Opportunity to learn, rush to equity
by Guest blogger on Mar 10 2010 Posted in Community voices
This week's guest blog post comes from Herb Kohl who continues to be an educator and writer. His most recent book is The Herb Kohl Reader (New Press, 2009). He's also a NotebookMember.
Some suggestions for educational reform: I suggest we replace the Race to the Top with a Race to Equity, and find a way to introduce Opportunity to Learn articles into the ESEA reauthorization.
During the last attempt to rework ESEA I worked with Senator Paul Wellstone on building Opportunity to Learn ideas into ESEA. Let me explain our thinking then, which might be useful as progressives consider what specific suggestions to make this time through.
When looking at school failure, consideration must be given to the situation and circumstances under which children learn.
Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities dramatically documents the lack of opportunity presented to many poor children. Taking off from there, we raised the issue of how to negate those inequalities. The question that droves this analysis was: Do all children have the same opportunities to learn?
We were careful to avoid the question of poverty, family background, etc. because we wanted to make strictly educational arguments. We wanted to focus specifically on the conditions of schooling and make the opportunity to learn an equity issue. In this context we wanted to create a series of measures of equity, amongst which were:
- What are the facilities necessary to promote equitable learning?
- What is an equitable ratio of students to teachers?
