We really should put students first
Posted: Sunday, April 29, 2012 12:00 am
Earlier this month, former Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and former Washington, D.C., Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee announced that their StudentsFirstNY education group intends to raise $10 million a year to make sure that Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s education legacy continues after he leaves office. For many of us in low-income communities, this legacy is a lack of resources and persistent inequalities that deny our children a substantive and fair opportunity to learn.
At the Highbridge Community Life Center, we hear from many parents who say that we simply can’t afford this kind of reform, which isn’t much different from the failed policies of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Without an emphasis on inputs and resource allocation, inequalities in education opportunity and attainment will persist. Struggling schools that lack adequate resources and strong teachers will face more arbitrary closings, firings and reforms in an attempt to “turnaround” the worse performing schools.
This approach continues to ignore the mounting evidence that reform focused exclusively on outcomes actually widens the achievement gap. It also amounts to a refusal to fix the growing inequities in educational funding that exacerbate student underachievement, posing the biggest roadblock to teacher effectiveness.
Many of our parents agree that we need to assess the performance of teaching staffs at our schools. However, they are also frustrated that the evaluations are based solely on how well their children perform on high-stakes tests. We know that these tests are not fully indicative of what a child knows or what proficiency level they’ve reached.
Our schools are being blamed for failure without an honest discussion about why and how many of these schools have been failing for years. If Rhee and Klein really chose to put students first, they would stop supporting the failed policies of Bloomberg and NCLB: labeling schools and teachers without appropriate measurements or supports, emphasizing testing over a well-rounded and balanced education and measuring