By Julia Johnson
(From The Miami Herald, April 6th, 2013)
I have the greatest respect for parents who get involved in education issues — especially the ones now engaged in the debate over parent empowerment legislation. However, I disagree with those who oppose the bill, and I must question the accuracy of some of their claims.
Some historical perspective is in order.
Back in the 1990s, when Florida first began assessing students’ ability to read, 74 percent of Florida’s African-American students were functionally illiterate. Educators could sign off on their schools’ poor service to minority children, yet schools that had failed these children could still collect full funding to underwrite more failure. And the parents of these children had little if any say in this system.
I don’t understand what a critic of parent empowerment meant when she recently wrote that it would use parents like “cheap napkins.” But I do know that low-income kids were used as a cheap paycheck, and their schools were oftentimes used as a training ground for novice teachers and a depository for ineffective ones.
Education reform has started reversing this trend. Florida’s African American fourth graders have advanced more than two grade levels in reading, and their scores on national assessments now exceed the national average. Low-income children once were practically nonexistent in Advanced Placement classes. But now Florida leads the nation in providing them access to these courses.