Kati Haycock, director of The Education Trust, has released a new
report full of data that she hopes will support efforts to improve the
quality of public education.
WASHINGTON
On two huge screens at the front of a hotel ballroom,
Kati Haycock displays a chart demonstrating that in the past five
years, schools in El Paso, Texas, have brought up test scores of its
Black and Latino students by about 50 percentage points. The jump has
nearly eliminated the achievement gap with White students, who improved
their test scores at the same time. All kids appear to be doing better
in El Paso.
“My challenge to you is this,” Haycock said to the 800 or so educators from around the country. “Beat El Paso.”
Haycock was speaking at the November conference of The Education
Trust, an organization she created to “promote high academic
achievement for all students, at all levels, kindergarten through
college,” with a focus on those students often left behind — Latino,
African American, and Native American students.
The conference attendees included parents, teachers, guidance
counselors, university administrators, and heads of local and state
school systems and education associations. Many among this loose band
of people at all levels of the education system feel a sense of urgency
that if they do not act quickly, their school systems may be dismantled
by charters and vouchers. In the words of a top official from
California’s school system, “this may be the last chance we have to
save public education.”
That urgency is shared by Haycock, who, with characteristic
bluntness, said later in an interview, “The polls among Black folk
around vouchers versus public education are an indication that you
cannot continue screwing a whole bunch of people and have them not
catch you at it and decide that the game is so rigged that they may not
continue to play. I think we’re hovering on the edge of waking up to
the fact that this is a seriously rigged place.”
That “rigged place” is public education, and it is Haycock’s goal to change that.
