policy analysts bite back

here

and

here

Responding to Classroom Caste System

Missing from all of these analyses, as usual, is the hapless parent.

You know, the parent, the person actually teaching the basic skills all these white kids supposedly possess in spades before they set foot inside a public school. (gosh. I wonder why we have all those "reading specialists" floating around our K-3 school? Aren't parents supposed to be handling phonics? How could an upper middle class white kid possibly have trouble learning to read?)

The idea that there could possibly be a critical thinking gap when white kids are spending their earliest years in school not learning "basic skills," but checking out "the role of quilts on the Underground Railroad," is plain wrong.

Of course, if NCLB has created a situation in which disadvantaged black and Hispanic children are being taught basic skills and advantaged white children are being taught quilts and dances "based on retellings of Cinderella," we should be seeing the last of the achievement gap pretty soon here.