I'll join the trend of posting my favorite paragraph from Deborah Meier's post this week:
I regularly meet “well-educated” people who claim that, were it not for NCLB, they wouldn’t have known that a test score gap existed. The claim, at best, is a brutal reminder of the existence of “two Americas.” Where have they been for the past 100 years?
2 comments:
It's hard to imagine how they became well-educated without ever setting foot in a classroom. Unless my experience as a student is highly irregular, there were always kids who didn't "get it" alongside others who knew "it all." I went to both private and public schools; it was the same in both.
Many of those well-educated people are willing to believe anything they hear about public schools these days, as long as it's bad.
If it's a brutal reminder of the two Americas at best, what does this comment represent at its worst? Saying "I was not aware of any gaps" reveals a certain kind of narcissism, a deficit in the human urge to build community, a lack of awareness. Where does that come from?
Talking about high-needs schools where students of poverty are not achieving will draw blank stares around here, too--until you mention Detroit. Ah. Then the general public can understand and define "the gap." A gap even more insidious than that between have and have-not.
I agree with Doug--the public filter for "truth" in discussing public schools is broken.
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