[Response to comments by Michael Atherton's in the thread "re: [mpls] Sunday Strib School Editorials"]
I don't agree that "hardly anyone knew" that an academic performance gap existed 100 years. There was a great deal of discussion about why it existed. And the popular explanation, then and now, is that children of immigrants, the poor, and people of color are hard-to-educate. Standardized achievement and "intelligence" testing has been around for over 100 years and was done routinely in most school districts by the 1950s. Desegregation through racial integration in the 1960s and 70s was seen by partisans of the Civil Rights movement (such as myself) as a means to the end of closing the gap, not as an end in itself. Closing the education achievement gap was also recognized as a strategic goal of the school system in the US, and substantial progress toward closing the gap in reading and math, as measured by National Assessment of Educational Progress exams, was made during the 1970s and early 80s. The National Assessment of Education Progress (federal testing program) has been monitoring achievement levels in reading and math on a national scale since the 1970s. And there have been widely used standardized achievement tests, such as the California Achievement Test, that also allow comparisons between districts and individual schools in various states using the same yardstick. Since the late 1960s the federal government has required school districts to do standardized achievement testing, to breakdown test score averages by race and eligibility for free and reduced price lunches, and to pass the information along to the state and federal departments of education. Since the early 80s the federal department of education has been promoting reforms to address a nonexistent "rising tide of mediocrity." The recipes for promoting "excellence" have included high stakes testing, intensified curriculum tracking, "choice" (magnets, charter schools, school vouchers), more homework, etc. Although Bush education advisor Diane Ravitch made a good case for "untracking" the schools in "Left Back: A century of failed school reforms," the federal government has not abandoned its century of support for tracking. NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND: OLD WINE IN NEW WINESKINS No Child left behind does not address the systemic obstacles to "closing the gap" that I see in the Minneapolis Public Schools (and which are common to other big city public school systems), such as high teacher turnover and a high concentration of inexperienced teachers in schools serving high-poverty and / or high minority schools, and a multitiered curriculum tracking system that begins in the elementary grades. What is new about NCLB isn't that it requires the collection, breakdown and reporting of data on educational achievement and the gap (which has always been classified as public information). That's been happening since the late 1960s. What's new about NCLB is that it has a mechanism for imposing changes in school governance and ultimately closing down schools that fail to make "adequate yearly progress." NCLB also promotes charter schools as an alternative to district-run schools. The charter schools are generally nonunion, pay lower wages, and don't have as much revenue per student from public sources as the district-run schools (which is why they tend to be nonunion, pay lower wages, and suffer from high teacher turnover rates). Under NCLB the better performing public schools don't have to make room for students in poor performing schools, despite the rhetoric about students in poor performing schools getting "unlimited school choice" at some point. -Doug Mann, King Field Mann for School Board www.educationright.com - REMINDERS: 1. Think a member has violated the rules? Email the list manager at [EMAIL PROTECTED] before continuing it on the list. 2. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. For state and national discussions see: http://e-democracy.org/discuss.html For external forums, see: http://e-democracy.org/mninteract ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
