Re: Please purge "Achievement Gap"

[Csubstance@aol.com]

12/10/07

With all due respect to Monty's lengthy list, the whole thing has long boiled 
down to teacher bashing, the bashing of poor kids, and union busting. The 
rest is rhetoric. Even the most cyncial suburban public educators know it, and 
many are doing quite well ignoring our common public ground here. Divide and 
conquer and all that.

"Achievement Gap" is an obscenity. I won't elaborate again, since I've 
already done so.

Last weekend (during that ice storm) Sharon and I attended a birthday party 
that was held at, of all places, Argonne National Laboratories. I thought of 
Jerry and Sandia the whole time.

But most important to me, in retrospect, was the conversation we had. One of 
those at our table was a suburban principal. She told us, among many other 
things, that when the guy from ISBE (Illinois State Board of Education) came to 
do a minor audit of her programs, he played a "game" with her. He asked her for 
a few variables on poverty, race, and mobility and told her he could guess 
her school's scores on the ISAT (Illinois state test). 

She said he was within one percent of the scores before he saw the numbers.

She said he said he plays the game all over the suburbs, and it works every 
time. 

Prattle aside (and I'm simply deleting Art again; it's the holidays and I 
have better things to do), that correlation is very close, and the past 20 years, 
especially in Chicago, have been about scapegoating. I first graphed what is 
now know as the "achievement" gap in Chicago more than 30 years ago, on the 
recommendation of Annie Stein (New York City). Sure enough, Chicago's "reading 
scores" (back then, on the ITBS) produced a bimodal curve, just as Annie said 
it would.

For years back then we read those data as showing that the nation had created 
two school systems, separate and unequal. The job of society was to end the 
deprivation (at all levels, from home to school) that left the segregated black 
system --- i.e., the children in it -- the way it was. That was the project 
for justice, from Brown through Chicago's Harold Washington administration.

Little did we know that some people who claimed "civil rights" roots were 
contriving to make themselves wealthy (or at least very well funded) by taking 
those same data and using them to blame the victims. But that's what began with 
"A Nation at Risk", continued through Chicago's versions (quoting Bill 
Bennett) via the Chicago Tribune -- "Chicago's Schools are 'America's Worst" -- and 
continued through the Clinton and Bush years as mayoral control.

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance

www.substancenews.net
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