Two ways to attack the achievement gap

There is already a group of educators and interested citizens working on the achievement gap at District 97, with Carl Spight as chair. At a recent meeting, a doctoral student from MIT working with D97 stated that 80% of the achievement gap is already in place by second grade.

It seems to me this information calls for two courses of action:

First, we have to make an effort to contact the parents of every baby and new child in the community and offer guidance on the services available to help make their child a star no matter what resources the parents have. The Early Childhood Collaboration has been working diligently on this piece for five years, but have very limited funds to create the social network needed to complete the job. A little money in this area would offer great long-term benefits to the entire community.

The second part is very difficult because older children who have been behind since the moment they started school do not want to be viewed as needing special help. There are private schools all over the U.S., such as the KIPP schools started by a graduate of OPRF, that can take students who are not even close to reading and handling math at grade level, and in several years they are at grade level or above. They go to school the equivalent of 60 days more per year than the children of Oak Park.

It is my understanding that 20% of the freshmen students at OPRF are not proficient in multiplication or division. What does this tell us about their reading and writing skills? When they are this far behind, how can they catch up with a short school year, a short school day?

This brings us to the next problem. Many of the children who are way behind by high school have given up on school. This was echoed by a number of black students that the Journal interviewed a few years ago. They goof off in school and create the problems that lead to the type of discipline that creates controversy.

You can create a 'school within a school' that works primarily on getting its students proficient in basic math, with a large reading component. The student then has the skills to look toward higher education, filling in the gaps at a Junior College. To be successful, this approach would need small class size, top quality teachers and the resolve to suspend those students who have no intention of trying to do the work. This was tried before with none of the above provisos in place and it failed miserably.

We all realize that students who hate school will only cause trouble, unless there is some unique offering that changes their attitude.

All young people do not need a college education. There is often the cry that we aren't challenging our children enough; they can't get into the honors classes, etc. Often that child does not have the basic skills to succeed in those classes. If they failed in the honors classes, there would be another complaint about the work being too difficult and taking the "heart" out of the child.

We have a number of retired, very talented educators in the OPRF area who I'm confident would be willing to give of their time to a project that might make sense to understanding the various causes of the achievement gap and how they might be addressed. Just interviewing those freshmen students who were already in difficulty in grammar school and trying to find the road map for them could be a marvelous exercise.

Jack Flynn, a River Forest resident, is a volunteer with Cristo Rey schools.