Earlier this month, something called the “Shared Governance Committee” at Berkeley High School in California voted on a proposal the school’s principal had submitted earlier.
The board adopted the plan; the result is that BHS science students who used a one-hour time span before or after school for lab work can now kiss that practice goodbye. The five science teachers who teach those lab classes can kiss their jobs goodbye as well, according to news stories.
The reason? That’s best explained in the action plan the governing committee approved. This is a quote from the plan:
“This year Berkeley High was identified as the high school with the largest racial equity/achievement gap in the state. This is unconscionable. All students, regardless of ethnicity, deserve effective instruction with challenging and engaging curriculum.
“All students deserve to learn the skills and content needed to be prepared for college. We need to know our students, to ensure that they have the information and support they need to find their way through Berkeley High and beyond.”
Everybody get that? White and Asian-American students perform better academically than their Latino and black counterparts at BHS. (I know the politically correct term for black Americans is “African-Americans,” but the name change from black to African-American back in the 1980s didn’t help with that achievement gap thing one iota, did it?) White and Asian-American students benefit most from science labs. So to free up money and resources to help the underachievers, the science labs have to go.
This news hit local talk radio stations in Baltimore earlier this week. Radio show hosts and callers expressed outrage after learning white and Asian-American students will suffer to benefit black and Latino students. I didn’t feel any outrage; I was too busy giggling with peals of laughter.
I trust you see the humor: In the People’s Republic of Berkeley, arguably the bluest enclave in the entire nation, there exists a startling achievement gap between white and Asian-American students on the one hand, and black and Latino students on the other.
Hey, you’ve just gotta love it. This is even better than Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. screaming racial profiling after getting arrested by a white cop in what may be the second-bluest enclave in the nation (Cambridge, Mass.) earlier this year.
Something is clearly amiss at BHS, but not what the principal and governing committee think. Yes, there is a racial achievement gap, though not only BHS, but also schools the length and breadth of the land.
We can speculate for eons about the reasons (the racial achievement gap was closing until the 1980s and then stopped; I’ve blamed gangsta rap, the crack cocaine epidemic and the movie “Scarface,” and I’m sticking with that theory) but there’s a hint about the solution.
The folks who run BHS need to call in Geoffrey Canada. Canada runs the Promise Academy in Harlem. He’s also the mastermind behind the Harlem Children’s Zone. The Promise Academy is a K-10 charter school.
In a recent “60 Minutes” segment, it was revealed that elementary schoolers have eliminated the achievement gap in reading and math, outperforming white students in other New York City public schools. The Promise Academy’s middle schoolers have “virtually eliminated” the achievement gap in math and cut it in half in reading.
How did Canada, the faculty, students and parents at the Promise Academy achieve these results? The key words in all this may be “charter school.” Canada has eliminated the two factors that may be the greatest hindrance to achieving the “education” in public education: The education bureaucracy and teachers unions. He’s also taken care of what may be the third greatest, lack of discipline.
It exists at the Promise Academy, and learning is the result. Those charter schools that fail — and liberals love pointing to charter schools that fail as justification for why there shouldn’t be charter schools, but would never dream of saying that failing public schools would justify eliminating public education — probably don’t have that discipline element.
Baltimore’s KIPP Ujima Academy is a charter school with an academic record equally as impressive as Canada’s Promise Academy. The key element at KIPP is also discipline.
Eliminating science labs at BHS won’t help black and Latino students there. But getting them the heck out of BHS and into a good charter school might.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
