Standards Won’t Change Inequity: A Reader

The new Common Core and related tests are likely to continue a three-decade pattern of traditional schooling either integrating the new standards and tests into the existing structure of schools or using the new standards and tests to justify existing practices. And thus, I offer a reader below, highlighting a demonstrable set of interrelated problems with U.S. public schools and higher education—inequitable discipline, retention, and other school-based dynamics disproportionately impacting African American males negatively and college graduation inequity for AA male athletes:

• Revealing New Truths About Our Nation’s Schools (Office of Civil Rights, USDOE)
• Black athletes must pick up the ball on graduation rates
• Black Male Student-Athletes and Racial Inequities in NCAA Division I College Sports
• College athlete reading study: Some play like adults, but have literacy of 5th-graders
• Death threats and denial for woman who showed college athletes struggle to read
• Federal guidelines address discipline in nation’s schools
• U.S. Criticizes Zero-Tolerance Policies in Schools, from which I highlight:

“We often talk about solving this problem as if it’s an easy problem to solve,” said James Forman Jr., a clinical professor at Yale Law School. “Actually creating a positive school climate, particularly in schools that are in communities that are themselves not calm and orderly, is hard work.”

Mr. Forman added that because school accountability systems focus on student test scores and other academic measures, rather than on reducing suspensions, schools might not have much incentive to keep troubled students in class [emphasis added]. “Sometimes getting rid of these kids can help you do better on the metrics that you are evaluated on,” he said. “If a kid is causing trouble, that’s probably not a kid who is testing well, and it may be a kid who is making it hard for teachers to teach other kids.”

K-12 and higher education are failing African American males; high-stakes accountability based on standards and testing is unlikely to change that fact—but is likely to increase it.