Education Department's Racial Inequality Guidance Indicts School Systems on an Enormous Problem -- But It's Just a Start

Education Department's Racial Inequality Guidance Indicts School Systems on an Enormous Problem -- But It's Just a Start
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This photo taken July 21, 2014 shows students in Jane Cornell's summer school class learn story telling skills at Mary D. Lang Kindergarten Center in Kennett Square, Pa. For the first time ever, U.S. public schools are projected this fall to have more minority students enrolled than white, a shift largely fueled by growth in the numbers of Hispanic children. White students are still expected to be the largest racial group in the public schools this year at 49.8 percent, but according to the National Center for Education Statistics, minority students, when added together, will now make up the majority. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

RCEd Commentary

Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights released first-of-its kind data on racial disparities in K-12 education. Students of color, even in the earliest years, were disproportionately suspended from school: black students made up 16 percent of the student population, but 42 percent of suspensions in 2011-12. Minorities were also far less likely to have access to basic college preparatory coursework: a quarter of high schools with large numbers of minority students didn’t even offer Algebra II, let alone rigorous Advanced Placement or dual enrollment options. These disparities continued into the teaching force: black students were four times as likely to attend schools where at least one out of every five teachers was not fully certified by their state.

Now, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has put local education leaders on notice that it intends to amp up federal investigations of school districts where these resources -- learning opportunities and academic coursework, highly qualified and experienced educators, modern facilities, and instructional technologies -- are distributed inequitably and have an adverse, disparate impact on students of color. Building on reforms emphasized in Race to the Top and waivers from No Child Left Behind, the Department’s promised monitoring would bring new focus on access to educational resources these students need to be college- and career-ready, including AP and STEM courses and support staff like school counselors, and will also look favorably on districts that are developing new teacher and principal evaluation systems based on student learning outcomes in order to improve educator quality.

The “Dear Colleague” letter is long and fairly technical, and while some may see it as mere lip service to civil rights groups that haven’t been particularly impressed with the administration’s commitment to accountability for disadvantaged students, it should be taken more seriously than that. Not because these disparities will disappear overnight. Of course they won’t. Educational inequity is a centuries-old problem, unresolved despite a string of legal victories. But rather, because it represents an overdue acknowledgement of the importance of resource accountability alongside test-based accountability.

For the past decade under NCLB, educational accountability has been outcomes-oriented, and rightly so. Students’ learning and their progression toward college and career readiness should form the basis for policymakers’ judgments of school quality. But that’s just how we identify schools as low-performing, high-performing, or somewhere in-between.

When it comes to improving schools, inputs -- teacher and school leader effectiveness, instructional resources, and infrastructure and technology -- matter. They provide context, helping to answer why schools see the results they do and revealing ways to help them do better. And if low-performing schools, especially those serving disadvantaged students, continually get the short end of the stick when it comes to these essential resources, ensuring that they do get a fair share moving forward must be part of the “interventions” our accountability system applies to them.

By adding this kind of resource accountability to our existing accountability structures, school interventions or sanctions aren’t simply a “punishment” or indictment of the school -- they’re also an indictment of the system in which these schools operate. No Child Left Behind went to great lengths to describe how school performance should be evaluated and what should happen when they failed to meet annual goals. But it did relatively little to hold the states and districts in which those schools operate accountable for how they support their public schools beyond the allocation of federal dollars (and it isn’t particularly strong in ensuring equity there, either). The federal government doles out billions each year in Title I funding to states, but rarely, if ever, withholds those funds from states for non-compliance, let alone poor performance. Maybe it’s time for states and districts to get some skin in the accountability game, too.

I’m not suggesting under-resourced, high-minority schools get a free pass on accountability. It’s imperative that we recognize when schools are not providing instruction and experiences that ensure their students are ready to succeed in college and the workforce. Rather, these schools, when they are labeled low-performing, should get more than an improvement plan from their district. They should also get critical resources -- or at least a commitment to develop them -- from their district and state to support their improvement. And districts and states should be required to demonstrate to the Department that they are distributing these resources in a way that prioritizes the schools that need them most and does not reinforce the disadvantages these schools already face by nature of the students they serve.

It’s been 60 years since the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, and most American schools (for the first time) are majority-minority. But that doesn’t mean our schools are more diverse, or that educational inequity has been eradicated. While student achievement overall is rising nationally, achievement gaps have been stagnant. High school graduation rates are at an all-time high, but minority students lag far behind their white peers. And though the college enrollment gap has narrowed, gaps in college completion still loom large. These results -- four decades after desegregation -- are humbling for anyone working to improve outcomes for low-income and minority students. A letter, an announcement of intent to tackle this challenge (in some districts... at some point in the future…) is trivial compared to the enormity of the problem, and the number of policies, institutions, people, and cultural attitudes that are entangled within it. But it is, perhaps, a start.

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