I'm not as sanguine as Andy about the Department of Education's forthcoming announcement on civil rights enforcement. I mean, sure, nobody can be against enforcing civil rights. But using civil rights laws to pursue a policy agenda is something else. As I wrote last summer, when word first leaked that the Administration was thinking about combating racial disparities in advanced courses via civil rights lawsuits,
...there are lots of reasons to support??efforts that prepare poor and minority students for rigorous courses???and plenty of reasons to complain when students spend their days filling out dittos. But I cringe at the thought of federal officials using??the threat of lawsuits to try to fix this problem, if that's what [Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali] has in mind.Consider Advanced Placement courses, for instance. Getting more poor and minority kids into them is easy. Preparing students to succeed in those courses is something else. If a school district is forced by an OCR lawsuit to expand access to AP for poor and minority kids, what are the chances that it will do all the complex work it takes (from grades kindergarten through 11) to make sure those??students are ready? And what will the impact be on the students who are ready for AP, and whose classes will now be flooded by students who haven't mastered the prerequisite material? (If you want to know what the nation's teachers think about issues like this, see our survey of AP teachers here.)
We learned from NCLB that the federal government can make states and districts do things they don't want to do, but it can't force them to do??those things well.
The Obama Administration seems to have limitless faith in its ability to make the world right from Washington. That's the sort of hubris that tends to lead to all manner of unintended consequences.
-Mike Petrilli
