Urban school leaders focus on inequities in education
By Del Stover
03/09 -- The Obama administration offers urban school leaders their best opportunity in years to redress the inequities that exist between schools serving affluent communities and those serving the most economically disadvantaged.
That was a key message delivered at the CUBE Issues Forum Jan. 31, held in conjunction with NSBA’s Federal Relations Network Conference in Washington, D.C.
The need to tackle educational inequities is plainly seen in international test scores, Beth Glenn, policy director for the Forum for Education and Democracy, told school leaders. The United States ranks 21st in science and 25th in math among industrialized nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
“What’s dragging us down is racial inequality,” she said. “White and Asian students do slightly better than OECD [averages], but black and Hispanic students do significantly worse. Class inequity drives low U.S. rankings.”
What makes such findings more disturbing is that, while the United States needs increasingly educated workers for a knowledge-based economy, the public schools aren’t producing enough of them. “We have a failing or stagnant level of learning in those schools,” Glenn said. “We call this the education debt.”
It’s a form of debt because, in the long run, the country is going to pay for inequitable schools just as it does for its national debt. Just the annual dropout rate -- about 1.2 million students a year -- will cost the nation nearly $300 trillion in lifetime household earnings, with a corresponding cost in lower tax revenues, higher social service costs, and a growing prison population.
Quentin Lawson, executive director of the National Alliance of Black School Educators, called school inequities a civil rights issue. “A youngster born in this country has a right to a quality education,” he said. “We have zero tolerance against crimes in school. There should be zero tolerance for illiteracy, high dropout rates, and disproportionate numbers of expulsions.”
Why is it, he asked, that blacks “are half as likely as whites to be enrolled in Advanced Placement courses? Why is it that twice as many blacks as whites, and four times as many Hispanics as whites, drop out of school? And why are blacks two-and-a-half times as likely to be expelled from school?”
Jim Crawford, founder and president of the Institute for Language and Education Policy, told school leaders about the immense challenges facing English language learners (ELL). Too many ELLs are taught by teachers with no certification in the languages spoken by students or in research-based pedagogy aimed at English learners.
Anti-immigration politics also are overruling pedagogy in some instances, with proven bilingual programs replaced by less-proven English-only approaches. Mandates to test ELL students in English also make no sense until they’ve learned the language, he said.
“If you haven’t mastered English, how are you doing academically?” he asked. If you do poorly on tests, “is it because you haven’t learned the language or the subject matter?”
Glenn suggested advocacy efforts aimed at federal education officials should emphasize a shift in the government’s role -- from measuring compliance with federal mandates to providing financial and technical support to schools attempting to fix these inequities. The White House and Congress also should put a “laser-like focus” on issues of teacher quality and training -- and take a closer look at the inequities in states’ education funding formulas.
Such policy improvements will depend partly on whether urban school leaders get more involved in advocacy efforts, said Reginald Felton, NSBA’s director of federal relations.
“NSBA cannot be effective in implementing its legislative agenda without members of urban communities,” he said. “It’s nice to think about a national [education] policy, but there are 535 members of Congress concerned with their own [constituencies]. If they don’t hear from you about moving public education forward, then it simply will not happen.”
Reproduced with permission from
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