Fairness is a core American value. Last week, President Obama spoke eloquently about fairness and why it matters if all Americans are to realize their dreams of decent lives for themselves and their children.
President Obama talked about growing our economy faster and linked this goal to empowering “more Americans with the skills and education they need to compete in a highly competitive global economy.” In the same week, new PISA results showed that American students are, at best, treading water. Our 15-year-olds are slowly but surely falling behind 15-year-olds from countries where education is valued for social and economic reasons and rigor is the standard.
Are aspiration and reality at loggerheads? We assert in America that we believe deeply that education should be the great equalizer. But when we look at the data, we would have to be blind in broad daylight not to see that education is becoming the great unequalizer—where you go to school and with whom has long-lasting effects on your chances for a successful and prosperous life.
The President referred to this growing class and race segregation: “The opportunity gap in America is now as much about class as it is about race, and the gap is growing.”
The President also mentioned his signature educational reform initiatives—Race to the Top, raising standards, high school redesign, connecting businesses to community colleges, financial support for college students and universal high-quality preschool.
But will these noteworthy efforts bend education reform in the direction of closing opportunity gaps based on race and class?
For several decades, many educational reform initiatives emphasized market efficiency and outcomes. The algorithm of reform for those pushing these is roughly:
School Choice + Standards + Testing + Teacher Accountability = Student Success.
But though the promises have been lavish, the results have been less than impressive, as the PISA results dramatically demonstrate.
Perhaps it is time to marry the best efficiency reform strategies with equity strategies. Educational policymaking is not an either/or proposition. We can have an academically competitive system of schools that is also inclusive and caring.
An “equity agenda” has to focus on two significant and simultaneous challenges that must be addressed now as well as into the future:
The first is the immediate and honest recognition that poverty and near poverty impede learning and can’t be wished away. Fairness implies a level playing field. Twenty percent of our children live in poverty and 39 percent live in low-income families. Our neglect of these children constitutes a national scandal.
Providing high-quality wraparound services for all students—but especially low-income students—and rewarding effective teachers so they remain in high-need schools is a way to right this wrong.
As for embracing the future, we live in one of the most exciting periods in human history, an age of discovery and invention. Today, equity is about the experience of real learning, talent development and shared opportunity.
This, I think, is the spirit of the President’s speech. His call for fairness follows a long line of American leaders. He mentions Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson as champions of fairness. Let’s hope that in the coming months aspirations and reality begin to merge in educational policies so that, in the President’s words, “a child’s course in life should not be determined by the zip code he’s born into, but by the strength of his work ethic and the scope of his dreams.”