Education Reform Consensus Grows on Fixing Urban Schools
The ground in the battle for school reform is beginning to change
One of the most important yet least noticed rallies in Washington during Barack Obama's inauguration week took place at Cardozo High School, a struggling inner-city school located not far from the steps of the U.S. Capitol where the chief justice swore in the nation's first African-American president. The Martin Luther King Jr. Day rally at Cardozo's run-down auditorium drew a coalition of strange but influential bedfellows who spanned the political spectrum, from the civil rights firebrand Al Sharpton to Republican Sen. John McCain. All of the speakers were united by a single cause: A determination to tackle the nation's last, great civil rights battle—the shameful achievement gap between minority and white students.
Despite its humble setting, the Cardozo rally helped mark a sea change in the battle to fix our ailing urban schools. Hosted by the Education Equality Project and its odd-couple cochairmen, Sharpton and Joel Klein, the reformist schools chancellor of New York City, it was a remarkable and riveting piece of political theater that would have been all but unthinkable just a few years ago. In a land where education opportunity is supposed to be the great equalizer, the average black or Hispanic 12th grader in the United States today has the reading and math skills of a white eighth grader. White parents would be up in arms if their 17-yearold sons and daughters had the cognitive skills of 13-year-olds, and Sharpton and African-American mayors like Cory Booker of Newark, Adrian Fenty of Washington, and Kevin Johnson, the former basketball star and new mayor of Sacramento, Calif., are equally fed up.
Yet what was most striking about the rally at Cardozo was not just Sharpton's call to responsibility but the bipartisan lineup that stepped up to challenge the education establishment. A parade of black, Democratic mayors declared they no longer would defend the practices that hurt minority students. The Democratic Party, Booker declared, had sometimes gone "the wrong way on education." He concluded: "I am no longer concerned with right and left. I just want to go forward!"
None of the speakers at the rally fell back on tired nostrums to excuse the poor performance of minority students or to justify the need for new spending. Not a single civil rights leader said that disadvantaged students are too burdened by poverty to perform well in school. They did not say that the solution to the achievement gap was to shower new money on urban schools. Nor did anyone suggest that achievement tests were inherently unfair to minority students and should not be used under the No Child Left Behind
Act to hold schools, principals, and teachers accountable for student performance. In fact, this generation of school reformers believes that schools should be more accountable for student learning, not less.
No bipartisan tableau at the rally was more striking than the joint appearance of Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, on her last day in office, and her successor, Arne Duncan. Spellings and Duncan affirmed that they, too, believed closing the achievement gap was the nation's enduring civil rights challenge. Even in the face of poverty, great schools matter, Duncan suggested.
In his inaugural address, Barack Obama took on those people who are deeply skeptical of the possibility of change in many aspects of American life. "What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them—that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply."
Mr. President, the ground in the battle for school reform is beginning to shift, too. Just ask them at Cardozo High.
- Read more by Mortimer Zuckerman .
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Reader Comments
whale sperm
ugh...i was searching th internet for measures that ARE being taken ti fix the problem... i cant find a website on what people ARE doing to fix it. i can only find websites on statistics and how people THINK they can fix the problem...but what ide love to know is...what ARE they doing...ummmm can any1 help me here? or should i pick e new topc for my project
Reforming Political Correctness ...... Again
"In a land where education opportunity is supposed to be the great equalizer, the average black or Hispanic 12th grader in the United States today has the reading and math skills of a white eighth grader."
-Cognitive skills have been proven to be higher in whites than blacks. Get over it. You know its true. You've seen the studies. This may be as good as it gets.
"None of the speakers at the rally fell back on tired nostrums to excuse the poor performance of minority students or to justify the need for new spending. Not a single civil rights leader said that disadvantaged students are too burdened by poverty to perform well in school. They did not say that the solution to the achievement gap was to shower new money on urban schools. Nor did anyone suggest that achievement tests were inherently unfair to minority students and should not be used under the No Child Left Behind."
-This is a welcome change.
Act to hold schools, principals, and teachers accountable for student performance. In fact, this generation of school reformers believes that schools should be more accountable for student learning, not less.
-Bullsh*t! Just another excuse. Learning requires an inherant skill set. Some pick it up faster than others. Like basketball, some learn the fundamentals easily, while others have to practice 3 times longer and harder just to keep up.
If the under acheivers cant learn in a traditional setting, then a different setting needs to be found. If they need to go to school 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, then so be it.
Holding schools, principals, and teachers accountable for for the above mentioned students performance is like holding a basketball coach accountable, for his team of dwarfs loss, to an NBA team.
Reforming Education
For education to reform parents, need to reform. At my school, we have a saying "Parents send us the best kids they have." This is true. Students are not at the root of the problem, their parents are. If parents are concerned about their children's education then the children will be concerned about what they learn. The greatest thing the government can do to reform education is to make parents responsible for the education their children receive. Does this leave the school system and teachers off the hook; of course not. Teachers, administrators, and the system must do their job. As important as teachers are and as much impact we can have on our students it cannot compare to the impact that parents have on their children. When parents believe, they do not need to do anything to support the school or the teachers they are showing their children that your teacher is solely responsible for your grades and your learning. Kindergarteners are now entering school without knowing their letters, how to count, shapes, or colors. There is no home training. The problem seems to be worse among the minority children. When these children enter school, they are already behind. They will probably never catch up. I am tired of the national government telling teachers and school systems that we do not do enough to encourage student success and achievement. That it is the teachers fault that the achievement gap exists. There is no responsibility placed on the students and the parents. Children will do as much or as little as they are allowed to do. If we want our school system to change then we need to change the way we are raising our children.
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