A sixth grader in Mountain Brook, Alabama, can be considered one of the luckiest in the country, enrolled in a district where he and his classmates read and do math three grade levels above the average American student. But a child of similar age in Birmingham, just five miles north on Route 280, would be in considerably worse shape; there, kids perform 1.8 grade levels below average. So how could a ten-minute drive transport students to a different educational galaxy? Well, look at some numbers compiled by a team of Stanford researchers: Mountain Brook is 98 percent white, with a median household income of $170,000. Birmingham is 96 percent black, with a median household income of $30,000. Sometimes the figures speak for themselves.
John Bel Edwards, the recently elected Democratic governor of Louisiana, has had an eventful few months. After being inaugurated in January, he’s wrangled with state lawmakers over their leadership selection process and hustled to patch a huge crater in the budget. But his education agenda, largely aimed at curbing the growth of the state’s charter sector and cutting funding for voucher students, has run aground over the last few weeks. After the state’s newly appointed Republican House Speaker stacked the body’s education committee with charter enthusiasts, the governor’s legislation died quickly. A traditional friend of teachers’ unions, Edwards hasn’t been able to move the ball for the groups that worked the hardest to elect him. As an education commentator affiliated with a local business group put it recently, "There is no compromise on school choice. That would never ever have been on the table."
As Fordham’s Victoria Sears wrote last month, the spring testing season has brought with it a plethora of technical mishaps in states across the country: internet connectivity failures in Alaska, mysteriously vanished student responses in Texas, and fouled-up testing platforms in Tennessee. Now we’ve gotten a closer look at specific complaints in the Lone Star State, where the local STAAR tests apparently included a question that had no correct answer. Meanwhile, in the overwhelming majority of states that have adopted next-generation assessments aligned to the Common Core State Standards, kids have been happily taking their tests without a hitch. (Well, they’ve been taking them, anyway.) What problems have arisen, such as a PARCC computer glitch in New Jersey, have mostly been addressed swiftly. And should we be surprised? Not only are the exams pretty darn good—they actually work.
