No one has talked much about it, but the bipartisan Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) reauthorization bill that passed unanimously out of the Senate HELP Committee last week includes a provision that requires local educational agencies to:
Identify and address any disparities…that result in low-income students and minority students being taught at higher rates than other students by ineffective, inexperienced, and out-of-field teachers.
This essentially carries over teacher equity provisions from both the last ESEA reauthorization (aka the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 or NCLB) and the stimulus bill (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009). This is also an issue that the Administration has pushed via data collection by the Office of Civil Rights and guidance issued to states and school districts last October by Secretary Duncan.
As the Congressionally-chartered “Equity and Excellence Commission” – whose members included civil rights groups, academics, and the heads of both national teachers’ unions – reported to the the Secretary of Education in February 2013:
Ten million students in America’s poorest communities—and millions more African American, Latino, Asian American, Pacific Islander, American Indian and Alaska Native students who are not poor—are having their lives unjustly and irredeemably blighted by a system that consigns them to the lowest-performing teachers, the most run-down facilities, and academic expectations and opportunities considerably lower than what we expect of other students. These vestiges of segregation, discrimination and inequality are unfinished business for our nation.
Despite all of this attention, very little has been done to remedy resource inequities that stack the odds against black, Latino and other historically disadvantaged groups of students.
Today’s infographic displays what we can learn from research and the work of several innovative districts that are leading the way.
(To see the full presentation mode, click here).