March 25, 2014--Chem Lab

In an analysis of the nation's 97,000 public schools, the Department of Education last week issued a report about the unequal deployment of resources among schools that enroll predominantly white students and those that serve children of color.

In every way it is disturbing.

Racial minorities are much more likely than white students to be suspended; they have access to fewer math and science courses; their teachers are lower paid and less experienced; and the schools in which they are enrolled are older and less well maintained.

Black students are three times as likely to be suspended or expelled as white students; a quarter of schools with the highest percentage of Hispanic students do not offer any math courses beyond Introductory Algebra; and a full third of them do not have any chemistry courses.

And when it comes to the availability of advanced placement courses--important for college admissions and success--schools with African-Ameircan and Hispanic students fare as poorly.

It is no wonder then that the academic achievement gap between the races is so pronounced and persistent.

This inequality of resources gives the lie to the claim of many conservatives that the opportunities are there equally for everyone and if certain people do not succeed (and we know what that is code for), it is their own or their parents' fault.

Some years ago I was working with the lowest-performing school district in New York State--Roosevelt, Long Island, a wedge of poverty squeezed between communities of great wealth.

The high school had the lowest graduation rate in the state and as a result the smallest percentage of students going on to college. The Ford Foundation was looking to work with all the schools in the district, offering to bring to them approaches to teaching and learning that had been shown to work in other impoverished school districts.

On my first tour of the high school, the principal pointed proudly to a gleaming chemistry lab. It was during school hours but there were no classes being held in the lab. When I expressed curiosity about that, the principal said, "Oh, we don't actually use the lab."

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because there's no gas for the Bunsen burners and no running water."

I was incredulous. "So no one takes chemistry lab? Isn't it a state requirement that to earn an academic diploma students need to take two to three years of lab science?" She acknowledged that was true.

"So what do you do?" I asked.

"We arrange field trips to Great Neck High School," she told me proudly, "and they allow our students to watch their students do lab work."

"They watch them? Doesn't that rub it in your students' faces that Roosevelt is, well, less than second-rate?"

For this she had no reply.

Nor, I suspect, do the thousands of principals and teachers who labor in under-financed and resourced public schools across the nation.