John Thompson is an Oklahoma City teacher with 18 years of urban high school experience and an education blogger at thisweekineducation.com. He contributes regularly to our blog on education issues.

The Oklahoma City Public Schools has launched a campaign to close the “achievement gap.” To their credit, the school system acknowledges that our gap between Black and White student performance has grown since the federal No Child Left Behind law increased investments for schools serving poor children of color. The problem is that the OKCPS, like most school systems, has focused on instructional reforms, despite the social science and cognitive science explaining why those efforts are doomed without first addressing deeper issues. As was recently explained by Jonathan Zimmerman in the New York Review of Books, if we believe in the social science that was a foundation of the Brown v. Topeka desegregation case, we must admit that NCLB-driven policies are “doomed.” Read the rest of this entry »

John Thompson is an Oklahoma City teacher with 18 years of urban high school experience and an education blogger at thisweekineducation.com. He contributes regularly to our blog on education issues.

In 2000, when serving on the Steering Committee for MAPS for KIDS, I grinned as arch-conservative Leland Gourley demanded a “warranty” that Oklahoma City Public School students would be reading at grade level by 3^rd grade. Little did I know that cognitive and social science research would soon show that Gourley had identified the key to closing the achievement gap.

I recalled Gourley’s prescience recently when the liberal Schott Foundation for Public Education announced that New Jersey has the nation’s highest graduation rate for Black males. In contrast to the national rate of 47 percent, or Oklahoma with a rate of 52 percent, in New Jersey 69 percent of  Black males graduate from high school. The Schott Foundation also reported 4^th grade NAEP Reading test results showing 66 percent of Oklahoma Black males score Below Basic, as do 58 percent of Black Males nationally. In New Jersey, 45 percent of Black males score Below Basic, 40 percent score Basic, and 15 percent score Proficient or Advanced.  Better still, in contrast with the normative trend where Black NAEP scores drop by the 8th grade, there was no fall-off in New Jersey.  This is crucial because social scientists have long used New Jersey as evidence that the best way to help poor children is to invest whatever is necessary so that elementary children read for comprehension. Read the rest of this entry »