Closing the achievement gap (pt. 2)

A friend recently passed a news story my way about a promising new charter school in Madison that hopes to help close the black-white achievement gap in our state. It is exciting to see things like this given that our state currently graduates whites at an 86% clip, but blacks a meager 44% rate (as I reported on last spring). But my excitement is necessarily tempered a bit by the finer points embedded in the article.

Consider this:

"[Cole] and other [school] board members are keenly aware that there's little money these days for much experimentation."

Uh-huh. Might this be because we're spending so much money on the failed status-quo? With a 44% black graduation rate, we've been doing so well under the current system, we've got to be careful about diverting funds from it to newer, fresher, and promising ideas, right? Wrong – it's exactly what's needed.

And here's the real kicker for me:

"Another unknown at this stage of the game is how ... Madison Teachers Inc. would work through what could be thorny issues regarding the flexible, demanding teaching hours that Caire sees as critical to the school's success."

Seriously? At what point do we begin viewing our education system as an education system for children, rather than as a jobs program for teachers? I would say that point is the point at which we realize our current system is leaving 56% of minority students behind. MTI of course will feel differently, and blame everything on lack of funding, even though we're spending twice as much per pupil in real inflation adjusted dollars now as we did in 1970, with no measurable increase in student achievement.

We have great teachers throughout the state, and surely a large part of our educational woes can be attributed to uninvolved parents, but allowing the teacher unions to dictate the structure of the system as it works best for them, rather than how it works best for children, is a grave injustice to the students and parents who ultimately fund our schools. MTI should have no say in whether this school gets up and running or not. The fact that they do have a say, or at least influence, is indicative of the structural problems hampering our current system, preventing us from fully exploring any and all possibilities for improving achievement.

Madison Prep may ultimately be approved, and I hope so. But a look at the bureaucratic obstacles that still stand in the way of such promising endeavors shows how far we have yet to go to improve our system. Most parents want our education system to be flexible, innovative, and responsive. Operating the system as a bureaucratic government run monopoly is the absolute worst way to try and achieve that.