportunity Myth should provoke a serious bit of self-analysis and soul-searching about the quality of classroom assignments.
Curriculum, intervention, and expectations: Sources - and remedies - for the problem
As an educator myself, my immediate reaction to these findings was to ponder why. What accounts for the disconnect between the learning tasks teachers are giving students and the level of rigor required by grade-level standards? My instinct is that teachers (and their administrators) are not aware how much they are lowering the bar, and if that's the case, what systemic issues or unrecognized attitudes are contributing to this problem? And in identifying the causes, could we also point ourselves toward some possible remedies?
Curriculum. First, I've become increasingly concerned that most schools still need to do a lot of work around curriculum development. There is a significant difference between the state's academic standards (which stipulate the bare minimum of content and skills students need to master) and the actual curriculum needed to deliver those standards. Curricula include all the many choices schools must make about the specific texts students will read, content that will be provided, instructional materials that will be engaged, and lessons that will be taught.
In other words, curriculum is much more than just a textbook series. But in many schools, individual teachers are still making the vast majority of decisions about instructional materials. The Opportunity Myth research bears this out, finding that teachers reported spending about 7 hours per week creating or finding lessons and materials accounting for about 57% of everything they used in the classroom. This inevitably leads to vast inconsistencies across classrooms, disconnects between lessons and state standards, and ultimately learning tasks that are below grade level.
Schools should engage a systematic process of curriculum review and selection, and consider fully-developed curriculum programs like Core Knowledge that specify at a high level of detail the texts, concepts, and learning task for each grade level. Teachers should be spending a lot more of their time assessing student progress and developing interventions for those who are struggling to meet standards, and a lot less time inventing curriculum.
Intervention. But intervention efforts also have to be effective. I've long been an advocate for standards-based assessment of student learning, which is highly sensitive to students' "readiness levels." Rather than treat all students as if they are ready to learn the same material at the same pace, a more mastery-learning approach emphasizes constantly assessing student learning and then modifying instruction to meet students where they currently are. I believe many teachers have gotten that message, but now in their sensitivity to meet students at their readiness level, they may be grossly underestimating how prepared students really are for rigorous learning tasks (I've also come to understand that accurately gauging student readiness level is much harder than many of us have realized).
If regular classroom instruction is unintentionally being watered down, then the interventions being offered to students in what educators call "Tier II" and "Tier III" (those who are preforming more significantly below grade level) are also failing then to catch students up to where they need to be, and never will as long as Tier I (the instruction offered to all students) is also below grade-level standards. We need a statewide reconsideration of how we are using systems of intervention, which on the whole appear to be making no impact on closing achievement gaps or accelerating students toward proficiency. And that reconsideration should begin by significantly ramping up the rigor of regular classroom learning tasks.
Teachers will naturally worry that students will fail if challenged with more demanding, grade-appropriate learning tasks. But the Opportunity Myth study offers some encouragement in this regard, finding that when students were confronted with grade-appropriate learning tasks they succeeded with those assignments 65% of the time. Moreover, value-added models employed by the study found that students who were consistently given grade-appropriate assignments made more than 7 months more academic gains in a single year than their peers who did not, proving that most students are far more capable than their teachers may realize.
Expectations. And this brings us to a final cause, deeply inter-related with the points above. Beyond the structural problems of poor curricula or ineffective systems of intervention, far too many educators simply have unfairly low expectations of what students of color and poverty are capable of doing, however well-intended their motives might be. We are far too prone to use poverty as an excuse for student outcomes. Poverty makes a huge difference, of course, but the Opportunity Myth makes it clear that students are far more capable than we sometimes give them credit, and we need a much greater collective sense of responsibility for school improvement and a hair-on-fire sense of urgency about figuring out how to get there. Believing in our kids, implementing a real curriculum, and figuring out interventions that actually catch kids up to grade level have to be key pieces of that process.
TNTP and the Kentucky Department of Education offer a wealth of resources for schools that would like to diagnose their own gaps between instruction and grade level standards and organize their improvement efforts around the Opportunity Myth research (my thanks to Associate Commissioner Amanda Ellis and her team for assembling this list of links). Among the resources available are the following:
- Assignment review tools that will help schools analyze classroom assignments for alignment with Kentucky standards in reading, writing, math, and social studies. This will help educators better determine if assignments are on grade level.
- The Student Work Library offers examples of assignments that are weakly, partially, and strongly aligned to grade-level standards in English language arts and math. KDE consultants are also working on vetting items for a student work library that will show assignments that are weakly, partially and strongly aligned to the KAS for reading & writing and mathematics.
- The Student Experience Assessment Guide is a how-to guide for systematically gauging the quality of students’ daily academic experiences and how to make informed decisions to improve those experiences for all students.
- The Student Experience Toolkit provides multiple resources available to ensure strong and engaging instruction and for enacting high expectations.
I encourage every school, but especially those that face the need to improve student proficiency rates or close achievement gaps, to use these resources for starting a rich, community-based conversation about how we can all take responsibility for accelerating student learning.
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