Friday, May 01, 2009

Where Have These People Been?

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:

Doug Noon said...

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.

Nancy Flanagan said...

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.