In This Issue | Minority Achievement

Studies and news stories on the U.S. crisis in minority education have created a veritable Mount McKinley of paper and electronic output since the mid-1990s. That's when national and local test data began to alert researchers to an alarming trend: The achievement gap, which had narrowed in the '70s and '80s, was yawning yet again. White students were once more outpacing black, Hispanic, and Native students in the classroom.

Just about every educational, journalistic, and political group has weighed in on the issue: the NAACP and the College Board. The National Black Caucus of State Legislators and the U.S. Congress. The Phi Delta Kappan and the New York Times—to name a handful. As philosophically divergent and geographically scattered as the studies and the discussions are, they nevertheless coalesce around one common call to action, ranking even as a national imperative: Close the gap. Do it, they say, for the kids who ought to have a chance to become physicists and physicians, photojournalists and playwrights, politicians, prosecutors, professors, principals, pharmacists, psychologists, paleontologists, percussionists, painters, potters, and every other possibility in a world of endless possibilities. In a democracy whose long-term viability rests on equality of opportunity, the varied voices agree, every child must get the best education available.

This call is arguably the toughest challenge facing schools today. Some say it can't be done without deep social change. As long as kids come from poor homes, broken families, and violent neighborhoods, they reason, schools can't hope to do better. But the research tells a different story. Studies by the U.S. Department of Education and others have turned up islands of excellence in a picture that is admittedly bleak. There are schools beset by poverty and burdened by past failures that have turned things around for their minority students—schools where the staff has refused to settle for a status quo that limits the possibilities for children of color.

No magic formula will bring minority kids to parity with their peers. But researchers and practitioners have turned up a wealth of promising ideas—both strategies and attitudes—that make a difference. "No single policy or program can ensure the school success of every child, but a combination of approaches can," renowned researcher Robert Slavin writes in an issue of Educational Leadership titled "Reaching for Equity" in December 1997/January 1998. "Research in education is increasingly identifying the kinds of approaches we could use if we decided as a society to end the poor academic performance of so many of our children."

In his article, "Can Education Reduce Social Inequity?" Slavin identifies three keys to success:

1. Begin to think of all children as being "at promise." Slavin counsels: "Build on cultural and personal strengths. Accept nothing but outstanding performance. Respond immediately and intensively if children start to fall behind."

2. Start early. "Research on programs for three- and four-year-olds," he says, "finds consistent and powerful impacts of high-quality early childhood programs on the cognitive performance of young children."

3. Work on many fronts at once. "Effective schooling anticipates all the ways children might fail," Slavin notes, "and then plans how each will be prevented or quickly and effectively dealt with."

In this issue of Northwest Education, we take you on a journey to some of the beacons of equity within the Northwest where ideas like these are yielding results. You'll travel from the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana's remote Rockies to the congested inner cores of Portland and Seattle; from the agricultural heartland of Eastern Washington to a neighborhood of immigrants and blue-collar workers in Anchorage.