Obama ed "blueprint" will widen achievement gaps

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Guest writers Lisa Guisbond and Monty Neill explain why:

But what are we really talking about when we talk about the worst schools?

With all the hype about schools that “beat the odds,” overcome poverty and close gaps in test scores, it’s easy to forget what research continues to confirm. As James Coleman found in his landmark 1966 education study, what test scores measure better than anything else is socioeconomic status (SES). So the bottom tier are inevitably schools serving largely poor, urban students of color.

Of course, many of those schools do need help. It would be a great thing if federal education law responded to this reality by creating a way to precisely identify the needs of the children, their families and their schools, and make long-term investments to provide them with essential resources, support and guidance. This is an approach advocated by FairTest, the Forum on Educational Accountability and others.

But here’s where common sense takes a holiday. The Blueprint’s response is to tighten the screws on these schools. If they continue to score low, they must choose from a menu of snake oil ’remedies,’ many unproven, and some well-proven failures, such as firing and replacing a school’s staff or closing and reopening a school as a charter school.

Washington Post Answer Sheet

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1. Another point of view is from Substance News

But I'd like people reading Substance to take the time to read between the lines carefully. Is Fair Test really helping here, when the implicit basis of the column is that an "achievement gap" exists (the language, remember, began with the Education Trust, Achieve and other teacher bashing groups) and ignoring the input of inner city teachers to join in the general attack on inner city schools, teachers, and, in a certain way, children. Has there been any "progressive" discussion for years on the conditions of segregation, extreme poverty, nutrition, crime, and all the other factors that the children who live in our ghettos bring into the schools every day?

Finally, is this just an indirect form of teacher bashing? Here is what I mean. A decade ago, when I was removed from my teaching after 28 years of teaching in the inner city, we still had the chance to say that inner city teachers were the heroes of public education. We used to talk at Substance of forcing our privileged suburban counterparts to engage in "Inward Bound" -- take two or three years to swap jobs with a teacher at Chicago's Marshall High School, or Bowen High School, or DuSable High School, where I had taught.

With all due respect to the contributions of Monty Neill and Fair Test, is there anything in what they've been saying that defends inner city teachers (and teacher unions) from the vicious teacher bashing that was pioneered in Chicago — based on the myth of the "achievement gap" — and is now going toxic nationwide under "Race To The Top"? Every time Chicago gets away with scapegoating teachers (by firing us) based on test scores (that the following admits will remain low for schools serving America's poorest and most segregated inner city children), aren't the "progressives" who use terms like "achievement gap" doing the same work as the reactionaries who have taken aim at public education. As we've reported extensively here at SubstanceNews, at this point in history, virtually every school targeted for reconstitution (this year, called "turnaround") by Chicago's powers is all-black, serving student populations that are all-poor, staffed with faculties that are overwhelmingly majority black. Those are the facts of Chicago, and this year we published the visuals from each of the 18 school closing hearings that Chicago held.

Substance News