My first book is called “Fighting the White Knight: Saving Education from Misguided Testing, Inappropriate Standards and Other Good Intentions.” I probably should have said “Allegedly Good Intentions.” Or even “Covert Attempts to Save Money by Trying to Coerce Desperate Teachers into Closing the Achievement Gap Without Extra Funding.*
I believe “Fighting the White Knight” helps explain the recent widening of the achievement gap. We created calamitous educational policies, later followed by even more atrocious plans and reactions, and yet somehow this post-pandemic growing gap in test scores nonetheless surprised us. COVID has been given the blame, but those assertions of blame are naive or even disingenuous.
Please believe me: The sad state of the gap cannot be laid at COVID’s door, even if COVID aggravated an already precarious situation. Simply, in poor US school districts, local funding had not provided enough. Not enough funding. Not enough academic choice. Not enough up-to-date resources. Not enough tutoring. In particular, not enough laptops, iPads and other technology. We had ignored the wisdom of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Across time and across the country, educational “reformers” had been trying to find solutions to the achievement gap that did not involve changing the US school funding system, hoping to find a magic fix for differences between zip codes, while deflecting attention away from the effects of local property-tax-based school funding. When the pandemic arrived, where were the computers and software required for remote learning? We know that answer now. We watched as districts scrambled to lay their hands on back-ordered Chromebooks and other tech, devices many of their students did not yet know how to use.
As I have observed before, property-tax-based funding favors Congresspeople, mid-level bureaucrats, and other decision makers. Middle-class (or better) employment allows parents to choose between more expensive, prosperous neighborhoods where education funding flows freely into schools that have all the support staff, technological devices and special services most parents could desire. Meanwhile, in less fortunate neighborhoods, laptops, iPads, desktops, software, books, aides, and tutoring tend to be much thinner on the ground. In the US educational system today, you still get what you can pay for. That can be a single language option on the curriculum instead of six different languages, and almost nothing for afterschool activities except sports, while luckier kids down the road get to pick between more than twenty after-school clubs, on top of the usual sports.
Eduhonesty: FUNDING needs to be front and center in our sights as we work to bring equity, fairness and improved performance to the US educational system. Frankin D. Roosevelt predicted the loss of learning in our poorer zip codes, even as so-called “reformers” pushed relentlessly for higher English and math test scores in schools without laptops or stable internet connections.
- * O.K., I admit that “covert attempt superteacher” bit is definitely too long to tag onto my subtitle!
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