Leid Stories - Battling the Blackboard Bungle - 03/26/13

All across America, especially in major metropolitan areas, public schools in African American and Latino communities are being shut down at an alarming rate.  City administrations are giving all kinds of explanations – budget issues, declines in enrollment, parental preferences for charter schools, etc. But overwhelmingly it’s because the targeted schools are failing, they say.

Dr. Pedro Noguera the Peter L. Agnew Professor of Education at New York University and an expert on school reform, contends that federal mandates not only are at the root of the problem, they all but guarantee failure at every level. The Obama administration’s “Race to the Top,” a stylized redux of Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” program, is wrongheaded and just plain bad educational policy, he says, offering instead a “Broader, Bolder Approach to Education” in this edition of Leid Stories.