At a recent suburban Rotary club meeting, our town’s local school superintendent gave a brief report about the new PARCC tests, which stands for Partnership for Assessment for Readiness for College and Careers.
To paraphrase, it sounded like the new tests for grade school-age children was going to be a long and grueling slog of weeklong tests and assessments. The superintendent also explained that one of the tasks for educators would be to prepare students who have always earned top grades that they might not do so well this time around.
This is coming from a great suburban district with a reputation for quality education.
As I listened to the report, I kept asking myself, “What are we trying to accomplish?”
After a generation of legislation aimed at improving education, with increased tests and higher standards with the goal of leaving no child behind, what do we have to show for it? Not much I’m afraid.
And then I realized, we are not even addressing the main issue facing our schools.
Here it is, 60 years after Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court case that outlawed segregation in public schools, and here in the Chicago area we still have legally segregated schools.
Most high performing schools are in mostly white and mostly wealthy suburbs, or are highly selective magnet schools in the city. Underperforming schools are mostly in poor, minority city neighborhoods or suburbs.
Why don’t we focus our gigantic federal effort on fixing education on schools that are in crisis, schools that have vast majority of poor students who are not meeting the standards for that grade level?
The reason is because the federal government is like the bad manager who runs your department at work. You know the type.
The bad manager wants to treat all employees equal. The bad manager does’t want the appearance of favoring one employee over another. So if one employee is habitually late, all employees get the same memo about tardiness. If a few workers are underperforming, everyone gets the scolding lecture at the department meeting.
And that’s the state education bureaucracy in a nutshell.
Rather than focus on the serious issues facing underperforming schools and the students who are consigned to having a 50-50 chance of graduating from the time they start kindergarten, the education bureaucracy proposes and dispenses laws and rules and regulations for everyone.
Some schools are doing just great. They don’t need extra money of bureaucratic hoops to jump through. We should just leave them alone.
But a lot of schools, especially those in poor, mostly minority neighborhoods, with large minority or poor populations, need help.
We need to focus our efforts on those schools. We need a Marshall Plan for Education, for schools that have been devastated by half a century of legal segregation and bad housing policy.