By MARK TALLMAN
Kansas Association of School Boards

Differences in academic success among Kansas student groups are receiving attention this year. 

In the Gannon school finance lawsuit, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled Kansas school finance was not constitutionally adequate because too many students were not meeting state standards, and those students were disproportionately poor, non-white or disabled. The court approved a multi-year funding plan passed by the Legislature to address those students, shifting the focus to how schools are using those funds to improve results. 

The State Board of Education’s “Kansas Can” goals are centered on getting more students to complete high school and go on to earn a postsecondary credential to meet the state’s economic needs and earn a higher standard of living. Many students are at-risk of failing to meet those goals. 

Finally, the Kansas Legislature has commissioned its Post Audit Division to study how Kansas provides extra funding to school districts to help students at risk of poor academic performance or dropping out of school, which could result in changes in the $415 million program. This follows a study of special education funding last year, and a future audit will look at bilingual education funding. 

This series looks at the major issues in the “achievement gap” between different groups of students, how current programs are working to address those differences, and issues under study. 

Part 1 – Impact of student and family income on student success

Lower income students are more likely to struggle on educational measures like test scores and graduation rates than higher income students.

On Kansas state assessments, over 70 percent of all students score at the what the State Board of Education has defined as “basic” ability to understand and use the mathematics and English Language Arts skills and knowledge needed for college and career readiness. However, less than 60 percent of free/reduced lunch eligible students are at that level, compared to over 80 percent of higher income students.

Likewise, about one-third of all students scored at the “effective” level, which is considered “on track” for postsecondary success, in mathematics and 37 percent in English. But only 19 percent of free and reduced lunch eligible students scored at that level in math and 23 percent in English, compared to 45 and 50 percent for non-low-income students.

The four-year graduation rate for all students is 88 percent but only 80 percent for free/reduced meals eligible students graduate “on time”, compared to 95 percent of higher-income students.

These differences are not unique to Kansas, or to public schools. On the 2017 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), which tests a sample of students at fourth and eighth grade on reading and math skills in all states, Kansas had a 22.6 percent gap between free and reduced meal eligible students and not eligible students at the Basic level, compared to 23.6 percent for all states and 24.7 percent for Kansas overall peer states (most similar to Kansas in student and population characteristics). Kansas had a 28.4 percent gap at the Proficient level, compared to 27.7 in all states and 27.9 percent for states.

The five non-public school systems that participate in Kansas State Assessments (Lutheran schools and the Catholic dioceses of Dodge City, Kansas City, Salina, and Wichita) have gaps between free and reduced meal eligible and non-eligible students of 10 to 20 percent at the Basic level and 20 to 30 or higher at the Effective level.

Reasons for the income-achievement gap

A number of reasons have been advanced for these differences (here is a chapter from a report presented by the ASCD, formerly the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Design). The conclusions are that students from low income or impoverished families experience more stress that negatively affects their development, begin school with fewer resources and therefore start behind their more advantaged peers, and have less home support and more disruption throughout their years in school.

Specifically, lower income students are more likely to lack adequate food and health care. They are more likely to live  in single-parent (or grandparent) households, with one or more parents absent or incarcerated. They are more likely to be homeless. They are more likely to experience “trauma” or “Adverse Childhood Experiences” that affect their development. While there are many exceptions, they are more likely to start school with smaller vocabularies, less socialization and basic skills.

Lower income parents are more likely to have unstable employment and housing, which leads to more frequent moving from home to home, school to school. They have less reliable transportation and parents may be working multiple jobs at hours that make it more difficult to monitor student attendance and progress, and be involved in school activities.

Finally, these families are less able to afford enrichments such as home computer and internet access, travel and vacations, sports, clubs and other activities. In other words, more of these families simply lack the resources to support their students at the same level as higher income families.

Because income is now so closely linked to education level, lower income families are likely to have parents who did less well in school and have less postsecondary education themselves. Therefore, their students may receive less guidance, understanding or even support for educational attainment as a priority. In fact, school leaders say some parents may actually discourage students from further education, concerned they may “lose” their children if they pursue education that leads to employment away from home.

The result is a difficult cycle to break. Students from lower income families are less likely to complete high school and college; as a result, they are more likely to have lower income as adults and their children with face the same challenges.

Of course, this does not mean all lower income students are failing; nearly 60 percent of these students score at least at basic on state tests and 80 percent graduate on time; and nearly one in five higher income students are below basic and five percent do not graduate from high school, at least within four years. The data is clear, however, that lower income students are much more likely to be behind on academic standards, fail to complete high school and be unprepared for postsecondary education.

Mark Tallman is the associate executive director for advocacy and communications for the Kansas Association of School Boards.

By BENJAMIN MARCUS
Freedom Forum Institute

The United States is exceptionally religious. Americans pray and attend religious services more than adults in other developed countries and they assign a higher value to religion in their own lives. Nearly three-quarters of Americans affiliate with some religious group.

Does this religious fervor correspond with a religiously literate public? On July 23, the Pew Research Center announced the results of a major survey of religious knowledge and found that Americans, on average, correctly answer fewer than half of questions — many of which were intended to represent some of the “basics” about various religious traditions.

