A New "Mainstream"

The logic of this view divides our children between two student bodies - "mainstream" and peripheral - and defines two distinct sets of educational parameters, making it seem natural to measure the quality of education by "mainstream" achievement while equity is measured by the extent to which peripheral boys and girls are given access to educaitonal offerings and experiences designed to meet the needs and characteristics of "mainstream" students. It is this dualistic imaging of students that allows some to frame debate about national educational equity (O'Day and Smith 1992).

We reject the exclusionary approach for which the term "mainstream" has become a code word. Our children are of both genders, many nations, every ethnic group and all economic backgrounds. They speak many languages, reflect all types and conditions, and represent all individual talents and abilities. And they are as different from each other within their groupings - boy to boy, Latina to Latina, African American girl to African American boy, and so on - as they are different from each other by group. In all their diversity, they make up the true mainstream of our student population and it is our responsibility to meet their diverse needs as the needs exist - not as we find it convenient. We owe them all schools that give each the opportunity to develop knowledge, skills and understanding at the highest possible levels. We owe them schools that expect to educate, are equipped to educate, and are committed to educate a student body that mirrors the rich diversity of our people. Schools that expect less, or that are only capable of less, fail their students and the communities that support them. In the national search for educational excellence, therefore, equity is not a secondary goal that can be postponed. Equity is education is a necessary condition for national educational excellence.

Inequities raise barriers to educational excellence. Today our schools provide excellence for the top 20% of students, mediocrity for the next 40%, and they fail miserably the lowest-achieving 40% among whom are boys and girls who are poor and of racial, ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity are over-represented. Failure to educate Native Americans is linked to the social, political and economic barriers raised against them (Department of Education 1991). Dropout rates, average achievement scores, graduation rates, teen-pregnancy rates and expulsion rates all reflect school failure. Gender bias in schools' hiring, governance, curricula and practices is widespread. Drugs and assault haunt our schools. If U.S. citizens abroad were subjected to the violence that many of our students face daily, our government might well intervene with military force. In Los Angeles:

Every day thousands of students residing in East and South Central Los Angeles attended overcrowded schools with inferior facilities, inferior curricula and inferior libraries. Overcrowded schools were principally attended by ethnically diverse, language diverse and poor students; they were limited to lower per-pupil expenditures than schools in more affluent neighborhoods; they had less experienced and less well-trained administrative support and instructional staffs...Allocation of facilities, acreage, school capacity, air conditioning, restrooms, school size, classroom size, portable vs. permanent classrooms, playground space, site maintenance, library books - all educational resources (structural characteristics of the actual institutions providing educational services) varied significantly and substantially between schools according to their size and ethnic concentration, with the disparities overwhelmingly favoring White majority school at the expense of Latino, and Asian American majority schools (emphasis in the original). Ethnically/linguistically diverse schools were significantly enrolled over capacity, were overcrowded and on year round schedules; they had inadequate facilities and they provided significantly lesser educational opportunities because of the unequal allocation of facilities. (Espinosa and Ochoa 1992)

Gender bias in virtually all aspects of education, reported in How Schools Shortchange Girls (AAUW 1992), creates patterns of differential education for male and female students. These patterns are evident in:

• Discouragement of female students both through formal curricular materials and informal classroom interaction;

• Differential course-taking, especially in math and science;

• Differential assessment and testing: methods, skill areas, format, content and context;

• Differential expectations and attitudes of teachers, administrators and parents based on a combination of sex, race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status.

The inequities that blight the educational hopes of so many are inextricably linked, as the failure of attempts to remove them piecemeal clearly demonstrates. Putting an end to discriminatory school funding, for example, so that every school had science labs, computers, adequate scientific apparatus and libraries, would not itself remove the barriers to learning raised by differential expectations and discriminatory counselling, placement and teaching practices that promote the achievement of white, middle-class boys over other boys and girls. Nor would ending the discriminatory mis-classification of Limited English Proficient boys and girls al learning disabled automatically remove the learning barriers raised by inadequate language programs, a hostile school environment, gender and culture-biased curricula or testing that is biased or unrelated to their actual learning experiences.

