Last week the Toronto school board decided to approve an alternative “Africentric” school in the city. Advocates for it cited the abysmal 40-percent dropout rate for Toronto’s black students — a disastrous rate that leads school leaders to try almost anything to improve it. (Rates in the U.S. can run nearly as high, though precise numbers are hard to pin down — see here.) The alternative school raises disturbing shadows of segregation, but board members were swayed by arguments that a “European-centred system” alienates kids of African descent. Learning about their heritage will spark their interest and keep them in class, and besides, the school will be open to all students.
Advocates should beware, however, of tying too closely a culturally relevant curriculum to academic achievement. A story in Education Week last month (here — subscription required) reported on a report by the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth that examined several studies of “culture-based teaching” and drew a troubling conclusion: “Not one study showed that culture-based education improved achievement in reading and writing.”
Several voices in the article object that the Literacy Panel’s examination defined achievement too narrowly and didn’t recognize the difficulty of gathering empirical data on culture-based teaching’s effects. Panel researchers reply, however, that existing studies contain way too many unsubstantiated claims, and that, in fact, many of them “didn’t look at outcomes” at all.
The question remains open, but reports such as this one should, at least, blunt the blithe confidence often expressed by multiculturalists that aligning class content with the heritage of the students will produce achievement gains at grading time.
