Closing the "achievement gap"

In the Journal this morning, link, links to every story the Journal has published on "the achievement gap" in education.

The gap they refer to is interracial; whites, Hispanics, blacks, and so on.

In grouping kids by race, an opportunity presents itself to spend millions of dollars on Hispanics, on blacks, and so on. And by spending millions of dollars, I don't mean, on students. I mean on more bureaucracies and more bureaucrats.

In truth, there is only one achievement gap. It applies to an individual child, and it is the difference between where they are educationally, and where they could be.

If you were an educator, and you had a student in front of you, and invisible to you, you could ask questions of the student and eventually come to understand the obstacles between that student and the best they can do. You could do this, and never ask them what color their skin is.

Grouping students according to their race is fundamentally no different, nor any more effective than grouping them according to their date of manufacture. "Cemetery seating"; the educational model that takes 30 kids with nothing in common but the year of their birth, and then moves them lockstep in exactly the same direction at exactly the same speed for 12 years, is the intrinsic flaw in education. It is the cause of our failure.

The answer lies in individual educational plans; plans tailor made for the individual needs of individual students.

But alas, there are no bureaucracies to be built in that endeavor; no more bureaucrats to be given government jobs for life.

So we will ignore the obvious fix, and try the same tactic one more time. And then we will try it again, and again, and again.

There is one achievement gap that is of real importance;
it is the individual achievement gap.