To achieve educational excellence for all, our educational system and our schools must be comprehensively restructured on the principle of equity. That is the unequivocal meaning that we, as advocates of educational equity, give to the term "systemic reform." Failing such restructuring, what will schools characterized by inequity do when confronted by high-quality, content-driven curriculum frameworks except fail to implement them? Will certifying failure with a national instrument make the failure less tragic in our children's lives? Clearly it is not enough to define new content or to set new goals for student outcomes if we do not also recreate our schools as places where all children are expected to learn and where they will find:

• freedom from sexual and racial harassment;
• a nurturing atmosphere;
• programs effective in creating learning opportunities;
• teachers who understand and care about them;
• teachers who know both how and what to teach;
• teachers empowered to do their professional best.

We must recreate our schools as places where boys and girls learn inter-personal, inter-cultural and inter-gender respect and appreciation from their most important teachers: the structures and interactions of the school itself and its adult models.

A New Goal: Equity In Excellence

As advocates of educational equity, we believe that today's movement of opportunity that must be seized to redesign and restructure public schools so that all girls and boys have the opportunity for excellent education. Equity must be one defining characteristic of those schools. The task requires acknowledging the ever-increasing importance of well-educated, highly skilled men and women as our nation's indispensable human capital. Our economy requires high levels of intellectual abilities and complex skills in providing new services with sharpened sensitivities for perceiving ever-changing problems and far-ranging abilities to solve them. As Deborah Meier, founder and principal of New York's Central Park East Secondary School, put it (Lockwood 1993):

I find it absurd to pretend that employers are dissatisfied because students don't know the dates of the Civil War. It's clear that they are not finding some kink of rigorous work habits in youth - a sense of initiative, making judgments, and using evidence well.

Our society requires citizens of al groups and both genders who have the developed knowledge and skills to participate effectively in community life as workers, citizens, parents, leaders and role models for our children. And our democratic ideals demand that the education required for full and equal economic and societal participation be made equally available to all.

Educational reform efforts, implemented at local, state and federal levels, are aimed at making broad systemic changes. Successful efforts will integrate equitable goals, processes, achievement measures and supports. Only then can each U.S. school become a place of high-quality learning for each student that passes through its doors. Figure 1 illustrates the relationship between local, state and federal elements in a system that could make of each individual school a proud monument to American education.

Just as the quality of education is largely determined in local schools, equity issues arise from inequities that are experienced there and that take their toll there in the lives of individual students. Therefore, all schools in which only some students - or no students - now achieve educational excellence will require substantial transformation. Costa (1993) suggests that teaching/learning the skills of thinking and problem solving will become the core of the new curriculum and that:

We will let go of our obsession with content acquisition and knowledge retention as merely ends in themselves. We will dismiss uniformity and begin to value diversity. We will replace extrinsic rewards with learning activities that are intrinsically motivating. We will deflate competitiveness to expand interdependence. We will redefine smart to mean knowing how to draw from a repertoire of strategies, knowledge and perceptions, and to take actions according to contextual demands.

New Foundations

New theories are challenging accepted concepts of what constitutes intelligence itself. Harvard University psychologist Howard Gardner distinguishes seven intelligences, each of which constitutes intellectual "talent" and "giftedness": linguistic, logical-mathematic, musical, spatial, bodily-kinesthitic, inter-personal, and intra-personal (Gardner 1985). Traditional views of intelligence, Gardner argues, have focused almost exclusively on the linguistic and logical-mathematic, ignoring other intelligences - for instance, those that underlie the abilities of the athlete, the dancer and the mime. And at Yale University, psychologist Robert J. Sternberg (1989) has developed a three-part theory of what makes up mental ability, suggesting that:

• Intelligence is always socioeconomically and culturally shaped;
• Intelligence is related to the ability to process and apply information; and
• Intelligence is demonstrated by the ability to learn from experience.

In Sternberg's view, a good measure of one's intelligence would be to take a trip to a completely different culture, where success is meeting ordinary physical and social needs depends on the ability to find significant meaning in signs, symbols and expressions experienced in unfamiliar contexts (Miller 1986). For successful negotiation of a culture completely different than one's own, for example, the ability to infer the appropriateness or inappropriateness of one's behavior may well be more important than a ability to master textbook rules of a foreign grammar or to quickly compute a currency exchange.

