Top high school fails NCLB—beyond empty clichés, no one asks why

At Princeton High School the average cumulative SATs of the 2004 graduating class were over 1200. Pretty impressive (though less so when we remember the substantial re-norming of the SATs that took place in the mid-90s). Yet at this top-ranked school, the 10 percent of students who are racial minorities are doing so poorly that the school failed the No Child Left Behind guidelines. The blacks at Princeton High all come from middle-class homes. There’s no discrimination one can point to. Parents of the black pupils are glad that NCLB has forced attention on this problem, and that it will require the school to devote extra efforts to closing the racial achievement gap. Yet the story offers no suggestions as to what causes the gap, except for the “low expectations” that teachers have historically had of black pupils, and “inadequacies of the system.” That’s really penetrating journalism by Samuel G. Freedman of the New York Times.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 28, 2005 01:28 PM | Send