Have we failed?
During the superintendent interviews, candidate Paul Schlictman made a point that I have seldom heard mentioned: “Twenty-five percent of Lowell students are ’suburban’, that is they are on a par with or doing better than students in the wealthier suburbs.” As an example of this, our Latin Lyceum kids rank as high as or higher than students from wealthy suburban schools, and we have students from Lowell High that go on to Harvard, Yale, MIT and other highly-selective institutions. So, as we on the CPC have been saying for years – the problem is not that the schools are not doing their job. It is that the problems the kids bring with them to school are often too overwhelming to be conquered in a 6-hour day. Yesterday’s Sunday Globe, Ideas section, had a provocative article on the status of Ed Reform as it applies to high-poverty schools. Paul Reville, incoming secretary of education, is quoted in the article as saying that the original goal of the legislation was ‘to eradicate the correlation between socioeconomic status and educational attainment.” He adds: “We’d have to say we’ve failed on that.”
There are success stories though, and the article goes on to describe several schools that have succeeded in narrowing the achievement gap; all have used similar methods, the most important being extending the school day. Other methods for boosting student achievement include: “extensive tutoring, giving schools wide latitude over teacher hiring, and setting high expectations for all students, regardless of the hurdles put in place by their tough backgrounds.”
Are we doing enough in Lowell? Well, extended day never got off the ground here, despite available funding from the state to make it happen. In addition, and most discouragingly, we continue to cut the budget year after year. Where we have applied resources, such as reading interventions and math ability groupings, we have seen results. The question is, can we do more, and can we possibly continue to see improvements in this fiscal climate?