Education Week - February 17, 2016 - 22

Poor High School Standards at Issue,
Not the NCAA's Demands
To the Editor:
James Lytle's Commentary "The NCAA's
Chokehold on Secondary Schooling" (Jan. 20,
2016) misrepresents the important role that the
National Collegiate Athletic Association plays
in maintaining quality in American secondary
schools. I know, how could the NCAA do such a
thing, right? But it's true.
Lytle's "obvious" conclusion that "the NCAA's
member colleges and universities do not trust
each other" as the animating motive for NCAA
course monitoring is false. Rather, for good
reason, these institutions don't trust America's
high schools to meet high standards. This is
because high schools routinely offer subpar
courses, especially those delivered online. Such
courses mask student-athletes' frequent lack
of college readiness, which leaves these young
people high and dry when their grade point
averages fall below collegiate eligibility.
Rather than pointing the finger at the NCAA
for suppressing instructional innovation-a farfetched claim, but one that a school could easily
remedy by working with the NCAA eligibility
office-we should bemoan declining high school
standards and the clear need for the NCAA's
admittedly bizarre, but necessary, quality-control
mechanism.
David C. Bloomfield
Professor of Education Leadership, Law, and Policy
Brooklyn College
The CUNY Graduate Center
New York, N.Y.

ESSA Will Leave Children
From Poorest Communities Behind
To the Editor:
No Child Left Behind bombed. The law was
based on the audacious concept that 100 percent
of America's students would be performing at
grade level by the 2013-14 school year. Now,
we have the new and improved Every Student
Succeeds Act ("Inside ESSA: The New Federal
K-12 Law," special section, Jan. 6, 2016). This
latest version of the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act assumes that shifting the
balance of power in education back to the states
will provide our neediest youngsters with the
educational boosts they didn't receive under
NCLB.
I would argue that everyone-the powersthat-be in Washington, states, local school
districts, and teachers-knows what it takes
for children to succeed: high-quality teaching
and good parenting. Even if the most qualified
teachers go to the areas with the mostdisadvantaged populations, they alone cannot
make up for the hours a child spends in a poorquality environment at home. This is where it's
unlikely that ESSA will stack up any better than
No Child Left Behind.
In addition to high-quality teaching and
parental follow-up at home, students, especially
the disadvantaged, need supplemental services,
like high-quality preschools, summer and afterschool programs, health and social services, and
more. All these things require tax dollars, and
ESSA does not authorize robust funding for such
services ("ESEA Reauthorization: The Every
Student Succeeds Act Explained," Politics K-12
blog, Nov. 30, 2015).
Money for our schools comes primarily from

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 21

gender-responsive books.
Despite these and other efforts, accurate and dignifying portrayals of
the experiences and history of people
of color remain an ongoing challenge
in children's literature. Last month,
for instance, a high-profile controversy over the depiction of slaves in a
Scholastic children's book, A Birthday
Cake for George Washington, led the
publisher to stop its distribution.
As publishers increase the number
of children's books that feature nonwhite children, they must be careful
to include diverse representations of
the people and groups they seek to
highlight. Otherwise, they run the
risk of reinforcing stereotypes and
propagating racist ideology.
In response to recent debates over
the lack of positive representations
of nonwhite characters in children's
books, far too many people echo the
U.S. Supreme Court's 1896 majority
opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson, which
asserted that if "separation of the two
races stamps the colored race with a
badge of inferiority ... it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but
solely because the colored race chooses
to put that construction upon it."
Are we to believe that stereotypical, degrading, and dehumanizing
representations of nonwhite people in
children's books do not communicate
messages about good and bad, significance and irrelevance, superiority and
inferiority?
How educators use children's books
also significantly shapes students' selfperceptions and their perceptions of
others. Relegating books with nonwhite
main characters to diversity/ethnic
book lists or social studies units created
for Black History Month, National Hispanic Heritage Month, or Native American Heritage Month creates a form of
implicit and de facto segregation.
As children's book author and illustrator Christopher Dean Meyers noted
of children's literature in a 2014 New
York Times op-ed essay, "characters of
color are limited to the townships of occasional historical books that concern
themselves with the legacies of civil

Vicky Schippers
New York, N.Y.

