Closing the Achievement Gap: An Obama Signature Program?

I posted earlier that President Obama needs to create a sense of agency and engagement among the American people as we face depressing economic and social times. A signature program to close our achievement gaps would be a good way to do that. I say gaps because there is more than one, though they are all related.

There is the academic gap between Asian and white youth on the one hand, and black and Latino youth on the other.

There is also an academic gap between all American youth and their counterparts in 24 other industrialized countries. This gap is in large measure a function of the racial and economic inequity of our public education system, an inequity that is much greater than in any of our competitor countries. The Wall Street Journal reports this inequity has "created the equivalent of a permanent, deep recession in terms of the gap between actual and potential output in the economy."

There is also a gap in civic and community engagement affecting many of our youth, regardless of background. This gap could be lessened if our youth, regardless of background, became engaged in bettering themselves and others in educational terms. The International Association for Research on Service-learning and Community Engagement (IARSCLE) is one of the organizations working to bridge this particular gap.

Finally, there is a significant gap between our concern for those who are close to us and those who are not, and that doesn't just affect the youth. (Some trace this back to the influence of Ayn Rand on conservative political and economic figures such as Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan. More recently, Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan has declared himself a follower of her teachings, apparently ignoring her atheism and focusing instead on her philosophy of enlightened selfishness.)

All these gaps can be engaged by tackling the first one.

The achievement gap is in many ways the unfinished business of the Civil Rights Movement. Some of this idea informs the new movie Won't Back Down. Indeed, Daniel Barnz, who co-wrote and directed the movie, in his recent blog states:

The character played by Maggie Gyllenhaal is poor and lives in a neighborhood with a failing public school. She can't afford to move or send her daughter somewhere else, which means like many Americans, her daughter is doomed, educationally-speaking. That's fundamentally unfair -- as in civil rights unfair.

It is ironic that the achievement gap still exists, and has indeed worsened, since Brown v. Board of Education was decided. The opening salvo of the Civil Rights era, the case opened doors that were the pathways to great strides in housing, employment, and voting rights. These struggles, however, were carried forward by grassroots activism. In contrast, the issue of education was left to lawyers and academic professionals.

"Professional" solutions have not solved the problem because they have been only institutional -- test-focused legislation, vouchers, charter schools -- and have not engaged the community. "It takes a whole village to raise a child," says the African proverb. That doesn't mean just the village government, or village businesses, or even just the village teachers. It means everyone.

One way to engage the entire village would be to focus on elementary schools. Elementary schools are naturally located at the center of communities. They are close to the homes of the children who attend them.

A mentoring program, teaching soft skills to elementary school kids could bring people into the schools that actually see each other at bus stops and in local stores, so they have the potential for strong ties instead of weak ones. (Soft skills include planning, problem-solving, management of effort and collaboration, reflection, system-navigation and ethics. They supplement and complement the "three Rs" and STEM the kids are taught in formal school settings.)

From the elementary schools, you branch out. Reach up to the middle schools, then the high schools, the community colleges, mentoring all the way. Then the mentored children begin mentoring those younger than they. (Or start at college, work down and branch out) I recently discussed these and other concepts during a keynote speech for the IARSCLE conference in Baltimore, Md. My theme was the "Invisible College," a learning environment based in the community, which complements, and creates synergies with the "Visible College" of formal schooling.

Brown v. Board sputtered as an increasingly conservative U.S. Supreme Court, courtesy of decades of Republican presidential appointments, turned away equal protection claims that protected minorities from discrimination. Early casualties included lower court cases finding equal protection violations where school districts skewed the distribution of resources to affluent neighborhoods and away from poor and minority communities. That lies at the core of the achievement gap.

In contrast, the much greater advances in housing, employment, and voting rights did not rely so much on the courts. Grass-roots mobilization fueled passage of the Fair Housing Act, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, and the Voting Rights Act. There has been no Fair Education Act, no Equal Education Opportunity Act, no Education Rights Act.

But with a massive, well-organized social movement to close the achievement gap, there could be.

There should be civil rights workers in communities registering people for the parent-teacher associations at their local school the way their counterparts registered people to vote in the rural South in the 1960s.

Local Citizen's Assemblies could engage mentors to assist in school and after school. They could mobilize communities to demand that government, federal state and local, respond to structural inequities hampering our entire educational effort. They could hold school boards, school superintendents, principals, teachers, and teacher's unions accountable.

The Assemblies could also lobby local and national businesses to step up to the plate with internships, "soft skill" mentors, and STEM tutoring.

The Obama Administration could provide a national focus for all these efforts with a signature program to close the achievement gap, not displacing the contributions of community and business but facilitating and focusing them.

Why not?

 

Comments

[Idongesit Umo]

10:30 AM on 10/02/2012

Very good article Professor, a mentoring program that starts at the lowest levels and branches out would be the most effective way to close the gap. All that is needed is willing volunteers and more importantly willing parents and school administrators.

[Charles Tyler]

04:42 PM on 10/01/2012

I agree that communities need to be engaged with their community schools, however, what is occurring under obama and his "reformers" is faux community ownership. Such things as parent trigger imply that the parents have control, but in reality control is removed from the parents and community and placed often times in private hands, resulting in less communal control of the system. For example, these new schools often act outside of schools board elected by the populace and run by school boards created by private firms. Power is then limited. The concepts of choice and vouchers further breaks down communities, as children are shipped throughout neighborhoods, parents and communities begin to act for their own good instead of the good of the communities. Often times the community school is destroyed, which prior to the closing of the schools was a public space for debate and pride. Further, it is ironic that the voucher movement was first promoted in the 60's as a method of reversing brown vs. board, as it would create separate but "equal" schools, and allow for a resegregation in acceptable terms. However, nowadays vouchers/choice are seen as a manner of completing the civil rights movement. people fail to realize that where choice has been implemented segregation has increased. We need to promote public and community schools, and yes we must get all community members involved, however this means investing in our traditional public schools and working for more equality and less poverty in our communities/economy.

[Harold A. McDougall]

08:27 AM on 10/02/2012

I agree with much of what you say. I quoted from Dan Barnz' blog on Won't Back Down because I agree that the problem of inequity and inequality in our public school system has reached "civil rights unfairness" proportions. As far as critique of the trigger system and the movie itself, there's plenty of that in the comments after his blog and in blogs by Julie Cavanaugh and others.

I think I made it clear in my blog that community engagement is a key ingredient for turning this situation around, just as community engagement was central to those areas in which the Civil Rights Movement succeeded. As long as 89% of American children go to public school, solutions that take the children of the most motivated parents out of the system may work for those kids, but won’t solve the problem.

But the whole village means the whole village—all levels of government, business, teachers, school administrators, parents, students, college and university-based “service learning” projects and anyone who cares where our failing educational system is taking the entire country. That means less finger-pointing, more action, and more people showing that they care by working together.

As far as the President is concerned, I’m trying to send a message that the community engagement he praised and participated in as a community organizer back in the day is something he needs to facilitate now on a national level.

[Charles Tyler]

11:10 AM on 10/02/2012

I dont disagree with anything you wrote. I am just worried that certain reforms that are said to give power to the communities are actually limiting power of these communities. That they are breaking institutions and networks that are needed to make community involvement possible. But again I agree with your overall argument that community engagement is essential.

[changing]

01:45 PM on 10/01/2012

Won't Back Down is garbage. The Obama adminstration is interesting in privatizing public education just as Bush was. As Christie said, Obama and Duncan are his best allies in this. Don't count on one thing but more trouble in education from O.