Can Schools Fix The Achievement Gap?

While educators continue to work on at social school issues, we the community leaders need to look at other social issues that affect children and their ability to learn. But there's still the matter of The Gap, the difference in test results between advantaged and disadvantaged students. Are public schools, as currently structured and conceived, capable of really making a dent in the achievement gaps between poor students and affluent ones?

In recent years, public schools have been infected by a system of hidden privileges offered to affluent and politically powerful upper-middle class families and their children -- a system that flatly contradicts politicians' lofty goals of reducing the achievement gaps.

Consider, for example, tracking -- the practice of placing students into remedial, regular or advanced classes based upon test scores and teacher recommendations. Not long ago, tracking became a dirty word in progressive education circles. But I found researching, Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education, that tracking has gone underground. Visiting schools across the State, we have discovered that tracking remains a prevalent feature of most American middle schools and high schools, and takes a variety of forms, including selection for Advanced Placement classes, gifted and talented programs, and other special enrichment programs that systematically sort students by class and race.

Indeed, these programs are populated with students who were born lucky: to affluent and well educated parents who able to provide their children with the cultural, educational and social advantage that State schools value and reward.

What's more, children whom schools track into these exclusive programs learn more than other students because they are taught more. And they are taught in far more interesting and engaging ways than what schools ordinarily provide students in regular classes.
The use of such tests to sort the supposedly smart and talented from the not-smart and not-so-talented is so common in our States that few parents and educators question the legitimacy of this practice. Rather than identifying the most promising young talent, our school was in essence picking and choosing children based on where they stood in the Boise State University class grading system. Far from being the Great Equalizer, Boise schools were instead a handmaiden to elite interests.
Boise is the capitol of Idaho, the most Republican of states. But the pressure on schools to create bastions of privilege and schools within schools in the interests of elite parents crosses the usual left-right political boundaries.
With appropriate re-engineering and refocusing, North Carolina schools do have the capacity to diminish the achievement gaps that politicians like to talk about. Schools need to pay a lot more attention to supplementing the cultural and social capital that disadvantaged students -- for a variety of reasons -- do not get from home because they, unluckily, were born to parents who lack education, information, and resources.
There's also the matter of basic fairness. It's hard to argue against the need to improve math and science education for North Carolina students. Indeed, the school is doing a wonderful job. Any parent would kill to have a child attend such a school, so cool are the learning opportunities it provides its students.
But why should wonderful learning opportunities and small classes be the exclusive rights of only the "best and brightest?" Why are we dumping down schools for ordinary children, force-feeding them facts and formulas to pass the next standardized test, while we create special and enriched learning environments for the children of privilege?
The short answer is politics and brute power. Let's be honest with ourselves. As currently structured, the North Carolina education system is organized to serve elite interests at the expense of children and families at the bottom.