So Much For NCLB: Racial Achievement Gap Wide as Ever

Oh dear. Here's the bad news on minority educational achievement:

Between 2004 and last year, scores for young minority students increased, but so did those of white students, leaving the achievement gap stubbornly wide, despite President George W. Bush's frequent assertions that the No Child law was having a dramatic effect.

Although Black and Hispanic elementary, middle and high school students all scored much higher on the federal test than they did three decades ago, most of those gains were not made in recent years, but during the desegregation efforts of the 1970s and 1980s. That was well before the 2001 passage of the No Child law, the official description of which is "An Act to Close the Achievement Gap."...

The 2008 score gap between black and white 17-year-olds, 29 points in reading and 26 points in math, could be envisioned as the rough equivalent of between two and three school years' worth of learning, said Peggy Carr, an associate commissioner for assessment at the Department of Education.

When the Obama administration brings the bill up for reauthorization this year, I'm hoping to see the hard-headed, 'it takes a village' kind of thinking that can provide quality education for all our children. It takes after school programs, Saturday schools, and reform of the kinds of dysfunctional educational bureaucracies that stifle innovation and drive out the best teachers. It also takes communities doing their parts; overseeing homework, unplugging the TV, staying in close contact with the kids' teachers, policing their neighborhoods so kids can study in peace. Otherwise, the long term crisis of inner city education will continue in a world which becomes more highly technological and labor-unfriendly everyday.