When Diane Jean Schemo dedicated a recent New York Times education column, “It Takes More Than Schools To Close The Achievement Gap,” to the proposition that anti-poverty economic and social programs were as necessary for significantly narrowing the achievement gap as educational reform, she cited Richard Rothstein’s important work on that subject, Class and Schools. This led, in turn, to a number of uninformed summary judgments on Rothstein’s arguments.
Now, in a clinic on how to demolish an opposing argument, Rothstein provides first round knockouts of two critics — Checker Finn and Joel Klein. Read it all here.
Unfortunately, this is a classic case of an issue where logical argument goes only so far, because there are very real — and very powerful — interests with a stake in ignoring the need for battling poverty. They want to talk only about what schools can do, because they do not want to hold elected officials and the corporate world responsible for what they should be doing. But Rothstein’s piece will make it harder to pretend that this is a posture which cares about the best interests of children living in poverty.
