Closing The Achievement Gap, Guerrila Style

The New York Times today published a feature on the lack of progress made toward closing the achievement gap. I'm sure many blogs will reference this as evidence of any number of factors, from the ineptitude of federal intervention, to the invisible hand of the IQ gap. The real problem revealed by the Times article is the fact that for years we've been attacking this issue from one side, allowing the enemy to limit the battle to a single front. Attempts to improve the educational environments and instructional quality of predominantly low-income, Black and Latino schools are all well and good, but to truly close the achievement gap we must not only improve those schools, we must damage highly successful, affluent, White and Asian schools in equal measure.

I hereby declare a sweeping initiative to relocate ineffective teachers into the richest schools. In so doing, we do not seek those who will merely refuse to work hard or show movies in place of instruction; some of those kids would insist on achieving anyway. No, we need teachers who will actively mis-teach. The capital of the U.S. is Topeka. The order of operations is SADMEP. Good topic sentences always include "Hi, my name is Janie, and today I'm gonna tell you about..." Homework is optional or unimportant, and Columbus discovered America.

We need teachers committed to doing an awful job with America's best and brightest, those proud few who are willing to put aside years of below-average service in pursuit of the much loftier goal of actively imparting instructional damage. A pedagogy of impairment.

By opening this second front in the battle for educational equity, my brothers and sisters, your apathy, unprofessionalism, and complete lack of perspective will no longer lay foundational proof that the perception of inadequacy hung around the neck of your community and District is more factual accuracy than imagined albatross. Your inability to grasp any ideas outside the shoe-box paradigm you have constructed, coupled with your self-important delusions of grandeur will no longer provide eloquent illustration as to the causation of many societal ills -- both great and small. Under your slip-shod guidance, we expect our otherwise accomplished young Americans to feel a sense of frustration, despair, and creeping nihilism. Whereas you once embodied the cure for idealism and hope, you may now become the antidote for that most destructive of gaps.

Vox populi, vox dei.