Renowned scholar Ronald Ferguson gave the 14th Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture Tuesday afternoon. Before the lecture, he sat down with The Herald to talk about a social movement for equity in education.
The Herald: How did you get interested in studying issues of racial inequality?
Ferguson: I have been interested in helping the folks in my neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio, since I was eight years old. I asked people, "What can I do to make things better?" The response was city planning, so I went into Cornell as an undergraduate, planning to study engineering. I ended up studying economics, and later got my PhD in economics at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). I then started teaching at the Kennedy School, working on the issue of inner-city economic development. In the late '80s, I worked on how differences in test scores predict differences in earnings, and the basic finding was that reading and writing skills are fundamental for employment. I then wrote two chapters for a book on the black-white achievement gap, and since the '90s, I have been working with public schools on the issue of educational equity and the test-score gap. I am also the director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University and the founder of the Tripod Project for School Development.
How do you think test scores reflect the achievement gap?
The economy has changed and increased the value of basic skills in the workplace. International trade makes U.S. workers compete with workers around the world, and people have realized that they can't achieve a middle-class lifestyle without basic reading and writing skills. Even though these gaps remain large, they aren't set in stone — when I was in college, people attributed educational differences to biology; now, people acknowledge that the evidence for biological difference is so varied that one must proceed under the assumption that there is no biological difference.
How do you think it would be possible to achieve greater equity in education?
We need to affect the lived experiences of children.
I have a four-box model for this. The first is schools, in which teacher participation is critical. The second is peer dynamics and how children interact. The third is parenting and their home life. The fourth is the leadership that holds these together, aligns resources and determines what children achieve in these settings. What do students need to experience in order to be good learners? We need to work on adult learning. The teacher needs to be educated on the level of instructional leadership. The mechanisms needed to reach parents must be respectful of their world vision. We must reach parents through every institution on the topic of effective parenting, from the workplace, to places of recreation, to beauty salons and shops. We must saturate communities with images of effective parenting so that it becomes the norm. We need to organize things to engage parents. Lots of people are now working on this issue — many organizations are conveying this message. For example, people are now talking about the nature of the "bedtime conversation." Parents should no longer just read to their three-year-old — they should talk about what they are reading and ask questions about the book. How much freedom a two-year-old has to crawl around the house alters his visual and learning skills. With older children, studies have shown the importance of warmth and responsiveness on one hand, and structure and demandingness on the other. Not letting a kid talk back to you can be a problem — this prepares them to be subservient, while the opposite teaches kids to be entitled.
Each person must be situated in a specific position in the system. The role of the teacher is to be aware that kids come in from different backgrounds. The teacher can't fix the parents but can do a lot for the students.
How effective do you think programs such as Teach for America are in addressing the issue of equity in education?
Teach for America has attracted an army of people to care about public schools. They may or may not be more effective than other teachers, but the program is taking people out of elite universities and making them aware of the sense of injustice in our education system. They do not accept the conditions of public, inner-city education anymore. When I read admissions essays for the Graduate School of Education at Harvard, the stories that TfA graduates tell are very emotional. They describe the sense of injustice they felt. I understand the criticism of the program, that it takes a longer time for people to learn how to be teachers, but the schools they are going to need help. And TfA is certainly not doing any harm.
Can you talk about the thesis of your book, "Toward Excellence with Equity: An emerging vision for closing the achievement gap"?
The thesis of my book is that we need a 21st century movement built around helping students from all different backgrounds to realize their full potential. Communities that in the past were discriminated against because of white supremacy now have new opportunities. The legal changes that the civil rights movement brought are not enough. People resist the word "culture," but a change in lifestyle is necessary. We need to rethink what it means to be one of the most preeminent nations in the field of education and the role of the arts in our education today. The employment rate for young people between the ages of 18 to 25 is dismally low. What are young people supposed to do when there isn't much demand for their services? There is a need for community-level opportunities to provide service and give meaning to their lives outside the workplace. I don't know exactly how to make that happen, but it is time for a widespread social movement. Every day, I get two to three calls from people trying to organize around the issue of equality in education. There is a sense that the current configuration is not just.
We need to find a way to mobilize high school students and encourage them to participate. Students from low-income Latino families tend to accept their position in the social order and don't push back. They need to feel a sense of entitlement to upward mobility. The term I use is "the conspiracy to succeed." We need to mobilize students to undermine issues of their own peer culture, like the pressure not to succeed.
