Barney Frank recently compared the GOP presidential candidates to “Wizard of Oz” characters. It got me thinking about how the education establishment might accommodate the analogy.
The Lion had no courage. That would have to be people elected to school boards or hired as principals who hope to make real reforms but then get steamrolled by establishment interests into business as usual.
The Tin Man had no heart. That would have to be politicians who sell out the interests of kids trapped in chronically failing schools in return for campaign contributions and union votes.
And the Scarecrow? That could be the straw-man arguments often made in an attempt to undermine reforms. One of the most common goes like this: Education Reformers deny that cultural factors are at play — that bad parenting, poor nutrition, and other cultural problems aren’t important as long as we can repeal tenure and change other protect-the-establishment policies. Which single cause is behind academic underperformance, they rhetorically ask us — broken schools or broken families?
The implication is that if we acknowledge the obvious societal problems in 21st-century America, then whoops — we’ve just let the schools off the hook.
On the contrary. Problems at home don’t make education quality less relevant, they make education quality more relevant. And we can’t be afraid to take a clear, sober look at issues of culture if we hope to craft public policies that move us forward.
Case in point: For years education reformers have been measuring and writing about something called the “Achievement Gap,” the differences in test performance by race. New data shows another kind of achievement gap — differences by culture, within a race.
As reported at ChoiceMedia.TV, Seattle Public Schools have determined that the district’s black students whose first language is English do much worse academically than black students who immigrated to Seattle from other countries and now attend the same schools.
Specifically, only about a third of African-American kids in Seattle, 36%, score proficient in state math tests. By contrast, the district’s black kids who immigrated from Ethiopia, and speak both English and Amharic (Ethiopia’s official language), have proficiency rates nearly double that: 62%. Black kids who speak both English and Somali test better too, with 47% proficient. (And the sample size of these two immigrant student populations isn’t tiny either — nearly 600 kids.)
It’s shocking. It’s important. And people should be talking about it. Could these largely poor, African immigrant kids have somehow been lucky enough to move to the Seattle neighborhoods with the relatively better schools? Unlikely. The test disparities seem to underscore serious cultural problems in Seattle’s African-American neighborhoods that have no connection to either school quality or skin color.
But if you’re the kind of person who reads this and decides evidence of cultural problems should let failing schools off the hook, or that reforming the education establishment is just too scary, then you’ve made a serious misinterpretation. Anyone who comes to that conclusion is either heartless, brainless, or has no courage.
Bob Bowdon is the director of The Cartel, an award-winning documentary film about corruption in public education. He also appears regularly on the Onion News Network.