No distinction without differentiation.

I was reading an article today about a school principal who, after seeing the low standard test scores of certain races in her school gather all the African-American 4th, 5th, and 6th graders for a pep-talk. Of course this pissed off all their parents, because she was singling them out and making them feel dumb. She was going to do the same for the Latino students, but decided not to after the backlash from parents.

I really have to wonder what exactly the state and federal governments except but that when they require all the different races in a school to test the same. The parents were saying that she should have brought all the low achieving students in for the assembly, but that wouldn't fix her problem - that there was a gap between these races and the white students.

I think Ockham is the one who talked about the fact that there can be no distinction without differentiation, and I like to turn that around by saying that there will always be distinction when there is differentiation. As long as these programs like No Child Left Behind insist on looking at test scores across races, teachers are going to have to focus on the differences in student's races - which they shouldn't have to do. All it does is put the teachers in a difficult position, and reinforces for some students that they're are being picked on because of their race. A lot of times they're not - they're being picked on because they don't care about school and underperform - but that's not what they think.