Aside from those who are polishing up their “Status Quoer of the Year” trophies, most within the education sector recognize that the future of public education has never been as intertwined with the future of our economy as it is today.  The school improvements sought by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and those long funded by groups such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are not simply change for change sake.  They are specific actions designed to make our P-12 systems more relevant to life after school, ensuring that more students see the career options before them and possess the knowledgebase and skills necessary to achieve in a 21^st century workforce.

Education, or at least effective education, does not happen in a vacuum.  Improvement efforts must be tied to outcomes and to real-life expectations.  That’s why we no longer teach our children Sanskrit.  It’s why typing has given way to keyboarding.  And it is why language instruction in Latin and Italian has given way to greater emphasis on the teaching of Spanish, Chinese, and even Hmong.  We do not, cannot, and should not reform simply for reforms’ sake.  We need to ensure that changes are relevant to future educational and career paths.

Yet even today, there are those who fail to see the connections.  In recent years, I’ve held focus groups and discussion sessions with teacher educators and classroom teachers and school board members and policymakers, and some of the comments were frightening.  Many believe the quality of education in the United States is stronger today than it has ever been.  Instruction has never been more effective.  And some believe achievement gaps and drop-out rates are simply urban legends, designed to spur changes that are unnecessary and undermine the great work being done by the system, overlooking that “the system” has nearly half of minority students are dropping out of high school and where only a third of today’s ninth graders will go on to postsecondary education.

For these doubting Thomases and the defenders of the status quo, the recent data released by McKinsey & Company crosswalking the achievement gap in our schools with the financial shortfalls of our economy is downright startling.  McKinsey’s April 2009 report, The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools, paints a bleak picture of the very real impact of the performance failures in our schools on the future of our nation.  The student achievement gap costs our nation $3 billion to $5 billion a day.  The achievement gap between black and Hispanic students and white students costs us more than half a trillion dollars a year, or 4 percent of our GFP.  And the gap between low-income students and the rest can cost us upwards of $670 billion a year, or 5 percent of GDP. 

Recognizing there are obvious overlaps between those two disaggregated groups, we know that achievement gap costs us a bare minimum of $500 billion a year.  For those clamoring for additional dollars for our public schools, believing that funding has been the only obstacle to student success, imagine the impact half a trillion dollars could have on P-12?

Moreover, McKinsey’s data spotlighted the social impacts of a struggling school system.  The consulting company boldly proclaimed that data clearly demonstrates that, as early as the fourth grade, achievement gap indicators demonstrate: 1) lower rates of high school and college graduation; 2) lower lifetime earnings; 3) poorer health; and 4) higher rates of incarceration.

This data needs to end, once and for all, the debate on how important student achievement is as an evaluation measure.  In today’s day and age, performance is king.  Data is the driver.  And quantitative information needs to rule the roost. 

Like it or not, that means student achievement is determined by performance on state assessments and on Adequate Yearly Progress measures.  Until we have national education standards and national assessments, the state test is our tool.  It is the single measure that helps us determine student proficiency and allows teachers and families to understand where their children stand in comparison with others in the class, the school, and the state.

Now is the not the time for debate about multiple measures or looking for creative ways to evaluate students on qualitative factors that cannot be captured on “high-stakes tests.”  The McKinsey data, coupled with the warning calls and alerts issued for the past 25 years since the issuance of A Nation at Risk make one thing clear.  The achievement gap is Public Enemy Number One when it comes to the success of our schools.

Elementary school learning gaps are driven, in large part, between the reading proficiency differences between low-income and higher-income students.  Our national high school crisis is further exacerbated by the irrefutable realities than half of black and Hispanic students drop out rather than earn a high school diploma.  And even for those who enter postsecondary education, high levels of remediation, particularly in English and math, only further emphasize the differences between the haves and have nots.

The Education Equality Project has seized on the McKinsey data, using the most-recent numbers as a beacon to draw attention to EEP’s overall goal to eliminate the racial and ethnic achievement gap in public education by working to create and effective school for every child.  Last week, EEP used the opportunity to address the issue of teacher quality, and the irrefutable linkages between the effectiveness of teachers and the performance of students.  This is particularly true of students from historically disadvantaged populations, who are often saddled with teachers who are unqualified, unprepared, or simply incapable of leading struggling classrooms and providing the instruction necessary to overcome the learning gaps identified by McKinsey and others.

The achievement gap is a national disgrace.  There is no question about it.  For the past decade, we have talked ad naseum about student achievement and the need to reach AYP.  Noble goals, yes.  But in the process, we have neglected the gaps and let far too many children fall through the cracks.  As a result, the NCLB era is one where the differences between the haves and have nots continues to grow.  Race is more of an indicator of student struggles than per capita spending.  And those students who benefit the most from a meaningful public education are often the last to actually receive it.

But it begs a larger question.  Can we truly close the achievement gap before we have addressed the issues of equity and opportunity?  Can historically disadvantaged students narrow the learning gap if they are not provided equal access to high-quality learning opportunities?  Can we improve the quality and impact of our public education system by simply defining resources and equity by dollar signs, without factoring in quality and impact?

The answer to all of the above questions is obviously no.  The achievement gap cannot be closed simply through rhetoric and pleasant dreams of lollipops and rainbows.  It requires serious investment in real solutions.  It requires rocking the boat, doing things differently, and holding our states, our schools, and our teachers to high expectations with high consequences.  It requires refusing to buy into the status quo, and accept that the paths of the past have gotten us into the crisis of the present.

So where do we go?  We need qualified, effective teachers in the classroom, and we need to quantify their effectiveness.  We need to demand equitable instructional resources for our schools, ensuring that equity is measured at the highest points of the scale, and not by dropping to the lowest common denominator.  We need greater accountability in the schools, both for instruction and for how we utilize our education resources (particularly new ARRA dollars) and ensure that such money is reaching those students most in need.  We need to involve parents, families, and the community in the school improvement process.  We need to ensure that those students on the failing end of the achievement gap are given new access to the very best instruction, from early childhood education to college prep curricula.  We need to collectively demand more from our schools, and settle for no less.  And we need to keep up the fight until both the opportunity and the achievement gaps are things of the past, joining the phoenix and the unicorn as mythical beasts of the past, never to be seen again.

We must also recognize we have no choice in the matter.  As McKinsey has made crystal clear, the stakes are simply too high for us to be content with the way things are.  The achievement gap is downright destroying the quality of our public schools, the impact of public instruction, and the future of our economy.  To borrow from a mentor of mine, failure to act, knowing what we know, is committing educational malpractice.  If education is indeed our next great civil right, now is the time for our great march on Washington and now is the time for us to truly act on our dream.

Next month, we celebrate the 55^th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board decision, integrating our public schools and offering the promise of equity and opportunity all U.S. Students.  More than a half century later, we still have many, many miles to go before the intent of that decision becomes a reality in our inner-city and low-income schools.  What exactly are we waiting for?