- In the entire tortured lexicon of bureaucratese, no two words can inspire more dread in the hearts of academic administrators than “Dear Colleague” (well, maybe “NAEP scores,” but that’s a separate issue). President Obama’s Office of Civil Rights has issued a fusillade of “Dear Colleague” letters to educators at every level of schooling over the past few years, relying on the magic of governmental coercion to solve such diverse ills as campus rape, inequitably applied discipline, and the existence of languages besides English. In both the Wall Street Journal and Education Next, R. Shep Melnick has picked apart the legal rationale behind yet another pernicious edict, first disseminated late last year; this one pushes schools to shrink the nationwide racial achievement gap by providing their students with equal access to “resources” (read: funding, and everything else). The policy breezes past two Supreme Court rulings that explicitly reject its legal foundations, forcing schools to meticulously chronicle the “intensity” of their extracurricular activities and the condition of their carpeting if they wish to avoid a federal investigation. Educational disparities among ethnic groups are seriously concerning, but policymakers should consider whether the best way to counter them is really by dropping regulatory bombs from thirty thousand feet.
- Parents are accustomed to gulping down their kids’ standardized test results with a chaser of euphemism and wishful thinking. That’s how we allow ourselves to believe that most of our students are doing just fine, even if our best national indicators tell a drastically different story. But with this spring’s rollout of more rigorous, Common Core-aligned assessments, reality has been served up neat—and proficiency scores have predictably plummeted in a range of states across the country. Reformers shouldn’t get too smug, though: The San Jose Mercury News reports that many of California’s high-performing charters are facing their own test of truth, with math and English scores generally falling well below the marks they’d set on previous (easier) state tests. A few exceptions are worth mentioning—the Bay Area’s KIPP network outpaces most of its area cohorts—but it’s clear that district and charter schools alike are waking up to a proficiency hangover this fall. Of course, that’s the whole point of the new assessments. As one chastened charter leader put it, "I think that what is being asked of teachers, relative to what was being asked before, is a couple of steps up in difficulty. I think this is going to cause us to up our game."
- Everyone loves a success story, especially when that success is achieved against great odds. When minority and low-income strivers make their way from struggling school systems to selective colleges and universities, often taking advantage of great opportunities like Posse scholarships as they ascend, we tend to declare victory and go back to work. But for those newly minted college kids, postsecondary education can go one of two ways. A Harvard sociologist writes in the New York Times that over two-fifths of the minority population at elite colleges come from a group he deems the “privileged poor”—students who have already made stops at rarified private high schools, where they happily picked up the autonomy and social skills that many of their white counterparts take for granted. When classes start, this group knows how and when to ask professors for help, and the adjustment to the next phase of their education isn’t a fish-out-of-water experience. WAMU’s Breaking Ground documentary series presents the less-sunny version, which other outlets have made woefully familiar: A talented kid makes it to his dream school, faces a lack of institutional and family support, and buckles under the weight of enormous expectations. Those schools obviously need to do more to orient their underprivileged students within campus life. But reformers should also ask how we can help prepare star learners for both the academic and the social leaps of college.
