{"id":710,"date":"2006-09-09T06:44:13","date_gmt":"2006-09-09T10:44:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=710"},"modified":"2006-09-09T06:44:13","modified_gmt":"2006-09-09T10:44:13","slug":"backpedaling-on-the-achievement-gap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=710","title":{"rendered":"Backpedaling on the achievement gap"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been puzzled by Kevin Carey&#8217;s blog entries <a href=\"http:\/\/www.quickanded.com\/2006\/09\/rothstein-concluded.html\">Thursday <\/a>and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.quickanded.com\/2006\/09\/aftie-confusion.html\">Friday<\/a>, in response to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.epinet.org\/webfeatures\/viewpoints\/200608_rothstein_finn\/rothstein-response_to_finn.pdf\">a Richard Rothstein essay<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.letsgetitright.org\/blog\/2006\/09\/qe_fought_the_law_and.html\">AFT&#8217;s NCLBlog<\/a>, respectively.  Here&#8217;s the critical claim of Carey (from Thursday):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>NCLB is not based on the premise that good schools can erase the achievement gap. It&#8217;s based on the premise that good schools can raise disadvantaged student performance to a defined level, proficiency.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In a word, dear readers, this is baloney (technical educational policy term). The mechanisms of AYP notwithstanding, rhetoric about NCLB has <em>consistently<\/em> been about the achievement gap. I&#8217;m not sure if Carey is echoing Fordham&#8217;s Michael Petrilli (see my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shermandorn.com\/mt\/archives\/000597.html\">earlier entry on that<\/a>), but when anyone starts to lowball expectations, it&#8217;s, well, it&#8217;s, well, &#8230; soft bigotry? I&#8217;ll avoid the purple prose and just note that defenders of the AYP mechanism and high-stakes testing are engaging in this rhetorical dance because NCLB and most accountability frameworks avoid concrete discussions of standards.  We must have them, <em>proficiency<\/em> must be defined, but your everyday Joe wouldn&#8217;t know what that means.  Heck, <em><strong>I<\/strong><\/em> don&#8217;t.<br \/>\nI&#8217;m not sure if we&#8217;re headed towards the worst possible outcome of oversold education reforms (regression towards deterministic views of human capacity), but when defenders of high-stakes accountability start backpedaling as fast as they can from the rhetorical framework that&#8217;s been the political underpinnings of NCLB, it&#8217;s not good news.  No, this is not earthshaking stuff, but I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s helpful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been puzzled by Kevin Carey&#8217;s blog entries Thursday and Friday, in response to a Richard Rothstein essay and AFT&#8217;s NCLBlog, respectively. Here&#8217;s the critical claim of Carey (from Thursday): NCLB is not based on the premise that good schools can erase the achievement gap. It&#8217;s based on the premise that good schools can raise [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accountability-frankenstein"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-bs","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}