The Pandemic: For Many Students It May Mean the End of the American Dream
Federal education policy, driven by laws like the 2002, No Child Left Behind and its 2015 replacement, the Every Student Succeeds Act, makes assumptions about the power of schools as institutions. These laws presume that a school institution can mitigate the academic effects of economic inequality among families and communities. No Child Left Behind, for example, proclaimed that it would force schools to close achievement gaps and make all children proficient by 2014.
By forcing school closures across the nation, however, the coronavirus is showing us why No Child Left Behind failed to do what it promised. Today we can clearly see the depth and scope of inequality in America. If we pay attention, we can also see why our expectations for public schools have been entirely unreasonable. No Child Left Behind was designed in a way that punishes the schools serving the poorest students, schools where test scores are unlikely to rise quickly. The goal was to provide incentives for teachers to work harder to raise scores. But no public school by itself has never had the capacity entirely to alleviate the effects of extreme poverty.
No matter how attentive a school may be to the goal of ameliorating inequality, we are learning that institutions mask the disparities in students’ economic circumstances. This is, of course, desirable. Our society has tried to make it possible to bring children, adolescents or young adults together—to provide an equal school experience. Our society has grown so unequal, however, that no institution can erase the barrier posed by extreme poverty.
For the NY Times, Nicholas Casey traces the contrasting stories of seniors in a seminar on immigration and inequality at Haverford, a private, selective, and very expensive liberal arts college. Casey’s story is about higher education, but what he shows us is surely relevant to all educational institutions. When the college shut down in March due to the coronavirus, a tenured and experienced political science professor teaching a class that covered inequality was stunned by what she discovered: “‘It’s as though you had a front-row view on American inequality and the ways in which it was disguised and papered over,’ said Anita Isaacs, the CONTINUE READING: The Pandemic: For Many Students It May Mean the End of the American Dream | janresseger