Don't 'Scapegoat' Charters
For Failing Students With Disabilities
To the Editor:
After presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
stated in a town-hall meeting in South Carolina
that "most charter schools ... don't take the
hardest-to-teach kids. Or if they do, they don't
keep them," there was a media flurry regarding
whether charters enroll and retain such hardto-teach students, including students with
disabilities ("Would Hillary Clinton Be an AntiCharter-School President?," Charters and Choice
blog, www.edweek.org, Nov. 9, 2015).
Consider the irony of this narrative, that
charters are a scourge because they underserve
students with disabilities as part of those hardto-teach groups. This assumes that traditional
public schools are consistently providing a quality
education to students with disabilities, which is
hardly the situation.
We are 25 years into the evolution of charters,
and they are growing for a reason: Parents want
options. Not all charters have embraced their
responsibilities to students with disabilities, and
data also demonstrate that many regular public
schools are also failing these students.
However, wide variability in these data tell us
that we can do better. There are good and bad
schools in both sectors. The variability in student
outcomes is the problem that we need to address,
not whether charters accept hard-to-teach
students.
Advocates committed to students with
disabilities can't afford to pass up opportunities
to innovate. The autonomy extended by state
charter laws is just that, an opportunity. Politics
can oversimplify complicated issues. But students
with disabilities seeking a quality education don't
benefit from the scapegoating of charters. Rather
than exploiting incidents of discrimination as
a weapon to rally opponents against charters,
I urge those concerned about students with
disabilities to focus on developing thoughtful
policies and practices that will ensure equal
access and quality programs-two constructs
that are intricately connected, regardless of
educational setting.
Gross generalizations about school quality may
play well for politics, but they fail to advance the
important dialogue about promoting excellence
and equity for all students.
Lauren Morando Rhim
Executive Director and Co-Founder
National Center for Special Education in Charter Schools
New York, N.Y.

COMMENTARY POLICY
Education Week takes no editorial positions, but
publishes opinion essays and letters from outside
contributors in its Commentary section.
For information about submitting an essay or
letter for review, visit
www.edweek.org/go/guidelines.

22 | EDUCATION WEEK | February 17, 2016 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary

iStockphoto

LETTERS to
the EDITOR

Diverse Books

sales, income, and property taxes. A well-off
community provides state-of-the-art buildings
and equipment, excellent teachers, and that extra
ingredient-parents who actively advocate for
these things. In our poorest communities, where
ESSA will put control back at the local level, the
opposite is true.
Public schools, even the best, cannot by
themselves help the poor climb from poverty. To
accomplish that, wraparound support services
are needed, the kind of things middle- and upperclass children claim as their birthright. ESSA
makes no provision for these and unfortunately,
under ESSA, many children will remain behind.

rights and slavery but are never given
a pass card to traverse the lands of adventure, curiosity, imagination, or personal growth."
No child's introduction to AfricanAmericans in children's literature
should be limited to slavery, the civil
rights movement, or the countless
other oppression narratives that so
often characterize books about the
African-American experience.
Negative and misleading depictions
of nonwhite people in children's books,
often under the guise of diversity or celebration, interfere with students' right
to an equitable and humane education.
According to the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress
results, 85 percent of black male 4th
graders in the United States read
below "proficient." Low literacy of this
proportion is not merely a matter of
deficient reading skills. The reading
struggles of many nonwhite children,
especially those living in poverty, reflect a revolt against reading experiences that omit or misrepresent their
interests and culture and, in effect, diminish their self-worth.
The persistence of disproportionately low reading scores among black
boys and other underserved student
populations reveals a systematic failure by American society and our education system.
The societal indifference toward the
struggles and disenfranchisement
of nonwhite citizens didn't begin in
adulthood at a voting booth, but on the
colorful rugs of early-childhood classrooms during read-alouds. Children's
literature, read-alouds, and the resulting discussions will continue to shape
children's perceptions. The extent to
which all children, especially white
children, are exposed to books with
diverse characters in diverse settings
across diverse topics will determine,
at least in part, if future generations
of Americans gain a genuine appreciation of difference or languish in bigotry,
racism, and white supremacy.
Publishers must publish more diverse
children's books, and teacher-preparation programs must better equip educators to create engaging year-round
learning experiences using diverse
titles. In sum, I advocate for diversity
in children's literature that affirms the
humanity and culture of all children. n

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Education Week - February 17, 2016

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