Public Schools: The Victims, Not the Cause, of Massive Inequality
A couple of years ago Paul Reville, then Massachusetts Education Secretary declared: “Some want to make the absurd argument that the reason low-income youngsters do poorly is that, mysteriously, all the incompetency in our education systems has coincidentally aggregated around low income students. In this view, all we need to do is scrub the system of incompetency and all will be well…”
This is the idea, widely held, that it is all the teachers’ fault. Extending this idea tells us that our problem is tenure or bad colleges of education training teachers badly.
Such ideas, foolish as they may sound to those of us who know something about inequality of educational opportunity, seem appealing because the problem can be fixed by merely firing our way into a better future.
We struggle to grasp and connect the web of issues that converge to drive inequality for children. And if we can grasp the scope of the problem, it seems overwhelming.
Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz helps us this morning in The Wrong Lesson