"Student achievement is on the rise," said Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said last week in response to new data showing better math and reading scores for American schoolchildren.
"No Child Left Behind is working," she went on. "It's doable, reasonable and necessary. Any efforts to weaken accountability would fly in the face of rising achievement." Indeed, test scores are inching up. But there's still the matter of The Gap, the difference in test results between advantaged and disadvantaged students. Closing the test-score gap was the ostensible reason for NCLB in the first place.
Yet the gap persists. That the achievement gap has remained so intractable for so long begs the question that few educators and policy makers seem willing to confront: Are public schools, as currently structured and conceived, capable of really making a dent in the achievement gaps between poor students and affluent ones?
According to our collective mythology about schools as the great equalizing force in American society, we want -- or say we want -- public schools to make a difference. But the reality on the ground often makes a mockery of that ideal. In recent years, public schools have been infected by a system of hidden privileges offered to affluent and politically powerful upper-middle class families and their children -- a system that flatly contradicts politicians' lofty goals of reducing the achievement gaps.
Schools reward privilege in many subtle ways that go mostly unnoticed because the mechanisms are the very fabric of the modern American education system.
Consider, for example, tracking -- the practice of placing students into remedial, regular or advanced classes based upon test scores and teacher recommendations. Not long ago, tracking became a dirty word in progressive education circles. But I found researching my book, Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education, that tracking has gone underground. Visiting schools across the country, I discovered that tracking remains a prevalent feature of most American middle schools and high schools, and takes a variety of forms, including selection for Advanced Placement classes, gifted and talented programs, and other special enrichment programs that systematically sort students by class and race.
Indeed, these programs are be populated with students who were born lucky: to affluent and well educated parents who able to provide their children with the cultural, educational and social advantages that American schools value and reward.
What's more, children whom schools track into these exclusive programs learn more than other students because they are taught more. And they are taught in far more interesting and engaging ways than what schools ordinarily provide students in regular classes.
Take the gifted and talented program at San Diego public schools, which offers its fortunate students highly engaging "seminar" classes as an alternative to the rote and dumbed-down schooling provided to ordinary students. The Seminar program has maintained a class size of no more than 20 -- considerably smaller than the average class size for the rest of the district. The argument for this special treatment? One Seminar program parent told the San Diego Union-Tribune that the elite students required "more social and emotional support than others."
Or consider the Treasure Valley Math and Science Center in Boise, Idaho, which I visited on several occasions for my research. Launched with a $1 million grant from Micron, a locally based Fortune 500 company, Boise public schools created a special school to serve the area's best and brightest math and science students -- at least according to its founders' definition of best and brightest.
That by itself isn't so unusual. More unusual was the admission of school and company officials that Micron had given the district $1 million to create an educationally attractive alternative to regular public schools for the children of Micron's executives, scientists and engineers. Although admissions policies at a public school couldn't be openly slanted to achieve this objective, the school did adopt certain IQ- type aptitude tests that the sons and daughters of scientists, engineers and other affluent professionals often perform very well on.
The use of such tests to sort the supposedly smart and talented from the not-smart and not-so-talented is so common in the United States that few parents and educators question the legitimacy of this practice. Rather than identifying the most promising young talent, the Treasure Valley Math and Science school was in essence picking and choosing children based on where they stood in the Boise class system. Far from being the Great Equalizer, Boise schools were instead a handmaiden to elite interests.
Boise is the capitol of Idaho, the most Republican of states. But the pressure on schools to create bastions of privilege and schools within schools in the interests of elite parents crosses the usual left-right political boundaries. I also visited Berkeley High (where the principal of the school kicked me off campus...but that's another story).
At Berkeley High, a select few of the school's highly regarded teachers quietly began to offer classes that attracted mostly white students from the more affluent neighborhoods of Berkeley and the Oakland hills. Until the legitimacy of the so-called Academic Choice program was challenged by the larger Berkeley High community, the exclusive program remained on the QT: Students with the "right" demographic characteristics learned about the program through informal channels. While the program was nominally open to any student, outsiders who weren't affluent and white felt decidedly unwelcome.
With appropriate re-engineering and refocusing, American schools do have the capacity to diminish the achievement gaps that politicians like to talk about. Schools need to pay a lot more attention to supplementing the cultural and social capital that disadvantaged students -- for a variety of reasons -- do not get from home because they, unluckily, were born to parents who lack education, information, and resources.
There's also the matter of basic fairness. It's hard to argue against the need to improve math and science education for American students, and schools like the Treasure Valley Math and Science Center are doing a decent job of that. Indeed, the school is doing a wonderful job. Any parent would kill to have a child attend such a school, so cool are the learning opportunities it provides its students.
But why should wonderful learning opportunities and small classes be the exclusive rights of only the "best and brightest?" Why do we dumb down schools for ordinary children, force-feeding them facts and formulas to pass the next standardized test, while we create special and enriched learning environments for the children of privilege?
The short answer is politics and brute power. Let's be honest with ourselves. As currently structured, the American education system is organized to serve elite interests at the expense of children and families at the bottom.
Schools could make significant headway at closing the achievement gaps. But they won't. The cases of San Diego, Boise and Berkeley illustrate that elites view educational opportunity as a zero-sum game, and they will protect their interests. As the old saw goes, watch what schools actually do, not what they say.