Long-ingrained attitudes about "who" can learn "what" form a significant part of the foundations on which our school system is built. We have, as a nation, let racism, sexism, classism and elitism warp our thinking until we find it difficult to conceive of a win-win society in which educational excellence is widely and routinely available and shared by all girls and boys. We must learn to alter the view of schools as arenas in which those who share in a "common" culture balance their needs against those of "others" who come to school from "diverse" cultures (O'Day and Smith 1993). This view parallels the exclusionary "mainstream" concept challenged earlier. It is not only undemocratic, it denies the reality that the common culture of the United States is still evolving and is yet to be shaped from the full and free interactive participatory development of all its plural roots - an that schools have a responsibility to nurture all our roots and to educate all our children to the reality and richness of their world and nation.

The new foundations needed for achieving equitable goals for a new mainstream include the practical and tangible as well as the theoretical and attitudinal. The experiences of Chicago's Prescott Elementary School and of the public schools of Yonkers, New York, illustrate the kinds of problems faced by schools that are trying hard to restructure and to provide high-quality opportunities to learn in settings that traditionally have been places of "student failure."

Prescott Elementary School is a low-income neighborhood school where committed staff and community efforts have earned it national media attention as one of the most improved schools in the country. In recent (May 1993) testimony presented to the National Governors' Association Task Force on Education, Dr. Donald R. Moore described the Prescott model as focused not only on the school,

...where students in fact spend less than 20% of their waking hours during a given school year, but on the school community, which includes the full spectrum of institutions and individuals that touch a students life...Note further that Prescott's educational process can improve student outcomes only if it changes the quality of students' day-to-day experiences. From our perspective, improving the quality of students' day-to-day experiences, not just in school but in the school community, is the core of creating the opportunity to learn.

But:

...(Prescott) lacks many of the resources and prerogatives that suburban schools just ten miles to the north take for granted, resources that are critical for providing a fair opportunity to learn. For example, three years ago, the school threw away its most out-dated library books, many of which were infested with roaches. And the Local School Council spent $13,000 of its discretionary funds to buy new books. But they still are forced to keep hundreds of library books containing obsolete and inaccurate information, like this 1957 edition of Exploring Earth and Space which says that "Before many years,...man's dream of landing on the moon can become a reality." Further, the school has no science lab and virtually no science equipment.

Traditional foundations of material support for schools based on exclusionary definitions of the "mainstream" mean that Prescott Elementary is frustrated in its efforts to create learning opportunities. Overcrowding means that students must be tutored on stairways; an audiologist must test a hard-of-hearing child in a room where other children are being taught. The school's playground has no grass or play equipment; both the teachers and the students bring their own toilet paper to school. Union agreements, added to funding scarcity, make it impossible for Prescott to carry out a planned expansion of instruction and expansion of service to families and community.

In Yonkers, New York, several years after the successful desegregation of the city's schools, the Board of Education found evidence of continued discrimination against African American and Latino students through seven "vestiges of segregation":

1. Level of minority achievement;

2. Self-esteem and attitudes of students toward education and the educational process;

3. Relationships between majority and minority students;

4. Attitudes and effectiveness of teachers and administrators in educating majority and minority students in integrated schools and classrooms;

5. Continuing need for adjustments in curriculum and programs to facilitate quality education in integrated environments under the existing desegregation remedy;

6. Continued disparities in the quality of school facilities and resources; and

7. Community perceptions concerning Yonkers schools and the quality of education under the current desegregation plan. (United States v. City of Yonkers 1993)

These are critical factors in Yonkers' students' opportunity to learn. In 1993 the U.S. District Court agreed that they are unacceptable "vestiges of segregation." Yonkers Schools have carefully designed a comprehensive improvement plan to address them, only to find itself without the financial resources to do so. The School Board's hope of obtaining necessary financial assistance from the City of Yonkers and New York State now rests in a legal suit before the federal court.

Responsibility: Who Has It and Who Takes It?

