The Big Challenge: Reversing Generations of "Hard Bigotry"

“Why is it necessary to increase the use of testing when we know from years of previous testing what the results will be?”

Ronald A. Wolk, founder and former editor of Education Week, asks this compelling question in his recent article on the high stakes of standards-based accountability.

Wolk reminds us that despite decades of paying lip service to the idea that all children can learn, low-income and minority children continue to “fall on the wrong side of an unyielding achievement gap.”

But more importantly, he reminds us that educators and schools did not create this gap – and that as a result, a systemic approach is needed to truly solve the problem.

Wolk writes: “To assume that these students fail because of the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” as President George W. Bush suggested in making the case for the No Child Left Behind Act, is preposterous. Their failure is due to the hard bigotry that generations of these kids have suffered. And high common standards won’t rectify that. Indeed, they divert attention away from the real problem by creating the illusion that things will improve if students and teachers are held to even higher standards.”

What might this systemic approach to closing the gap look like?

Wolk maintains that smaller schools, where students and teachers have close relationships, would be a good start.

He also suggests that universal preschool is an important tool in closing the achievement gap. He maintains students should be evaluated primarily on portfolios and that traditional classroom instruction needs to be replaced with an environment where students are more in control of their own educations.

Teachers, he argues, could serve primarily as “advisers who guide students in educating themselves.”

Wolk’s suggestions, of course, are controversial in a number of ways.

But his point that drastic changes need to be made – in education and in society as a whole – should not be ignored.

How would you propose addressing the “hard bigotry” that some of our students and families have endured for generations? How do we close the achievement gap? What works? What doesn’t? Where do we go from here?