More than 50 years have passed since Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling ordering the desegregation of public schools, stating, “All provisions of federal, state or local law requiring or permitting discrimination in public education must yield.” Yet while the landmark Brown decision forever altered the landscape of American education, a raft of data indicates that in many schools, education is still far from equal.
Last week, the NC Education & Law Project of the NC Justice Center released a provocative report, The Achievement Gap Revisited. Incorporating copious data from state assessments, this publication shows that, while we have made some inroads into the racial achievement gap, there is much more to do. Some good news: over the past 5 years, our state’s achievement gap narrowed between third and eighth grade (although progress has been slow).
But the report presents alarming data about African-American high school students. While 72.4 percent of African-American students read at proficient levels in eighth grade (still too low), this percentage drops precipitously – to 46.2 percent – in tenth grade. This means that fewer than half of North Carolina’s African-American teenagers are reading at proficient levels. Also noteworthy is the fact that achievement in all ethnic groups declined between 2001-02 and 2003-04 as students moved from eighth to tenth grade.
A report by the advocacy group Education Trust, does little to alleviate concerns over the academic well-being of African-American high schoolers nationally. Using data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), this report finds that by the end of high school, African-American students have math and reading skills that are comparable to eighth grade white students. This data ought to shock us out of our complacency.
What can we do to ensure all students receive a quality education? If you ask the NC Education and Law Project, the answer is an uninspired one: more money, more paperwork, more committees. This group points the finger at school choice as a reform that would “drain resources from the state’s already struggling public schools.” This is fiction. The truth is that per pupil spending increases with the advent of school choice programs – programs in Florida, Milwaukee, and Cleveland all attest to this fact.
In the end, attaching money to the child and allowing parents to choose options is the quickest and best way to improve struggling public schools. One has only to look at research on choice programs around the country to see that competition makes public schools more effective for all students, but most importantly, for those at greatest risk.
After more than 50 years of bureaucratic attempts to level the playing field, many students are still woefully shortchanged by our allegiance to the education “system.” Isn’t it time we shifted course and made a choice for children?