This is a story about what happens when a state education department partners with city school districts in an attempt to close the achievement gap between poor, minority city students and their counterparts in the predominantly white and more affluent suburban districts. It is a story set in New Jersey, but the lessons apply in any American city that has concentrations of poor children in failing school districts. What sets New Jersey apart is the generous level of court-mandated funding available, and the fact that preschool in the state begins at age three.
A preliminary look at the results of New Jersey's expensive efforts resulting from the landmark New Jersey Supreme Court case Abbott v. Burke suggests an unsurprising conclusion: when additional funds are concentrated on supporting and enhancing teachers' efforts to assess the needs of their students and tailor their instruction to those needs, dramatically better results are possible. However, if no coherent plan for improved classroom instruction is implemented, more money makes no difference. In fact, without proper planning, increased funding instead can produce confusion and even declining performance. New Jersey has demonstrated remarkable success in improving children's educational attainment-for example, only in Massachusetts did fourth graders score higher than those in New Jersey, a much more diverse state, on the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading test. And, remarkably, New Jersey was the only state in which scores in all ethnic categories improved over 2005.
In Plain Sight explores the focused effort by many of New Jersey's poorest school districts to introduce effective early literacy practices that led to the state's fairly dramatic improvement in test scores. No one is better equipped to tell the story of New Jersey's success in closing the achievement gap than Gordon MacInnes, and his remarkably frank and comprehensive examination of those districts where poor, minority students demonstrated continued academic improvement provides invaluable lessons for improving the academic prospects for all.
Gordon MacInnes, a fellow at The Century Foundation and lecturer at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, has devoted four decades to government service and leadership on issues related to education, poverty, and urban living. He served from 2002 to April 2007 as assistant commissioner for Abbott implementation for the New Jersey Department of Education, where he oversaw a division that was created to coordinate the implementation of Abbott v. Burke, the nation's most prescriptive and sweeping state supreme court ruling on school finance, and to improve academic achievement in the state's poorest cities. He is the author of Wrong for All the Right Reasons: How White Liberals Have Been Undone by Race (NYU Press, 1996).
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