RAYMOND WOLTERS
WHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED
THE NATIONAL POLICY INSTITUTE
WHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED
RAYMOND WOLTERS
Professor Emeritus at the University of Delaware
The National Policy Institute
Research & Analysis
August 28, 2015
In the years since
Brown v. Board of Education of opeka
(1954), there have been many well-intentioned but unsuccessful efforts to close America’s racial and ethnic gaps in academic achievement. At the time of
Brown,
75 percent to 85 percent of the nation’s Black students (and 75 percent of Latinos) scored below the median for Whites on standardized academic tests. Tat has been the case ever since. Despite extensive government intervention and numerous educational reforms, the disparities remain. Tis persistent “achievement gap” has become one of the most comprehensively documented facts in American educational history.
[1]
[1] Brown v. Board of Education, 347 US 485 (1954); Abigail Ternstrom and Stephan Ternstrom,
No Excuses
:
Closing the Racial Gap in Learning
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003) 12 and
passim
.; Tomas Sowell, “Where Rhetoric Beats Reasoning,”
Wall Street Journal
, May 13, 2004; Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips, eds.,
Te Black-White est Score Gap
(Washington: Te Brookings Institution, 1998).
2
| RAYMOND WOLTERS
WHY EDUCATION REFORM FAILED
“Closing the gap”—that is, ending racial disparities through new educational methods or public policies—has been a recurring political
leitmotif
for the past half-century. It has been a ubiquitous and deeply contentious meme, which has played a role in virtually every national election. And yet so many reformers take up “closing the gap” as if for the first time. Tey ignore the complex history of education reformers, which I have recounted in my most recent book,
Te Long Crusade
(2015), and the important lessons that can be gleaned from what can only be considered a history of failures.
[2]
Education is undoubtedly critical for sustaining and advancing any advanced society. It is time for those who care about education to ask the difficult questions that past reformers overlooked. Te most important of which is whether racial achievement gaps can be closed at all.
1.
School desegregation was the first in a series of interventions and reforms that failed to close the gaps. Despite initial resistance in the South, by the end of the 1960s, the great majority of Americans accepted the desegregation that
Brown
had mandated. In large part this acceptance occurred because both the Supreme Court and the U. S. Congress made it clear that desegregation required only that public schools should not discriminate racially. In several decisions between 1954 and 1968, the Supreme Court handed down rulings (and upheld lower-court decisions) that forbade the exclusion of children from public schools solely on the grounds of race. But the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts did not insist that compulsory
inclusion
must begin. Tey held, rather, that the proper remedy for compulsory separation was to end such separation.
[2] Raymond Wolters,
Te Long Crusade
(Arlington, VA: Washington Summit Publishers, 2015).