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In an ideal or even rational world, this would not even be a fight. An old-fashioned notion of common good would guide reform, and we would all accept the importance of investing in those who may not look like us — because, in the end, we all inhabit the same space.
But such an appeal makes taxpayers and pundits uncomfortable because it comes too close to invoking racial equality. For many, racial justice is a bugaboo of the '60s, something we were supposed to have laid to rest long ago, especially when education's concerned. Reviving it feels retro at best, an admission of failure at worst. So it is that the debate about education reform tends to be an abstract and relatively polite debate over ideology, theory, funding — anything but the students themselves and their demographics.
Erin Aubry Kaplan: Good riddance, exit exam
Underdog high-schoolers won the battle against the test, but the fight for racial justice has just begun.
May 17, 2006
IN CALIFORNIA'S continuing school accountability wars, the underdogs — that would be the students — prevailed last week. On Friday, a Superior Court judge upheld a temporary injunction against the state's high school exit exam, so students do not have to pass it to graduate this year.
The exam, which requires students to prove they've learned what the system has theoretically taught them, has been under fire since it was introduced in 1999. In 2003, the Coalition for Educational Justice and other grass-roots activist groups successfully lobbied school districts to postpone the test. That was but a brief lull in the war; the skirmish that resumed has again been resolved in the embattled students' favor. For now.
I consider this latest development a victory, yet I feel little cause for rejoicing. The fight for public education is ultimately not about scoring points but about changing hearts and minds — and we are a long way from that. We are a long way from convincing the public that a school system that is overwhelmingly black and Latino is worth not simply saving but improving.
