WORCESTER – Two years after he left office, former U.S. Secretary of Education John King Jr. said persistent achievement gaps remain the No. 1 challenge facing schools today.
But King, who served under President Barack Obama in that role from 2016 to 2017, said Massachusetts has a rare opportunity to bridge those longstanding divides between poor and minority students and wealthier, white students with the pending adoption of a massive funding bill that aims to fix rampant underfunding of the public education system.
Worcester in particular, he said, thanks to the city’s recent creation of a long-term strategic plan that would theoretically guide the spending of those new dollars, “is well-positioned to put those resources to good use.”
King, now the president and CEO of The Education Trust, a national nonprofit organization focused on closing educational achievement gaps, sat down with the Telegram & Gazette for an interview prior to speaking at the Worcester Educational Collaborative’s annual meeting Tuesday at Mechanics Hall.
As secretary of education, and in his previous work in the Obama administration, King’s agenda included civil rights enforcement, supporting professional development, and ensuring students were prepared for college or careers. While he believes that legacy is intact, he said he is concerned by the direction his successor, current secretary of education Betsy DeVos, has taken.
The greatest threat facing the nation’s public schools, he said, may be the government agency tasked with overseeing them.
“You see the current administration campaigning for voucher schemes that are designed to take resources away from public education,” he said. “I think the most significant threat is chronic disinvestment and abandonment of education.”
Complacency, especially in a state like Massachusetts, which despite having some of the highest test scores in the nation also has some of its widest achievement gaps, is also a concern, said WEC executive director Jennifer Davis Carey, who joined the interview.
“My fear is we’re taking too many victory laps,” she said, content to settle for “islands of success” rather than addressing lingering structural inequities.
Along those same lines, Carey said one of the most important things a school district like Worcester can do is “be able to ask questions – that’s something we’ve struggled with as a district.”
Many critics of the school system have argued that’s been the case with Worcester’s racial disparities in school discipline, which continued this past year despite overall punishment rates falling substantially in the district. Abuse of school discipline has also been a priority area for King, who said implicit bias training is a vital component in addressing the prejudices and misunderstandings that can contribute to students of color being disproportionately targeted for suspensions.
The overall problem of opportunity gaps, meanwhile, boils down to society “giving the least to the students who need it most,” King said – an argument that would find agreement among local school officials who have long contended Worcester is underfunded annually by around $90 million a year by the state. “And because we give the least, we have the predictable achievement gap.”
The state’s billion-dollar school funding reform bill, which passed the House of Representatives last week, could change that dynamic, but it won’t be automatic, King said. Cities like Worcester must make careful decisions about how its potential new spending affects all students, particularly disadvantaged populations, he said.
But Worcester, at least, “has done the hard work to make a strategic plan for the district,” he added, that specifically identifies were equity must be achieved in the schools.
Scott O’Connell can be reached at Scott.O’Connell@telegram.com. Follow him on Twitter @ScottOConnellTG
