What If Education Reform Got It All Wrong in the First Place?
That’s the conclusion of a growing number of researchers who argue that 30 years of test scores have not measured a decline in public schools, but are rather a metric of the country’s child poverty and the broadening divide of income inequality.
It’s been just over 30 years since war was declared on America’s public schools. The opening salvo came with 1983’s A Nation at Risk, the Ronald Reagan-era Department of Education report that alleged that lax schools and ineffective teachers constituted a dire threat to national security.
Yet three decades later, and in spite the opening of a second front comprised of school vouchers, a 2.57-million student charter school network, and a classroom culture tied to test preparation, the nation’s education outcomes have barely budged, and rather than narrowing the education gap, the chasm between rich and poor appears only to be significantly widening.
But what if it turned out that education reform, with its teacher-blaming assumptions, got it all wrong in the first place? That’s the conclusion being drawn by a growing number of researchers who, armed with a mountain of fresh evidence, argue that 30 years of test scores have not measured a decline in America’s public schools, but are rather a metric of the country’s child poverty—the worst among developed nations—and the broadening divide of income inequality.
"The most striking takeaway, was that the students that need the least in this country, who are already coming in with every possible privilege and advantage, are getting the most resources."
It represented a fundamental misreading, claim the husband and wife research team of professors Gary Orfield and Patricia Gandara. The pair, who investigate education inequities for the University of California-Los Angeles’ Civil Rights Project, say this represents a tragic distraction from addressing the real roots of educational inequality.
"The Reagan revolution basically said, 'No, we don’t have to worry about any of those things,'" Orfield explained to Capital & Main. "'[It said] it’s all the schools' fault, and inside the schools it's the teachers' fault and the teachers' organizations. And if we just beat up on them, we can eliminate all the gaps and so forth. And if they don't do it, we'll just privatize everything. ... And we don’t even have to measure that, because we know that's true.'"
One area of agreement for both sides in this battle is that quality education remains crucial to both achieving economic security and breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty. More education typically leads to better jobs and more pay—a fact that has become increasingly critical due to the loss of middle class-manufacturing jobs to globalization—and it directly correlates to better-life outcomes for children. Added to that are the considerable social costs of educational deficits, including an incarceration rate of one in every 10 young male high school dropouts landing in jail or juvenile detention, compared with one in 35 young male high school graduates.
For California, the implications couldn’t be more profound. In sheer numbers, the state leads the nation in its share of students from low-income, predominantly immigrant families, and claims the largest percentage of English learners. It also consistently lags far behind comparable states in K-12 per-student spending—it was ranked 44th as recently as 2012-13, though that is expected to change, thanks to a boost in base funding from Proposition 30. The state is ranked 48th when it comes to adults with high school diplomas, beating out only Mississippi and Texas.
It is facts like these that recently led the Social Science Research Council to place California at the top of its educational inequality index in December’s Portrait of California: 2014-15 report. Using its own 10-point scale based on such factors as preschool enrollment and high school graduation rates, the report measured a dizzying eight-and-a-half point spread between Santa Clara County’s gilded Silicon Valley and the educational sub-basement of Los Angeles neighborhoods like Huntington Park City, Florence-Graham, and Walnut Park.
How that plays out on the ground is the day-to-day reality of the frontline What If Education Reform Got It All Wrong in the First Place? - Pacific Standard:
