The Achievement Gap

by Dennis Green

That’s how it’s referred to euphemistically by the Alameda School District Trustees and Superintendent, “the achievement gap.” Instead, it’s the failure of the schools, and the teachers, to close that gap for African-American and Hispanic students. While the unemployment rate for Americans in general is around 10%, for African-Americans, it is 15%. And that’s an achievement gap directly traceable back to the schools.

But no one wants to admit that. The new parcel tax initiative in Alameda doesn’t even promise to address that gap, and there is no language in the new “Master Plan” describing or explaining why such a gap exists. Nor why that gap is much greater in the West End schools than in the Gold Coast or the East End or in Harbor Bay. No one admits that the schools, and the teachers, are just plain failing these kids, in real time, in the classroom, and then in their grade books.

The drop-out rate is much higher, and the graduation and success rate much lower for these ethnographic groups than for “White” and “Asian” students, and the conventional explanation is all about culture, that these kids don’t learn English, that their parents don’t believe in education as a way out of the ghetto, that they are undisciplined and unruly. Anything but admitting any responsibility for maintaining discipline and order, and motivating the students to learn.

It’s definitely time to reform education in America, and the public schools. Or to make “vouchers” available to parents who want to choose instead to enroll their children in private schools. Why should we support a failing system, when Catholic schools graduate 90% of their students, and a charter school in Oakland, “Native American Charter School,” graduates 100%, and they all qualify for admission to quality universities?

Vouchers used to be the call-letters of conservatives, and especially of the Religious Right. No one paid much attention, except the teachers’ unions, which made fun of the notion. Why should private schools be allowed to compete on a level playing field with the public schools? Why should the public schools have any fair competition? Indeed.

But tenure and the seniority/senility system have ruined public schools. They give teachers lifetime job security, regardless of their real performance, and allow the oldest and some of the most sleepy-time, to keep their jobs instead of younger, more fired-up teachers, in the face of the few layoffs that get past the unions.

The achievement gap is horrible in its consequences, and very costly. Public school dropouts constitute a much higher percentage of prison inmates than graduates, are much more vulnerable to STDs and other communicable diseases, more likely to go on welfare and drugs, and the achievement failure of their schools, and their teachers, will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

As a former teacher, I’m angry. And I blame my former colleagues, who refuse to take any responsibility whatsoever for the fact that America spends more per student than any nation on earth, and its students score in the bottom third worldwide. This is an achievement gap that will surely make America a third-rate power, economically and in terms of innovation, unless we reform the public education system NOW!

©2010 Dennis Green