I was just starting to write a post reiterating the problems with Arne Duncan's "civil rights" announcement yesterday when the phone rang. And it was Russlynn Ali, the Department of Education's Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, calling to soothe my concerns about using civil rights laws to coerce districts to put more minority kids in challenging courses. I like Russlynn a lot, but what she told me made me feel even worse. Here's how our conversation went, more or less. (I'll use bold when I'm getting her words exact.) [quote]
Me: So I don't mind the civil rights rhetoric, but I'm worried about the unintended consequences. School districts are going to see this announcement and freak out, take shortcuts, and just push minority kids into Advanced Placement whether they are ready for them or not. That won't be good for the minority kids, and it won't be good for the other kids.Russlynn: I agree, this can't just be about filling out forms. It has to be about culture change. No one's ever tried to put robust remedies in place. We have to monitor the districts, enforce the agreement, use all the tools at the disposal of the Office of Civil Rights. We have to get in there and look at feeder patterns, early interventions...
Me: Well, I wish you good luck, but I'm skeptical. But even if you do all of that in a handful of places, what about the 15,000 other districts? How do you keep them from doing it the wrong way?
Russlynn: That's why we're going to put out detailed guidance and provide technical assistance about students' rights and districts' responsibilities...
Holy Toledo! The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights is going to use "all the tools" at its disposal to fix one of education's most intractable problems: the achievement gap. Because that's what's driving the "disparity" in AP course-taking between white and Asian students on the one hand, and black and Latino students on the other. (Sure, there still might be some schools that are steering minorities away from challenging courses in a discriminatory manner, but I suspect that's a very small part of what's happening now.) Take the District of Columbia. Even though there are ten times as many African-American students as white students in DC public schools, more white students (80) passed an AP test last year than black students (60). (Here's the data.) Does that make Michelle Rhee and her team racist?
Of course not. Rhee and company are working hard on boosting these numbers for poor and minority kids, but it's going to be a decade-long struggle, as it starts by getting kids better prepared in pre-K, hitting all the right notes in elementary school, making sure they get access to tough courses and great teachers in middle schools, and on and on. If Ali and Arne think they are going to discover the right "remedy" to make all of this happen in a recalcitrant district--and get implemented well--they are either high on power or high on something else.
Or maybe they just haven't read Shep Melnick's sobering chapter in the recent Fordham-Brookings volume, From Schoolhouse to Courthouse. In it, the Boston College scholar offers a careful history of federal remedies in education, and shows that (in my words) you can force states and districts to do things they don't want to do, but you can't force them to do those things well. These efforts almost never have a happy ending.
It's hard to fault Ali's zeal; her whole career has been dedicated to giving poor and minority kids a shot at a better education. .But zealotry alone isn't going to fix our schools, and could make them even worse.
-Mike Petrilli
