United States: Educational Inequality

Efforts at Educational Reform

Perhaps one of the most ambitious goals of the blueprint for educational reform articulated in March 2010 by President Barack Obama is its call for the transformation of the persistently failing schools in the United States. According to U.S. Secretary of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, there are more than 5,000 chronically underperforming schools throughout the United States. Many of these are high schools that he and others have described as “dropout factories” because they consistently lose far more students than they graduate each year. Although data from the Pearson Foundation indicate that there was a slight increase in high school graduation rates from 70% in 2008 to 72% in 2010, a closer examination of the evidence reveals little change in many of the nation's largest cities and school districts, where graduation rates typically hover at around 50% and are substantially higher for Black and Latino males.

The Obama administration has made reducing the dropout rate and improving the lowest performing schools in the United States a national priority as part of an ambitious agenda for overhauling the nation's schools on a scale never seen before. Secretary Duncan has called for schools with a track record of chronic failure to be transformed, turned around, or completely shut down. While the need for change in American education seems clear, particularly in urban and rural communities where poverty is concentrated and school failure is pervasive, the Obama administration has not explained why it believes its strategy is more likely to succeed than the reforms pursued by the George W. Bush administration. Nine years after the adoption of No Child Left Behind (NCLB)—the most far-reaching federal educational reform ever enacted—school failure rates are still high, reading and math scores on standardized tests remain low, and college attendance rates have been stagnant. A number of scholars and researchers such as Pedro Noguera believe that the continued emphasis on raising academic standards and tightening accountability as the primary levers for change offers little reason to think that the Obama/Duncan plan will be any more successful than the policy strategy pursued by the Bush administration under NCLB. The new plan differs from the Bush-era mandates in that it provides some funding for school transformation made available through stimulus funding and the Race to the Top (RTT) initiative. However, like NCLB, the Obama/Duncan plan does not provide direction on how schools are to improve. Like NCLB, it relies largely on pressure and threats to compel schools to produce better academic outcomes and essentially ignores the fact that this approach has not worked. Interestingly, such a strategy did not even [Page 2232]work in producing significant improvement in schools in Chicago where Secretary Duncan previously served as chief executive officer of schools. There is no research supporting an approach that relies largely on pressure to spur school improvement, and no evidence to suggest that Obama's RTT will work any better than Bush's NCLB in bringing about dramatic improvement in public schools in the communities where change is needed most.

...