Dori: If you want performance gap to change, family patterns must change

The Seattle Times has another Education Lab piece about the performance gap among public school students in Washington. It turns out that the performance gap especially widens on the national test they take in the eighth grade.

As we told you a few weeks ago, the Seattle Public Schools have an idea for a solution to this. Their solution is to eliminate the honors programs for the highly gifted students so as to even the playing field for everyone.

In other words, “Let’s just lower the highest-achieving kids.”

Dori: Seattle Public Schools want to take away honors classes

That doesn’t do anything to actually help the lowest achievers. But the schools are just concerned about the perception of an education gap, especially because the ratio of African-American to white students is much lower in the honors classes than in the overall student population.

They say in the story that test results at the highest level of scores have stayed about the same. But the lower-end of test scores has gotten much worse over the years.

The schools won’t say why this is. Nobody will talk about why we have this growing gap in our schools.

In my view, it goes back to Newton’s First Law of Motion:

An object at rest will stay at rest and an object in motion will stay in motion at the same speed and in the same direction, unless acted on by an external force.

In other words, if you’ve got things moving in one direction — down — then the schools and the taxpayers and billions of dollars are not going to change or fix the underlying problem.

It’s not politically correct to talk about the underlying problem. But the fact of the matter is, 70 percent of African-American kids are born out of wedlock. That makes it really tough to thrive academically. There are some single parents who do a fantastic, marvelous job. But in general, if more of your life is consumed by working and just trying to get by because feeding your family is all on your shoulders, that’s less of your time that you can dedicate to helping with homework, going to parents night, communicating with your kids’ teachers, and the like.

Then there is another issue with schools statewide — consider our population of illegal immigrants. If you don’t speak the language, it is very difficult for you to survive economically. There is going to be a gap in performance at school if you struggle with the language in which your classes are taught.

Money is not going to fix what happens at home. And getting rid of honors classes will not fix what happens at home. That’s the truth of the matter that is rarely discussed.

I don’t know why these things are considered politically incorrect. The truth should never be considered off-limits from an honest discussion. Unless we start to deal with the honesty of underlying causes of the performance gap, we’re never going to solve the problem.

That is what leads to the performance gap in our schools, and it goes back to Newton’s First Law. The forces that have led to under-performance 10 years ago are still at play with homes and families. That is far more important than anything taxpayers or the schools themselves would do. It is the reality of the situation.

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