High Expectations and Quality Teaching!


School superintendent criticizes expectations based on race

Raising questions about racial bias in California's public schools, state schools superintendent Jack O'Connell on Tuesday said low expectations for black and Hispanic students contribute to their persistent achievement gap with whites and Asians.
O'Connell said teachers and administrators need “a renewed sense of urgency” to close that gap and must evaluate whether they hold all students to the same standards.
“Let's approach the job as if our own child were attending a low-performing school,” O'Connell said in his annual state of education address. “We wouldn't be patient with our own children lagging behind. We must not be patient when any child does.”

This response echoes my feelings:

The biggest obstacle for poor and minority students is a lack of quality teachers, said John Affeldt, managing attorney for Public Advocates, a nonprofit San Francisco law firm that has sued the state over several education equality issues.
“What the superintendent should be calling for is a Marshall Plan for improving teacher quality in these lowest-performing schools in the state,” he said.


Here's some ore bad news:

Black students not sharing in AP course gain
By James M. O'Neill
Bloomberg News
Black high school students are missing out on an enrollment surge in Advanced Placement courses that help determine who will make it into college.

Nationwide, black students were 14 percent of the student population and only 6.9 percent of those in the college-prep courses, a gain of less than a percentage point in six years.
"An aching gap still exists in terms of average scores and achievement for minority students," said Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, in a telephone interview Feb. 2. "We still have a lot of work to do."

In New Jersey, where 14.8 percent of the students are African American, only 5.5 percent of students who took AP exams in the state last spring were African American.
African American students account for 11.8 percent of the student population in Pennsylvania, but only 4.7 percent of those taking AP last spring were black.

The results among blacks and Hispanics indicate that their teachers, like the students, "are not receiving adequate preparation for the rigors of an AP course," the report said.