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Ellen Winn - How Can We Close The Achievement Gap?

We must first speak honestly about the crisis in public education and acknowledge that eliminating the racial and ethnic education achievement gap is the civil rights issues of our generation. Fifty-five years after Brown vs. Board of Education, forty years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and twenty-five years after the publication of A Nation at Risk, we must confront the shameful national reality: if you are an African American or Latino child in this country, the probability is high that our public education system will fail you, that you will not graduate from high school, that your ability to function successfully in the twenty-first Century economy will be limited, and that you will have no real prospect of achieving the American dream.

Despite the urgency of the need and the righteousness of the cause, public education today not only serves most poor children badly, but shows little prospect of meaningful improvement. Instead, education policy leaders have been doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, which is a textbook definition of insanity.

The entire system needs to change. Changing our public education system so that it better meets the needs of all students will require not only a shift in our collective thinking, but also a shift in power. As the civil rights movement itself made clear, such transformations inevitably generate resistance and political conflict. We must no longer shirk that struggle. We cannot risk losing another generation of children.

In practical terms, this means that we must take immediate steps:

For teachers and principals - pay them as the professionals they are, give them the tools and training they need to succeed, and make tough decisions about those who do not.
For parents - give them the ability to select where their children are educated, including public charter schools.
For parents and students - demand personal responsibility: we must ask more from ourselves and more from our schools.
At the system and school level, for teachers, principals, and central administrators -create transparent, data-driven accountability for educational success at every level, from the classroom straight up.
For district administrators - abolish enrollment policies that consign poor, minority students to our lowest-performing schools.
For elected officials - address head-on the crucial issues that created and perpetuate this system: provisions within teachers' contracts and state policies that keep ineffective teachers in classrooms and too often make it nearly impossible to get our best teachers paired up with the students who most need them.
For voters - elect brave leaders who are prepared to tackle the status quo and make key decisions based upon the only metrics that matter: Will this help children succeed? Will this narrow the achievement gap?
For all of us - stand up to any political force or special interest that seeks to preserve the failed education system.
As a nation, we must commit ourselves to making every education decision-including whom we employ, how money is spent, and where resources are deployed-with a focus on what will best serve our students, regardless of how it affects all other interests. This is the mission of the Education Equality Project (www.edequality.org), of which I am the director. Our focus is single-minded: eliminate the racial and ethnic achievement gap.

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