'Global Gap' is Wider at Home

“Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them—and then, the opportunity to choose.”

Fifty years ago, C. Wright Mills, the intellectual rebel and prominent sociologist, uttered these words during a period of American history in which bureaucratization was on the rise and, as a result, imagination was quickly disappearing. Mills worried that Americans, increasingly unable to cultivate themselves, were morphing into passive receptacles filled by the social norms and mores of their time.

In “The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need—And What We Can Do About It,” Tony Wagner, the co-director of the Change Leadership Group at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, exhibits the same concerns that plagued Mills a half-century ago.

According to Wagner, all of our schools are failing our children, not just those failing to teach proficiency on standardized tests. Rather, Wagner argues, our national obsession with testing does a disservice to our children by training them to believe that the real world is full of alternatives they must passively choose between. And, in a world where simply being able to read, write, and perform basic computation is no longer enough, even children who master these tests are not ready to attend college or to compete in the global economy.

Wagner argues that all of our children must be taught how to think, how to critically engage in the world around them, and how to apply their knowledge to situations that are ever evolving. “In today’s world,” he writes, “it’s no longer how much you know that matters; it’s what you can do with what you know.” Indeed, he asserts that our competitive economic edge and even the strength of our democracy depend on it.

However, while Wagner’s book thoroughly examines how standardized tests, aided by an inability to teach beyond them, dampen the intellectual curiosity of American children and thus reinforce the global achievement gap, he only gets at a piece of the problem. By downplaying America’s first achievement gap—that between low-income minority students and their middle-class counterparts—Wagner’s argument belies a true representation of the academic challenges facing our country and obscures the actions we should be taking.

While it is difficult to disagree with his claim that teaching to standardized tests leaves students ill-prepared for accepting the responsibilities of both work and democracy, Wagner fails to adequately take into account the other side of testing. Wagner correctly assumes that the growing emphasis on testing is a result of our economic fears that our best jobs will go overseas, but he fails to seriously consider that testing is also being used as a measure of our national belief in equality, our belief that educators should aim to teach all children, no matter their socioeconomic station in life.

Although it is clear that the crux of Wagner’s book is about this new achievement gap, his failure to address the structural barriers to education for low-income and minority students makes one wonder if he is committed—or if he thinks it’s possible—to close that first, nagging gap. At one point during the book, Wagner reduces the complexity of the achievement gap to a simple dichotomy between the “Overachievers” and the “Unengaged.” And two of the three schools that Wagner cites as successful examples of teaching our children the survival skills he says they need are charter schools. It is hard to imagine how the lessons that work in schools in which each class has no more than 100 students could be applied in a large, urban school that has over 400 students in each grade.

But, as tends to be the case with large social problems that lack easy answers, it is asking the right questions that helps us progress, and Wagner’s book raises many important questions about both the state and purpose of secondary education in America. As Wagner states in his conclusion, “However you choose to start the conversation, it will succeed only if it is a reflective discussion that is driven by the important questions rather than the easy answers—by inquiry rather than ideology.”

But as answers to this question start to be outlined, educators and policy makers should not forget to address the first achievement gap that continues to have great bearing on the post-secondary opportunities of low-income and minority students in this country, one that’s been around since well before Mills. After all, it is difficult to be intellectually curious and obtain any job—let alone a good one—if the education system fails to address your basic educational needs.

—Staff writer Laura A. Moore can be reached at lamoore@fas.harvard.edu.