Americans fare only slightly better when asked about their own religious traditions. Christians, for example, answer about 59 percent of questions about the Bible and Christianity correctly.

So are Americans both religious and religiously ignorant about religion, as some claim? The answer to that question depends entirely on what we think it means to know about religion — especially our own.

When we compare the results of Pew’s survey with a study led by political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell about the importance of religion in people’s lives, we notice a surprising pattern: America’s least religious groups earn the highest scores on Pew’s religious knowledge survey and some of America’s most religious groups answer the fewest questions correctly. When Pew published the first iteration of the study with similar results in 2010, major news outlets focused on a perceived inverse correlation between religiosity and religious knowledge. “Survey: Atheists, Agnostics Know More About Religion Than Religious,” blared one headline.

We should pause when we hear the claim that Americans who are religious — people who gather in religious communities frequently, who ground their sense of self in religion, who find religion important in their daily life — know less about religion than people who are not religious. Echoing the philosophy of religion scholar Thomas A. Lewis’ astute question: If religious people lack religious knowledge, does “religious” mean the same thing in both halves of the sentence? What type of knowledge are we measuring?

Take a look at what religious knowledge means on the Pew survey. Of the 32 questions asked in 2019, roughly 22 — depending on how you classify them — measure knowledge about scriptural narrative (e.g. “Which biblical figure is most closely associated with saving Jews from murder by appealing to the king?”) and doctrine (e.g. “Which is one of Buddhism’s four ‘noble truths?’”).

Here’s my interpretation of the results: Being religious often has little to do with content knowledge about scriptural narrative and doctrine — of our own or others’ religious traditions. If that is correct, then how we talk about religious knowledge should change.

We should first acknowledge that religious individuals are capable of expressing their religious identity fluently in their own religious communities. Being able to express oneself religiously — and to understand the religious self-expression of a co-religionist — is its own type of religious knowledge. I have studied religion formally for years, but I know that, as the son of a Roman Catholic and humanist Jew, if I were to step into an evangelical church I would lack the vocabulary for communicating my religious identity clearly to folks in the pews. In other words, religious knowledge includes a skill — communicating religious identity — and not just content knowledge.

As religious studies scholar Vincent Lloyd argued after the release of Pew’s 2010 survey, there is a difference between “knowledge-that” and “knowledge-how.” The Pew survey measures the former, whereas religious individuals have plenty of the latter. Religious folks know how to be religious just as someone riding a bike knows how to balance on two wheels, even if they can’t explain the physics. We learn from the results of Pew that knowing how to be religious does not necessarily require knowledge about scriptural narrative and doctrine. So what does it entail?

We might better understand what it means to know how to be religious if we recognize three buildings blocks of religiosity: belief, behavior and belonging. Drawing on decades of sociology, anthropology and psychology research — including the work of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt — I have elsewhere explained how the beliefs people hold, the behaviors they manifest and the communities to which they belong mutually constitute people’s religious identities. Knowledge about beliefs need not be the primary focus of our religious lives. Growing up I could not name the five books of the Torah, but I knew how to tell Yiddish-inflected jokes over matzo brei while visiting my Ashkenazi grandparents in New York for Passover. In the eyes of my grandparents, my biblical illiteracy did not make me any less Jewish.

Religious individuals and communities need not know the dictionary definitions of their beliefs, behaviors or communities of belonging in order to know how to be religious and express that religious identity in their private and public lives.

And that brings us to a second type of skill, one that is academic and not devotional: the ability to analyze and contextualize religious expression. If religious individuals’ knowledge-how is akin to fluency in a religious language, then the conceptual knowledge of religious studies scholars is akin to linguistics. The religious studies scholar asks how religious expressions communicate meaning and establish relationships in specific times and places. The American Academy of Religion, the world’s largest professional association for scholars who study religion, defines religious literacy — a type of conceptual knowledge about religion — as the “ability to discern and analyze the intersections of religion with social, political and cultural life.” This conceptual knowledge helps a scholar analyze lived religion and religious identities, not memorize content.

So what does Pew’s survey tell us about Americans’ religious knowledge?

The results show us that Americans lack content knowledge about religion, especially scriptural narrative and doctrine. This should concern us, because content knowledge about multiple religious traditions is important. Stephen Prothero, an adviser to Pew and the author of the 2007 bestselling book “Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know — and Doesn’t,” makes a compelling case for why we have a civic responsibility to teach children facts and figures about the stories and beliefs found within religious traditions.

Pew’s survey does not tell us whether Americans are religiously literate as defined by the American Academy of Religion, though I suspect they are not. We do not know what conceptual knowledge Americans have to analyze the role of religion in public life, but recent evidence — statements that Islam is not a religion, a political cartoon showing Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a dog, or claims that Buddhism is inherently peaceful — suggests we need to improve religious literacy education. Fortunately, the National Council for the Social Studies has taken an important step by releasing guidelines for teaching about religion academically and constitutionally in American public schools.

The Pew results emphatically do not tell us that religious people are ignorant about their own religion. Religious individuals and communities know how to be religious — and that type of insider knowledge is profound.

Benjamin P. Marcus is religious literacy specialist at the Religious Freedom Center of the Freedom Forum Institute. His email address is: [email protected].