New Article: Achieveing Educational Equity Post-Katrina

Posted by on July 14, 2006

[posted from Public Education Network newsblast]

EDUCATIONAL EQUITY, AFTER HURRICANE KATRINA

The terrible destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina exposed for all the world what educators have long known: America remains deeply divided by race and class, and the lack of opportunities for poor people and people of color have devastating consequences. As Americans watched in horror, poor children and children of color were, quite literally, left behind by the storm and subsequent flooding. The implications for education are obvious and profound, writes Robert Rothman. Although leaving no child behind is national policy, Katrina demonstrated that poor children and children of color lack the resources and support they need. Given those stark realities, the old solutions will not work. To live up to the promise of the idea of leaving no child left behind, America needs to address seriously the question of equity. What would it take to achieve
true equity? First, it requires a recognition that equity involves much more than financial resources. It also involves changes in power relationships so that all individuals have a say in decisions that affect them. It involves curricular and instructional changes that enable teachers to take students’ cultural backgrounds into account. And it involves ensuring opportunities to learn — in and out of school — that many children are now denied. Yet, by itself, equity is an insufficient goal. To ensure a bright future for all children, equity must be matched with excellence, and both must be achieved at a large enough scale so that all children in fact learn what they need to know to succeed as adults. Clearly, though, schools in large cities are falling short of these ideals, and they have for years. Katrina merely tore the mask off this reality. A new issue of “Voices in Urban Education” examines educational equity and excellence in the post-Katrina era. The authors speak in impassioned tones about the pervasive inequities that continue to divide Americans and suggest new possibilities for addressing these inequities and for producing equity and excellence at scale.

http://www.annenberginstitute.org/VUE/winter06/Rothman.html