Education writer Karin Chenoweth has taken the last two years visiting schools that beat the odds in educating economically disadvantaged (i.e. poor), minority students to high levels of academic performance. Based upon this experience she recently authored, It?s Being Done highlighting these schools. Proving again ? Demographics do NOT confirm destiny! She wrote a brief overview in Education Week. You have to appreciate these words:
The theoretical challenges these schools have overcome include the ideas that poverty and discrimination are insuperable barriers to academic achievement; that today?s kids are so damaged by television, video games, and hip-hop music that they are impervious to books and scholarship; that good, qualified teachers simply won?t work in difficult circumstances; that the existing teachers and principals are incapable of improvement.
Theoretical arguments pile up, seemingly insurmountable, to explain why schools can?t expect high achievement from their children of poverty and children of color.
Except that the ?It?s Being Done? schools prove them wrong. When you overcome drag and gravity with enough thrust and lift, you get flight; when you overcome poverty and discrimination with enough thoughtful instruction, careful organization, and what can only be recognized as the kind of pigheaded optimism displayed by the Wright brothers, you get learning.
She just did not go far enough. She never described the ?drag? and ?gravity? in traditional government schools as teacher unions, job security(tenure), schools of education, low expectations, politics, bureaucratic mandates/regulations, etc. etc. The traditional government system needs to be ?fixed,? but not on the backs of families stuck in poor performing schools. Attaching money to students and not a system will quickly encourage the system to change, and provide options for families.
