Abandon "Students of Color" Category
In late March a panel of ten education experts gathered in Washington to nominate four most-improved urban school districts for a national education prize. What should have been a routine review of student data, however, suddenly took a new direction.
First one member on the review panel for the annual Broad Prize for Urban Education, then another, noticed the same thing: Plenty of large urban school districts nationwide were making solid progress with Hispanic students closing achievement gaps with white students, but not with African-American students.
In theory, the experts should not have been seeing what they were seeing.
The federal data tracking Hispanic and African American students shows they are making roughly