Kids Left Behind, The - William H. Parrett

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the mid-1970s, separate but equal was finally giving way to a national policy of equal education for all, and new legislation began to ensure the equal treatment of female students in public education. The Title IX section regarding female students was added to ESEA and began a massive realignment of educational programs and funding for young women that continues today. Following the legislation and court decisions that opened access and opportunity to females was the Education for All Handicapped Children Act passed by Congress in 1974, which sought to end the segregation of handicapped students by providing them with equal access and opportunity.

      Despite this long struggle to provide equal educational access and opportunity for the poor, minorities, female students, and the handicapped, even into the year 2000, researchers have continued to document schools that still use the destructive practices of segregation and isolation of poor and minority students. School districts have redrawn boundaries to establish school attendance zones that isolate poor and minority neighborhoods; ability grouping and tracking programs have been used to segregate poor and minority students within schools. “White flight”—when middle-class and affluent families sell their homes in cities and relocate to suburbia—exacerbates this problem. Poor children have been isolated into second-class facilities with insufficient and outdated instructional materials, where they are far more likely to be taught by inexperienced, inadequately prepared, or misassigned teachers. Inner-city schools have thus been largely abandoned to poor and minority students, leaving our nation’s schools more segregated by race and socioeconomic status today than before federal desegregation policies went into effect.

      Sadly, educational research in the mid-1960s provided an intellectual rationale for the continued use of these destructive school practices. James Coleman of the University of Chicago conducted the largest educational study to date, gathering data from 600,000 students, 60,000 teachers, and 6,000 schools. He concluded that teachers could only impact about 10% of the effects of poverty (Coleman et al., 1966). Although Coleman’s conclusion was later disproved, the flawed research led to more than 3 decades of destructive school practices that stigmatized the neediest of our children and youth and created a growing underclass of Americans who are undereducated, illiterate, underemployed, or, even worse, unemployable.

      In the late 1990s, as state and federal legislators began to recognize the relationship between education, civil rights, and economic justice, they began to transform the policy of equal opportunity in education into the new expectation of academic proficiency for all students. Pressure from state and federal agencies coupled with a growing realization that all children and youth can achieve high academic excellence have fostered this unprecedented change in public education. Starting in Kentucky, Texas, Colorado, and North Carolina, state legislatures began establishing policies about learning standards, achievement proficiency, and consequences for failure. With the enactment of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) federal legislation in 2002, the United States became the first nation to establish a national goal of all students attaining proficiency in reading, math, and science. This elevation of education from something available to only a few to a civil right that is absolutely essential has been fueled by two powerful and relatively new forces: changes in the economic marketplace and the emerging science of teaching and learning.

      The first development driving the new American revolution has been the changing economic marketplace. The economic marketplace has changed in four significant ways:

      1. The world of work has given way to the “age of the mind.”

      2. There is an ever-growing demand for new skills.

      3. New technology continues to develop.

      4. The relationship between education and income is becoming increasingly significant.

      In today’s world, there is only one door of opportunity to the good life: education. The old concept of hard work and perseverance has been transformed by the technological revolution. The world of work is transforming into the “age of the mind.” Jobs that previously employed millions of upwardly mobile but largely uneducated men and women in the United States have all but disappeared. Industrial robots and other forms of technology have replaced many of these laborers. Those jobs that are available typically pay only minimum wage, provide little or no health benefits, and are often filled by new immigrants to the country. Many other manufacturing jobs have been transferred to foreign countries where labor, insurance, and litigation costs are far lower.

      Even jobs traditionally seen as requiring less-specialized skills and training, such as jobs in construction, food services, and retail industries, now usually require detailed, often expensive training and licensure. Almost all jobs require a working knowledge of computer technology. More and more jobs require a high school education and postsecondary training programs. Most branches of the American military will not accept young men and women recruits with a GED. In community colleges, many vocational/technical associate degree programs require calculus as an admission requirement. Associate degree programs in sheet metal and tool and die training now require algebra and trigonometry. Today, business, industry, and the armed forces have no opportunities for dropouts.

       New Jobs Require Greater Education and Skills

       Eighty percent of the 30 fastest growing jobs will require an education beyond high school.

       Thirty-six percent of all new jobs will require at least a bachelor’s degree.

      (Hecker, 2005)

      The evolution of increasingly sophisticated job skills demands higher student competencies, and the only technological certainty is that we will experience more change. Public school students must not only master high levels of academic proficiency and complex technological skills, but must also build a sufficiently strong educational foundation for ongoing development so that they can continue to explore and learn for the rest of their lives.

      In recent decades, there has been a growing understanding of the relationship between salary and education that further supports the role of education as an individual’s civil right. The best way to predict lifetime income levels—to predict those who will live their lives in poverty and those who will enjoy the benefits of the middle class—is education level. Without sufficient education, there is little or no hope for a stable economic life (figure 1.2, p. 7).

      Figure 1.2: Predicted Yearly Income Based on Educational Level (National Center for Education Statistics, 2002, p. 163)

      American workers without an adequate education are underemployed, work for minimum wage, often hold two or three part-time jobs, or are unemployed or unemployable. Many of these poverty-level adults may decline into depression and despair and fall victim to drug and alcohol abuse, dysfunctional family life, and socially unacceptable behavior. Large numbers turn to crime and end up in jails and prisons. The number of men and women in prison in the United States has doubled in the past 20 years. For decades, over 80% of prison inmates in the United States have been dropouts; well over 50% are illiterate (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1999). In addition, the cost of public education’s failures is high:

       The cost of retaining one child is $6,500 per grade (Shepard & Smith, 1990).

       The cost of special education services per child is $9,369 per year (National Education Association, 2006).

       The cost of lost taxes, lost wages, and lost productivity over their lifetimes will “cost our nation more than $260 billion” (Spellings, 2005).

      As the economic marketplace of the world has changed in both developed

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