But Those Bootstraps . . .

Oops.

Ross Weiner, former policy director for the Education Trust, crafted a semi-mea-culpa Op-ed for the New York Times last week.

Therein he acknowledged the failure of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the federal accountability disaster passed in 2002, later replaced by Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). ESSA emerged from the Obama years and remains in force. The failure, Weiner and others declare, is demonstrated by the inarguable decline in test scores. I have argued relentlessly and hopelessly that the decline in test scores is an inevitable consequence of practices designed to raise test scores!

To be fair, Education Trust is not among the conservative villains who are chopping public education to bits with school choice chain saws. Weiner and his former colleagues support racial and economic justice in education. There is, unfortunately, little evidence that they have been effective.

While EdTrust’s equity mission is well-intended, and Weiner is too, the mea culpa is too little and far too late. 24 years have passed since NCLB began changing schools for the worse through grandiose proclamations and harmful expectations. It is nearly impossible to quantify the damage inflicted and opportunities lost as a result of the ongoing accountability era.

It is particularly tragic that the harm was - and continues to be - incurred most by the very students EdTrust has pledged to support. Poor Black and brown children have always felt the firm hand of government pushing them to perform and holding them accountable for the negligence of the powerful.

NCLB and ESSA have been irritating and inconvenient for relatively affluent, white majority schools. But white, affluent communities and private schools have more money, smaller classes, and a great many resources that encourage learning despite the nuisance of standardized tests.

Both of my Colorado grandchildren have gone through public elementary school without the least bit of test-prep or anxiety, even though they wasted many days sitting in front on a screen taking standardized tests. They also had art, music, theater and lots of free play outside in all seasons.

But poor Black students are virtually warehoused in schools that dress them like little soldiers and practice “tough love” because, as a wealthy, powerful reformer once told me, “They need it.”

NCLB and ESSA were bound to fail because they drove practices that violate almost everything known about children and how they learn. Among many other sins, these accountability policies assume that all children learn in the same way and develop at the same rate. It is hard to imagine a policy more futile and stupid than one demanding that all children be fluent readers by third grade.

Most infuriating is the widespread belief that the problem in education is not anything I have summarized. A plurality -if not majority - of NYT readers seem convinced that what most plagues schools is lousy parenting. I assume that most Times readers enjoy some measure of privilege and, like most privileged folks, are blind to their own manifold advantages.

The poor Black and brown parents at the receiving end of these judgments are, in many cases, too damn tired to pack nutritious lunches with $30 water bottles or join the PTA. They have often been the victims of the same lousy, filthy, underfunded schools attended by their own kids. They are frequently on a bus or subway before dawn, commuting to a job caring for the children of the wealthy folks who blame them for not being sufficiently engaged in their children’s school.

They are caring for elderly relatives in cramped spaces, dodging rodents in their deteriorating public housing, and living with the dull, persistent depression that accompanies poverty. The debilitating effects of multi-generational poverty are the moral failing of a nation.

Schools are a reflection of the society in which they exist. Our society is segregated as are our schools.Our society is inequitable, as is school funding. We relegate generations to poverty or near poverty through political and economic apartheid and then blame the poor for not being good enough parents.

For several decades, the standards and accountability craze has been a massive cover for a nation unwilling to address the fundamental problems - poverty and racism.

Now folks like Weiner have to admit; the approach failed.

But don’t wait for that recognition to inspire meaningful change. All of today’s political capital is being directed toward giving white folks the ability to get the hell out of the mess we’ve made by using school choice to further segregate education and society.