If given the chance, educators can end the educational abuse of struggling learners in general education and special education. It can happen in rich and poor, and urban, suburban and rural school districts. The tools to get it done—the evidence-based best instructional practices under the framework of Response to Intervention (RTI)—exist. But they’re not in the hands of teachers.
As seen in the preceding chapters, that’s because of both Us and Educators. Money and management are in short supply. And the overriding cause is the stalemated politics of school reform. How do we change that? How do we muster the political will to reform the system? This part of the book sets out the steps it will take.
The starting point is to confront the reality that federal action is unavoidable. Chapter 8 exposes the folly of expecting otherwise. The long-cherished American love affair with “local control” of public schools has been and always will be a disaster for disadvantaged children, especially struggling learners who are disproportionately poor and minority.
To overcome resistance to a prominent federal presence, we the people must face squarely the full extent of unequal educational opportunity throughout our land. We must recognize once and for all that learning to read, write and compute is a basic civil right. Chapter 9 lays out various ways to fulfill that right. Amendments to IDEA and the Every Student Succeeds Act could provide federal guarantees that assure RTI in general education. These laws could also reinvent special education as we know it by making IDEA apply only to students with severe cognitive and other disabilities.
What’s more, the realization of equal educational opportunity could be accelerated by civil rights lawsuits like those now pending in Detroit and Berkeley that seek to establish a constitutional right to literacy. It’s worth underscoring that any such federal guarantees do not negate the vital roles that state and local school systems can and should play in carrying them out.
Chapter 10 tackles how to mobilize political power behind reform. What’s the starting lineup of political players and what’s the playbook? Parents should be in the lead; the one saving grace for parents of struggling learners is that there are lots of them. Yet, developing a strong, cohesive constituency is harder than you would think. A major impediment is that a disproportionate percentage of the parents of struggling learners are poor and minority, and therefore lack political muscle. Then too, some tensions exist among parents and advocacy organizations representing different groups of struggling learners, caused by competition for scarce funding.
To surmount these hurdles, political liberals and especially teachers unions must be pressured by parents and other wannabe reformers to lend more support than they have in the past. Parents and teachers should be allies not adversaries in the struggle. This concluding part of the book calls for urgent, collective political action.