New Rochelle, NY– During a recent talk at the College of New Rochelle, a top official at the U.S. Department of Education assailed two of the most entrenched ideas about what ails America’s public schools.
In her double-barreled attack last week at an event hosted by the Lower Hudson Council of Administrative Women in Education, U.S. Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education Deborah S. Delisle dismissed the notion of an “achievement gap” and said it’s too simplistic to think that merely adopting “best practices” will improve educational outcomes at low-performing schools.
“I’m on a one-woman crusade to dismantle the concept of ‘best practices,’” Delisle said. “I say this because we think we have found the Holy Grail; people move [best practices] to a school district right next door and it doesn’t work.”
Delisle said her other “one-woman crusade” is to challenge people to rethink the idea of an “achievement gap.”
“If we could stop thinking about ‘achievement gaps’ and start thinking about opportunity gaps, we’d go a lot further,” she said, adding that the problem with the idea of an achievement gap is that it puts the focus on children who haven’t learned a particular thing.
“The problem is in that idea, we’re not putting [responsibility] onto the adults.”
Though most of Delisle’s comments focused on what goes on in the K-12 arena, those issues do have implications for colleges of education, which are under increased pressure to produce graduates that make a difference in student achievement.
