Try this thought experience. Picture an urban school in California (let's call it ?Malcolm X?) with one of the largest achievement gaps in the state?a whopping 44 percentage point difference between whites and blacks. Now picture another school in the Bay Area (let's call it the ?Arts and Academics Magnet?), a nicely integrated school where black students outscore the statewide black average by an impressive 14 points. It's fair to call the first school a failure, and the second school a success, right?
Well, guess what? (I bet you saw this coming.) It's the same school: the Malcolm X Arts and Academy Magnet Elementary in Berkeley, California, where 98 percent of the white students are ?proficient? in math compared to 54 percent of black students. Janie and I wrote about this school in yesterday's Education Gadfly.? It's an article that questions the Administration's proposal to label schools like Malcolm X?those with large achievement gaps?as ?challenge schools,? and to force federal interventions upon them. As we say in the editorial, this good-idea-gone-awry has the potential to punish schools for teaching white students too well, rather than for doing wrong by black and Hispanic kids.
Working on this piece got me thinking about a more fundamental issue?one I'm sure others have pondered before. Namely this: No Child Left Behind gained most of its civil rights credentials from its efforts to close the racial achievement gap. Yet the traditional civil rights approach to education is focused on creating racially and socio-economically integrated schools. And those schools are the ones most likely to have large achievement gaps.
Let me explain. Researchers have generally found that poor black kids do best when they attend school with affluent whites, and many integration programs have tried to make this possible. But poor black kids tend to be among the lowest-achieving students in the system, and affluent whites among the highest. When you combine a large racial achievement gap and a large socio-economic achievement gap in one school, you get a super-duper-sized gap.
So let's not go out of our way to shame schools like Malcolm X that are doing a pretty good job relative to other schools in the state?and demonstrating what an integrated society could look like, to boot.
-Mike Petrilli
