Certainly this means losing key tools in expanding choice, especially against traditional districts and others opposed to
allowing poor and minority children to attain high - quality options.
Not exact matches
This need for cultures that reaffirm the self - worth of
poor and minority children (
and ultimately,
allow for them
and their communities gain the knowledge needed to determine their own destinies) is why historically black colleges
and universities, along with other
minority - serving higher ed institutions, still exist.
Your editor could have spent this morning focusing on news from yesterday's news from Bellwether Education Partners that the state plans proposed as part of implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act show that districts are going to be
allowed to perpetuate harm to
poor and minority children.
What Kline essentially proposes to do is
allow states
and districts to spend federal education subsidies as they see fit without being accountable for providing all
children — including those from
poor and minority backgrounds — with high - quality teaching
and comprehensive college - preparatory curricula.
As Dropout Nation has pointed out ad nauseam since the administration unveiled the No
Child waiver gambit two years ago, the plan to let states to focus on just the worst five percent of schools (along with another 10 percent or more of schools with wide achievement gaps) effectively
allowed districts not under watch (including suburban districts whose failures in serving
poor and minority kids was exposed by No
Child) off the hook for serving up mediocre instruction
and curricula.
No one should be surprised that the U.S. Department of Education's new guidance for 41 states to renew the waivers granted to them under the Obama Administration's effort to eviscerate the No
Child Left Behind Act
and its accountability provisions effectively
allows states to get away with continuing their shortchanging of
poor and minority children.
That it means pushing for a rollback of federal education policy that have helped black
and brown
children as well as a return to the bad old days when states
and districts were
allowed to ignore their obligations to
poor and minority children doesn't factor into any of their thinking.
As Dropout Nation has noted ad nauseam, few of the accountability systems
allowed to replace No
Child's Adequate Yearly Progress provision are worthy of the name; far too many of them, including the A-to-F grading systems put into place by such states as New Mexico (as well as subterfuges that group all
poor and minority students into one super-subgroup) do little to provide data families, policymakers, teachers,
and school leaders need to help all students get high - quality education.
The consequences — from
allowing states to render
poor and minority kids invisible altogether through such subterfuges as lumping all of subgroups into a so - called super subgroup category, to ignoring the failures of suburban districts to improve education for all
children, to intolerable incoherence in federal education policy — were clear from the beginning.
This would also require them to admit that their «social compact» is little more than a step back to the bad old days before No
Child's passage, when states, districts, teachers,
and school leaders were
allowed to ignore the needs of
poor and minority children with impunity.