The Secret to One High-Poverty School District's Success

Continued from previous page

In a district where students come from a number of foreign countries, the Union City schools also do the important work of instilling a strong sense of American identity. At an end-of-year school ceremony, children hoist flags from more than fifty countries, says Kirp. A roar goes up for the Dominican Republic flag, but the “longest, loudest cheer is heard when the flag of the United States, their new homeland, is unfurled.”

Kirp is emphatic in noting that Union City achieved its success by hewing to fundamentals. There are no charter schools in Union City. And while teacher’s unions have come under fire for much of what ails public education, Kirp says, Union City’s teachers are part of a strong union, as are other teachers in New Jersey’s highly ranked schools.

Of course, Union City schools are not immune from national education policy. Kirp is concerned that the No Child Left Behind Act causes teachers to skip interesting lessons like plant experiments because science is not among the tested subjects in elementary school. He also worries when teachers provide extra learning sessions only for the “cusp” kids—those just within reach of passing the tests.

To his credit, Kirp does not join the militant anti-testing crowd. “High-stakes exams contributed to making Union City’s schools better,” he writes; if used properly, to identify areas for student improvement, “testing can be a force for good, especially for the have-less kids on whom schools have too often given up.” Unlike many state tests, New Jersey’s assessments measure students’ critical thinking skills rather than just their ability to memorize material. “Teaching to this kind of test means readying students to become problem-solvers,” notes Kirp.

Skeptics will likely ask whether Union City’s success can be replicated in high-poverty districts elsewhere, given the district’s relatively small size. Likewise, as Kirp points out, sociologist Anthony Bryk has found that Latino schools are often an exception to the “straight-line connection between poor neighborhoods and failing schools.” Trust levels are higher in Latino schools, Bryk found, and “Latino neighborhoods tend to have significantly more social capital and neighborhood organizations” than other poor neighborhoods. Would Union City’s programs work with African American students, who continue to bear the legacy of the nation’s most egregious forms of discrimination?

Yes, says Kirp, in places like Montgomery County, Maryland, outside of Washington, D.C., for example, which educates ten times as many students as Union City. Montgomery County, which includes wealthy white areas alongside more diverse and low-income communities, has devoted extra funds to lower-income “red zone” schools than to the wealthier “green zone” schools—for such interventions as reduced class size and extended learning time. The approach has worked. Kirp writes, “In 2003, only half the district’s black and Hispanic fifth graders passed the state’s reading test; by 2011, 90% did.”

Significant as Montgomery County’s “red zone” approach has been, Kirp fails to discuss a far more effective educational strategy employed by the county. Under an inclusionary zoning initiative, public housing units are made available to low-income families throughout Montgomery County, in the affluent green zone as well as the working-class red zone. An important 2010 Century Foundation report by RAND Corporation’s Heather Schwartz found that low-income elementary school students whose families were randomly assigned to housing units in the green zone and attended green zone schools had far more significant achievement gains than those assigned to red zone neighborhoods and schools—even though students in the latter group were showered with extra financial resources and did pretty well.

The omission of integration strategies is surprising, because in other contexts Kirp has written powerfully about the benefits of housing and school integration. In a 2012  New York Times article, for example, Kirp wrote, “The experience of an integrated education made all the difference in the lives of black children—and in the lives of their children as well.” Given legal constraints on using race in student assignment imposed by the Supreme Court, more than eighty school districts now pursue integration by socioeconomic status, an approach that not only raises student achievement but also allows low-income students access to the kind of middle-class social networks that are powerful determinants of employment.