Conservatives Cant Ignore The Achievement Gap

The achievement gap between white and minority students persists, and glaringly so, as this article in the New York Times details.

The lede of this article is unfair and shows the bias against President Bush’s signature education act – No Child Left Behind (NCLB):

The achievement gap between white and minority students has not narrowed in recent years, despite the focus of the No Child Left Behind law on improving black and Hispanic scores, according to results of a federal test considered to be the nation’s best measure of long-term trends in math and reading proficiency.

Aside from the lede, which does its best to blame the achievement gap on NCLB even though the achievement gap is way older than that law, the article is invaluable because it touches on the key elements in the education debate: Cultural challenges in urban communities that devalue book smarts, controversy over “teaching to the test,” strengthening education standards for all kids and the need to get better teachers into poor urban schools especially.

Having taught English in a very low performing urban school and seeing poor test results from a vast majority of my students, I have never had a problem with the NCLB tests that pop up throughout the year. The English test is a simple and good judgment of where the kids are in terms of reading comprehension and basic writing skills.

But it’s sad when the results come back and something like 15% of our kids pass the test compared with 85-90% of kids in suburban and country schools state-wide. Our state is one of the top ranked in the country in the overall rankings of state education – I sometimes wonder if the city’s test scores are just thrown out of the rankings.

As William Julius Wilson writes in his new book – More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City, it’s important to debate not only the structural causes of persistent poverty (a key cause of poor education and vice versa), but also the cultural causes of this illness.

There has to be a way to fix this problem; we can’t stand for the achievement gap in this country – whites, blacks, Latinos, Asians all. Being able to lay out all the issues, especially the sensitive ones that come when talking about race will be crucial to the debate and the future of the students trying to find their way in life in spite of failed schools, often split up families, and communities plagued by violence and poverty.