It may simply have been serendipity, but it certainly felt predestined when I saw Senator Al Franken’s letter to the editor in the newspaper recently. Here, in just a few short paragraphs, was fodder for several pages of commentary related to the frustrating state of our current education landscape. Given space limitations, however, those ramblings will have to wait. the past three years. Over the same time, the percentages of students who fail to even partially meet the standards have grown to 21.8 percent in reading and 19.4 percent in math for 2015—around 90,000 children statewide. For African American students– students the new approach was designed to help–the numbers are more than twice as bad: over 44 percent of these students now do not meet math or reading standards– more than 21,000 children.
The strongest force in every system is the inertia generated by the status quo. Education is no different, and may be more powerful in this regard because of its universality and the high degree of integration into related systems. Yes, the issues are big. Yes, they are complex. Yes, they will take time to fix. And yes, yes, yes, it will be an expensive proposition.
But consider the damage to individuals and society caused by our failure to effect change:
Every year in the U.S., over 1.2 million students drop out of high school, over half of them from just 2,000 of the nation’s 26,000-plus public high schools. About one-third of all minority students attend one of these 2,000 high schools, compared to less than one-tenth of all white students. Finally, high school dropouts commit about 75 percent of all crimes in America, with over half of dropouts under age 24 unemployed and about 1 out of every 10 of them incarcerated on any given day.
Why aren’t there protests in the streets over this abuse we are inflicting on students, families, and communities; and why do we accept shallow political victories, fanciful window dressing, and ineffective tinkering from those who vow to address it?
To be clear, the senator’s letter per se is not the issue. It is that so much of what is wrong with the system of education is apparent in it. If you missed it, the letter celebrates the Senate’s recent passage of an overhaul to the provisions of the federal education bill known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) with a replacement titled the Every Child Achieves Act (ECAA). It then continues with the senator’s lament that he was unable to secure passage of additional legislation that would provide federal protection of LGBT students from bullying.
Referring, as directed, to the senator’s website, I found a list of provisions he had included in the new bill to “help fix [the] broken education system.” I also dug further to discover the major components of the ECAA itself. There are some good ideas represented in both places. There are also some not-so-good ideas. Good or bad, however, they are mostly small ideas designed to please one political interest or another in a bipartisan fashion.
Living with a system that is acknowledged to be “broken,” we continue to hear blame laid and lip service paid rather than serious, constructive debate about how to bring about the significant changes necessary to fix it.
The system was broken long before NCLB, in an environment that looked a whole lot like the one that will exist under ECAA. In many ways, No Child Left Behind and Every Child Achieves are like two sides of the same coin. Celebrating political victories and good intentions isn’t getting it done, regardless of party affiliation.
In Minnesota, we have been out from under NCLB since 2012, operating under a waiver in an environment similar to what ECAA envisions. And yet the percentages of students who are academically proficient as measured by the state’s standardized tests have remained virtually flat for
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