Education in the United States is a function of local communities; "front line" responsibility for our children's opportunities to learn, therefore, lies with local districts and local schools. Local communities and their schools, however, vary widely in their historic, ethnographic, geographic and economic characteristics - and in their abilities to meet their students' needs. What these differences can mean for a school seeking to improve the learning opportunities of inner-city children is illustrated above in Dr. Donald R. Moore's descriptions of conditions at Prescott Elementary School. Recognizing local responsibility for education, Moore outlined for the National Governors' Association Task Force on Education (May 1993) a process whereby local districts and school can identify their own needs and plan their own approaches to meeting high educational standards without sacrificing local autonomy to a "top-down" restrictive mandate. Through a cyclical process of improvement, schools can draw on existing knowledge about promising practices to design their own paths to success. In the cyclical process advocated by Moore, schools would systematically take the following major steps:

• Analyze student outcomes that are centrally mandated and develop additional locally desired outcomes;

• Investigate relevant research about promising practices in the areas of school leadership, school environment, parent/community involvement, learning experiences (in and out of school) and assistance for change;

• Assess the school community's current practices in these five areas and the outcomes that students are currently achieving;

• Formulate an improvement plan that incorporates promising practices in these five areas selected by the school;

• Implement the improvement plan;

• Evaluate both the implementation of the improvement plan and changes in student outcome;

• Strengthen the improvement plan by beginning the cycle again.

Local control of education is not only a long-standing tradition, it is a cherished one. Prescott Elementary's and Yonkers City Schools' experience makes it clear, however, that local districts and schools cannot bear their responsibility alone. State and federal government also have responsibilities, among which assuring a fair distribution of educational resources is an important one. Without resource assurance, school in impoverished communities will remain unable to educate. State and federal government also play vital roles in developing and articulating consensus about what we want our children's learning opportunities to be. Furthermore, local control is democratic control only when all sectors of the local community are fairly represented. When local imbalances create educational inequities, state and federal government have a responsibility to protect all students' opportunity to learn.

Another important area of state responsibility lies is assessing school quality. Although student outcomes are the final measure of school success, state standards should provide the bases for assessments that permit state education agencies (SEAs) and local education agencies (LEAs) to identify school needs and strengths systematically. Capitalizing on local strengths is critical for state and district capacity building; systemic prioritizing of needs is an essential step in developing, implementing and monitoring school improvement.

State and federal governments share responsibility for the environment, opportunities and limitations within which schools operate. The evidence suggests that neither states nor the federal government have adequately met their responsibilities for assuring educational equity. Nor, although their roles are not the same, are state and federal actions insulated form each other. Needed are clearly articulated and effectively implemented federal policies that can influence and encourage states to recognize equity as a necessary condition of excellence. In Twenty Years On: New Federal and State Roles To Achieve Equity In Education, Cynthia G. Brown and Jill E. Reid (1987) contrasted state equity enforcement before and after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They found that in 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was passed:

...state governments provided virtually no civil rights leadership and little more in education, despite the fact that "education" was constitutionally recognized as a "state function." In 20 years, state governments have changed dramatically, including in the education area... A significant change has been the adoption or enactment of antidiscrimination constitutional provisions and statutes, and in several states, laws and programs aimed at achievement of equity goals more far-reaching than federal civil rights laws.

This suggests that states are influenced by federal leadership emphasizing the importance of educational equity. An interesting finding by Brown and Reid was that while state equity efforts are uncoordinated, uneven and far from sufficient:

State equity activities have evolved in spite of little direct encouragement by the federal government except for funding under Title IV of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and OCR requirements with regard to vocational education. The major exception to this is the state programs which were strengthened pursuant to the Education of the Handicapped Act (EHA). For example, EHA required every state to establish complaint resolution processes.

Still, in several states, Brown and Reid found that the federally required investigation and resolution of EHA complaints were virtually the only equity activities connected to education. The suggestion is strong that federal leadership for equity in education is vitally needed and that careful inclusion of implementation monitoring can be effective in promoting change at the local level. Of our federal and state governments truly mean to make all of our school places of excellent learning opportunity for all, then they must cooperate to see that all local schools are successfully empowered to restructure.

The following chapter, The Schools We Want, outlines our vision of schools restructured for excellence and equity. Subsequent chapters discuss systemic inequities of the traditional approach to public education and analyze systemic educational reform for excellence on the principles of equity. For "the schools we want" to become the national norm, Opportunity To Learn Standards are needed to assure that schools can and do provide educational opportunities for allchildren to meet high achievement and performance standards. School Finance, Family Empowerment, Teacher Preparation, both pre-service and in-service, and Student Assessment and Testing are critical and fundamental components of the systemic educational reform that our nation needs (Figure 1). District, state and federal policies and programs must address these components from a clear equity perspective to create excellence of learning opportunity for all children.