Apparently, there is what the Washington Post is calling an “academic gap” between minority and non-minority students in one of Virginia richest and fastest growing counties:
In one of the wealthiest counties in the country, minority advocates are urging the Loudoun County School Board to redouble efforts and resources to boost achievement of black and Hispanic students to the level of their white classmates.
Members of the Loudoun chapter of the NAACP, who have monitored minority student performance for more than a decade, said they have seen only “small, inconsistent improvement” in narrowing racial and ethnic disparities.
“Given that some schools throughout the nation have eliminated the achievement gap, [we] must demand more effective and vigorous action,” Reginald A. Early, the chapter’s president, wrote the board recently.
State tests show large gaps in reading scores, particularly for elementary- and middle-school students. Four years ago, the passing rate for non-Hispanic white third-graders in Loudoun was 24 percentage points ahead of the rate for both black and Hispanic students. In the past school year, black students lagged by 21 points; for Hispanic students, the disparity was 29 points.
Rather than looking at what is largely a middle class to upper middle class county and wondering if maybe there isn’t something going on at home with these kids, the NAACP is blaming the school system:
The NAACP recommended specific strategies for helping minority students across the school system. Its suggestions include using test scores to rate teachers, dedicating more funds to outreach programs for minority parents and recruiting a more racially diverse workforce of educators. Although more than a third of Loudoun students are nonwhite, only 7 percent of teachers are minorities.
The NAACP also recommended better training for teachers in cultural competence and classroom management, with the goal of alleviating inequities in school discipline. Black and Hispanic students represented about one-fifth of the student body in 2005-06, but they made up about two-fifths of those suspended that school year.
Of all of those suggestions, the only one that even comes close to making sense is the idea of grading teachers based on their students test scores. While not a perfect measure, if you’ve got a teacher who consistently has students unable to pass the classes he or she is teaching, it may be an indication that there’s something wrong with the teacher rather than the student. The question, of course, becomes what you do with those grades — if there aren’t consequences for teachers who aren’t teaching well, then monitoring their performance means absolutely nothing.
The rest of the suggestions, though, make no sense whatsoever assuming that what the NAACP really wants is a quality education. What does “cultural competence” have to do with learning ? And how is a more diverse workforce going to help students learn ? And unless there is evidence of real discrimination in student discipline — and a mere disparity in percentages does not constitute evidence of discrimination — then what does any supposed inequity have to do with whether a child can pass a standardized math test ?
If groups like this really cared about children like they claim to, they’d be talking about reforms that actually put some power in parents hands and reforms that hold teachers accountable for doing the job they were hired to do. Reforms like vouchers, school choice, charter schools, and making it easier to fire incompetent teachers. Playing political games like this with education is just plain disgusting.
