It’s about time. The media’s fixation on the most trivial, from the religion of our president to the witchcraft purported by a congressional candidate, has been substituted this past week for something more substantive – education reform. With the release of the documentary “Waiting for Superman,” reformers like Michelle Rhee and Geoffrey Canada have been in the perpetual spotlight and have caused celebrities like Oprah and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to give millions to disadvantaged schools. It is uplifting to see the media rallying around this story, engaging in its discourse and shedding light on its direness. But when the next vogue story captures the headlines of the major news outlets, what will happen to our children who are waiting in the balance?
Our education system is broken; let’s get that out of the way. Sure, we have made significant progress from a hundred years ago, a time when only eight and a half per cent of American seventeen-year-olds had a high-school degree. But today we face an alarming problem in two arenas that is sure to affect our country in the coming years. First, what once used to be the country that produced the most college graduates in the world, has become an America that ranks 25th in the world in Math and 21st in Science. Second, and perhaps more troubling, is the widening opportunity gap between White students and their Black and Latino peers. This gap can be defined as the difference in access to opportunity ranging from quality schools, to college access, to extracurricular activities, to educated parents, and inevitably leads to the much talked about achievement gap that plagues our nation today. In May, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that graduation rates in poverty-stricken schools fell from 86% to 68% between 2000 and 2008. The impact of this achievement gap is yet to be felt in its entirety.
What does this mean for Seattle? Here are the numbers: The average ACT score among low-income students in this city is an 18, a measly 34th percentile ranking. 33% of 12th grade students do not graduate. Although scores of both white and black students have improved in recent decades, the achievement gap between them, specifically in reading, math and science, isn’t closing.
So what is our solution? Washington State has fallen behind 40 other states on the issue of reform. For years, the teacher’s union has resisted calls for action to improve our schools. Our state is one of ten that still do not allow charter schools despite their proven success in other states. We still use a quality-blind layoff system, one that fires the least experienced rather than the poorest-performing teacher. We still pump thousands of tax-payer dollars into the professional development system that teachers despise and would admit does little to improve best practices.
But change is on the way, even in Seattle. Thanks to incentives created by Obama’s Race To The Top grant, our state passed two major reforms without receiving a penny from the government: A new law allowing alternative teaching certification programs like Teach for America, and a new method of evaluating teachers that takes some –though not yet enough –student achievement data into consideration when rating teachers. These reforms are a step in the right direction, and require a push by our city’s citizenry to continue.
I’m thankful, as a former educator, that a spotlight has finally been put on the heartbreaking state of this nation’s education system. I just hope that when the media moves on, as they inevitably will, we still choose to care.
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