Owning Up to Failure

A nice Op Ed:

Danielle K.  Smith, a 22-year-old product of Waterbury public schools, is the kind of  person educators speak of with pride: her hard work in high school honors  courses and her desire to excel helped her gain entrance to the Ivy League.  She graduated from Yale last year.

But Ms. Smith, who is  African-American, wishes Connecticut would stop citing people like her as  examples of all that is right with the state’s public schools. She believes  the state would be far better off focusing on its routine failure to educate a  large percentage of its minority students.

Connecticut’s “achievement  gap,” which is the academic disparity between middle class and poor students,  is the widest of any state, and the achievement gap between minority and white  students is one of the worst in the country.

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Owning Up to Failure
Editorial, Connecticut Section, New York Times
Sunday, July 1, 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/opinion/nyregionopinions/CT-education.html

Danielle K. Smith, a 22-year-old product of Waterbury public schools, is the kind of person educators speak of with pride: her hard work in high school honors courses and her desire to excel helped her gain entrance to the Ivy League. She graduated from Yale last year.