Ignorance is Strength, We Have Always Been at War with Eastasia, Holding Schools Accountable for Minority Achievement Hurts Minority Students

Yesterday the AP continued it's week-long inadvertent expose of muddled thinking about NCLB with an article titled "Law raises fear of more school segregation."

NCLB unexpectedly hurting the very students it's designed to help! Man, that would be quite a story if it were, what's the word...oh, right: true. But the story offers little evidence, starting thus:

No one...disagrees with [the] contention that Connecticut hasn't always given its poor and minority students an education as good as it's given its rich and white students. No one thinks the gap between the two systems is a good thing. And no one wants the disparities to continue. In the past, the main hurdle has been money...But now, [Connecticut state education commissioner and noted anti-NCLB litigant Betty] Sternberg says, there's another hurdle: the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

"We've had a reluctance on the part of school districts to accept youngsters who come in with deficiencies because they're concerned that if they get enough of them ... they'll become labeled as failing schools," she says.

It's a problem that many experts believe is confounding an effort to eliminate the racial achievement gap on standardized annual tests. That's because the law requires schools to demonstrate that students in specific racial, social and economic groups are making annual progress. A school fails if even one group fails. The more groups in a school, the greater chance for failure.

How do school districts not admit students who live within the district's legal geographic boundaries? Which districts is Sternberg talking about? What's she doing to prevent that from happening? Or is this all just complete supposition?

Also, "many experts" believe this? Such as? Two are cited. First Jonathan Kozol says:

"The really rich and ritzy suburbs that don't participate in any form of integration...[are] going to be rewarded for their selfishness. They're going to be rewarded for their racial insularity because they're not admitting any kids who are at any academic risk. They're not admitting any kids who had been previously studying, for perhaps the first six years of school, in a rotten, overcrowded school."

Again, how exactly do the ritzy suburbs pull this off? Does anyone have an example, even one, of an actual low-performing minority student being illegally turned away from an actual rich white school district? If they did, don't you think that would have made it's way into the story?Moreover, assuming Kozol is right, are we to believe that NCLB has changed that attitude, that the selfish suburbs were previously welcoming these students with open arms?

Expert #2 is:

Barbara Radner, director of DePaul University's Center for Urban Education, [who] works with Chicago public schools and has heard some parents complain about the treatment of inner city children when they move to suburban schools. "I have heard that there is a resentment toward those kids because they are dragging those schools down in the lists," Radner said.

"I have heard..." Case closed! Remember the end of Ocean's Eleven, where George Clooney purposefully makes up the weakest conceivable story about his knowledge of the casino robbery to fool Andy Garcia? The story begins "I know a guy...."

The rest of the article focuses on some inner-city schools which, contra Sternberg, are succeeding despite having lots of low-income and minority students. To wit:

Wedged in a poor, gritty immigrant neighborhood, Henry C. Dwight Elementary School near downtown Hartford, defies the odds. It harks back to an earlier era of learning. Its ceilings are high, there is a fireplace in the library and students wear uniforms as they dart between classrooms. The oldest public school in one of the nation's oldest cities, Dwight finds itself at the center of a growing national debate over whether the nation's newest education experiment is -- unexpectedly -- encouraging school segregation.

Dwight's population is racially and economically diverse, making its future under the law uncertain even though it is currently meeting its goals. The law stresses getting students proficient in math and reading by 2014, the school's principal, Stacey McCann, says. "They're (federal officials) not validating the incremental successes, but we are making great gains," says McCann, who supports the law. "I believe schools ... are making gains, but they might not make the mark that has been set."

When Congress passed the landmark law in 2001, Dwight was one of Hartford's worst-rated schools and exactly the type of multiracial, underperforming school the government intended to pressure to improve. So far, Dwight has. It has met its annual goals under the law even though it has eight special groups it must report to the government and a student population that hails from 21 countries

Okay. So there's a school full of low-income and minority students. Presumably this was just as true before NCLB as it is today. And despite having lots of disadvantaged students, it's doing well, thus proving that those students can in fact learn, and as such removing the incentive for rich white public schools to not admit those students, which they're not allowed to do legally anyway, and which we've been given no real evidence that they're actually doing, and which they were presumably doing prior to NCLB if they're doing it at all, as evidenced by the fact that they they were then and are now rich and white.

Let's say, purely for the sake of argument, that despite being a good school the malignant forces of poverty eventually catch up with Henry C. Dwight Elementary and it falls short of the 2014 goals. How would that affect segregation, one way or the other? It's already segregated. It's already full of minority students. If the school is labeled as inadequate under NCLB, wouldn't that increase the incentive for parents to say "Hey, I'm going to try to get my kid into that rich white school that isn't labeled as inadequate?"

What am I missing?