The broad-strokes agenda laid out by Gov. Jon S. Corzine in his recent State of the State address will have its supporters and its detractors. Among those in the latter category should be every black and Hispanic parent with a child in an Abbott district public school.
During his tenure, the governor has heaped both money and praise on our public education system. He regularly describes it as „the envy“ of other states and cites what is often advertised as the „highest graduation rate in the nation“ by the New Jersey Education Association.
The utterly questionable nature of these axioms aside, what he does not say is far more important.
The governor cites a recent study that ranked New Jersey in the top five nationally for public education output with a grade of B-minus. He does not tell us that the national average for that study is a C or that we spend 32 percent more per pupil for this nominal distinction.
He does not address the fact that the average minority high school graduate is four grade levels behind his or her white counterpart, despite receiving the same diploma. He does not reveal that, although only 15 percent of high school graduates come from the Abbott districts, they represent 42 percent of students who use the state’s less-rigorous alternate route assessment, the SRA, which is triggered after students fail the standard exit exam as many as three times. That’s a test that can be passed with a score as low as 47 percent.
The governor avoids saying that the 11,000 to 15,000 students annually — disproportionately minority — who use the SRA are, regardless, counted in the state’s graduation total. Without them, our graduation rate falls from 1st to 24th. Or that one-third of NJ STARS scholarship recipients, ostensibly our top high school performers, need remediation.
The governor does not let the parents of minority children in the Abbott districts know that our fourth-grade reading assessment — the promised indicator of Abbott success and urban school reform — can be passed by answering as few as 42 percent of the questions correctly. In Asbury Park, only four out of 196 fourth-graders scored above 70 percent on this test.
And all of this is the result of spending that dwarfs almost all districts, urban or suburban, in the country.
Does this sound like a system that should be the envy of the rest of the nation to you? Surely not, when even the governor himself, who lived in the elite burg of Summit, chose to send his children to private school instead of the public schools in his ostensibly high-performing school district.
The governor, and those who serve him in the state Department of Education, maintain two education systems in this state. One you attend if you are white and live in the suburbs — which still was not good enough for his children — and another you attend if you are poor, minority and live in a city. You may succeed if you attend school in the former, but you will almost certainly fail if you attend school in the latter.
This segregation of race, quality and opportunity — and his support of it — can no longer be tolerated.
Though minority parents should be upset by this, there is one group that has enjoyed the governor’s support on these affairs: the New Jersey Education Association. Even in these dire fiscal times, he has increased funding to this political gorilla. And all the while, he has cemented his commitments to the status quo, barriers to teacher quality and deployment hard-wired into teachers‘ contracts — as well as to those who market the failure of minority students, glossed over in his State of the State speech, as success to parents, students and taxpayers.
The governor calls himself a friend to minorities. He can prove it by doing three things:
By being truthful about how desperate circumstances are for children of color in the Abbotts.
By embracing initiatives, such as tenure reform, merit pay, charter schools and choice, that do not require low-income minority children to transform into different children (mainly white ones from upper-class
families) for them to work.
And by stopping the sacrifice of black and Hispanic children on the altar of the hollow lie of „the nation’s best public schools“ because it is convenient or because he believes it will get him re-elected.
We do not need a governor who looks the other way as black and brown children are tracked for lives of menial labor, crime, prison or death because they are unable to read the diplomas upon which their names are written.
Derrell Bradford is deputy director of E3 (Excellent Education for Everyone)
Source: The Asbury Park Press, Feb. 1, 2009.