Black Students in Poor Schools: It’s Still NCLB!
In The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, Jonathan Kozol refers to a comment by President George W. Bush about Bush’s goals for education. President Bush said, I went to Washington to challenge the soft bigotry of low expectations. Later, in 2004, he said, It’s working. It’s making a difference.
Kozol writes: It is one of those deadly lies which, by sheer repetition, is at length accepted by large numbers of Americans as, perhaps, a rough approximation of the truth. But it is not the truth, and it is not an innocent misstatement of the facts. It is a devious appeasement of the heartache of the parents of the black and brown and poor and, if it is not forcefully resisted and denounced, it is going to lead our nation even further in a perilous direction (p.284).
That lie is kept alive by those who promote charter schools, choice, and online learning, and who scapegoat teachers over reading and what and how they teach. They are throwback shills for No Child Left Behind (NCLB), failed policy whose underlying CONTINUE READING: Black Students in Poor Schools: It’s Still NCLB!
