The U.S. Department of Education, headed by former Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan, has poured some $4.8 billion – and counting – into addressing poorly performing schools around the nation and has set on a course to promote turnarounds
The U.S. Department of Education, headed by former Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan, has poured some $4.8 billion ¡¡– and counting – into addressing poorly performing schools around the nation and has set on a course to promote turnarounds at schools deemed to be “dropout farms.”
The department has deemed public education reform a modern day civil rights issue.
Through a series of competitive and other grants – including Race to the Top – and through funds from the president’s American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, the education department is pursuing a broad, nationwide reform that also targets minority students who are statistically shown to be more likely to attend some of the nation’s worst schools, lead the dropout population, trail their non-minority counterparts in graduation and achievement rates and are often ill-prepared for college.
In a recent education report, Ducan indicated that the number of high school dropout factories in the U.S. fell from about 2,000 to 1,750 high schools from 2002 to 2008. Still the number is far from where the Obama administration wants it to be. Additionally, earlier this year the federal government laid out its plans for revising the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which would ask states to adopt college- and career-ready standards and reward schools for producing dramatic gains in student achievement.
Speaking recently at an education conference in Arlington, Va., the Defender sat down with U. S. Dept. of Education Asst. Secretary of Civil Rights Russlyn Ali to discuss the nation’s public school system and how the federal government is address it. Ali is a lead adviser on civil rights and responsible for enforcing U.S. civil rights laws in education.
Chicago Defender: What does it mean that “education is the civil rights issue of our generation?”
Russlyn Ali: It means that if we don’t change the way our schools work for kids, if we don’t close the achievement gap and then do better than that – because even if we close the achievement gap our country will still be behind so many other countries – then our nation can’t survive, not in this inter connected and global marketplace. … Things are called a civil rights movement when they affect the masses of people, when they can pull apart the fabric of a county. The status of our schools, the persistent and pervasive achievement gap, couldn’t be more damaging to us as a nation.
CD: It (the issue with the nation’s public schools) a stark Black/brown issue?
RA: It is! It’s a poor (versus) not-poor, and it’s a minority versus not-minority issue. It just is.
CD: What is the federal government doing to address this civil rights issue?
RA: We’re ensuring that we have better data to understand the problem and the solutions. We’re ensuring that we add more to formula funds like Title I that have been the lifeline for poor kids and at the same time target competitive dollars to ensure that kids get what they need. It’s about vigorously enforcing the civil rights laws so that student are free from discrimination in our schools – both peer-to-peer and systemic discrimination. It’s about ensuring that all kids have access to the standards and skills and the courses that they’ll need to succeed. It’s about ensuring that we spend more money more wisely. It’s about ensuring that the teachers that are the strongest get to the kids that need them the most.
CD: When did this become such an urgent issue?
RA: I don’t think it’s just become urgent now, it’s been urgent for a long time. … I think what we have now at this unique moment in time is Pres. Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. They are the real deal. The dept of education is driven to achieving their goals, and equity is woven through all of their goals.
CD: Can the government afford to spend $4 billion-plus on the lowest performing schools?
RA: How could we not? We’ve got 2,000 high schools in the country producing 75 percent of the Black and brown dropouts of the country … Think about what we could take into scale if we targeted our money on those schools. So how could we not? The economic consequences of not doing what we’re doing would be far more grave than $4 billion.
CD: What is the fed govt going to do to push towards President Obama’s 2020 graduation goal?
RA: Everything from making college more affordable, ensuring that 10s of billions of dollars go into Pell grants, and that we make college more accessible – like transforming the FAFSA so you can actually read it and apply to it with ease, to ensuring that kids graduate from high school ready for college so they’re not going to college and doing high school all over again. Almost everything that we are doing has that North Star goal, that 2020 goal, connected to it.
CD: When you concentrate on the bottom, low performing schools, do you then neglect the better and higher performing schools?
RA: No, in fact we are mindful of that. … It’s not about taking away from some so that others get more. The Recovery Act money actually allowed us not to have to do that because it was $100 billion into education. But it is very much also about sustaining and continuing to provide them the support and rewarding the success. So our reauthorization proposal is to be very different that No Child Left Behind. So while we’re still like a laser going on closing the achievement gap, we’re also rewarding and applauding, celebrating those places that are closing the achievement gap or maintaining growth over time. It’s about transforming the way we think about accountability so that our reauthorization proposal is not just about those status benchmarks … but of growth. Where schools are growing – even if they’re still underperforming but they’re making progress – we’re gonna reward and celebrate those, not punish them.
CD: Arne Duncan pushes charter schools. Are charter schools the answer?
RA: Arne Duncan is not a big push on charter schools, he’s a push on good charter schools. And where charters can be part of the answer, he wants to promote and support and foster that kind of innovation. Where they are part of the problem, we’re shutting them down too.
Copyright 2010 Chicago Defender
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