By Lisa Macfarlane
A growing contingent of people in Washington state are frustrated by the loud arguments surrounding education that end up being about everything but what really matters—kids.
While the legislature can’t see eye to eye on a budget that would fully fund education because they disagree over whose tax breaks to take away, and the Washington Education Association (WEA) is busy attacking State Senators that don’t toe their line, community members and educators are seeing the vast disparities in school quality across the state and are crying foul.
Washingtonians are weary of the unproductive dialogue surrounding education reform. They want action; and when it comes to their kids, they want action NOW. People are calling for rational conversations that lead to taking real steps toward positive change in Washington’s public education system. Some have even joined forces to speed-up the process.
The Road Map Project is a consortium of seven South King County school districts, educators, parents, and community leaders who are working together to drive dramatic improvement in student achievement from cradle to career. This impressive collective action effort seems to be on the right track.
The Road Map Project’s recent work included collecting data on the current state of all the region’s schools to find and highlight bright spots and areas where improvement is needed.
Here is some sobering data from Road Map’s 2012 data collection project for South Seattle Public Schools:
- Half of our black students are not meeting 3rd grade reading standards and only 35% of our black students are meeting 4th grade math standards;
- Only 22% of our black high school graduates have met the minimum course requirements to apply to a 4-year college or university, compared to 62% of white students;
- 48% of South Seattle’s high school graduates who go on to community college have to take remedial (pre-college) math courses and 26% have to take remedial English classes (Remedial = pre-college course work for which there is no college credit);
- Only 2 out of 10 of our black high school graduates are getting a college degree (AA or BA or career certificate) in 7 years.
Collective action is sorely needed. Our kids are in trouble.
Why have we collectively tolerated this sorry state of affairs in South Seattle schools and across the state for so long? Is it because, as Jerry Large points out in his Inequality a Poor Path to Follow, “A tolerance for inequality of any kind opens the door to more inequality because it dulls our sense of fairness.”? I’d like to think we are better than that.