Let's fully fund McCleary, but not at the expense of equity

By Matt Halvorson

It's been a common refrain among those attacking charter schools in Washington State to criticize charter advocates for not simultaneously shouting from the rooftops for the legislature to fully fund our public schools.

So, let's talk McCleary.

It's been four years since the McCleary vs. State decision. As causes go, this one's a layup. Should our schools get the "full" funding legally promised to them? Yes. Easy.

But reality isn't quite so simple. And those trumpeting the “McCleary-first” mantra seem to either ignore or remain oblivious to the complexity of our current public education situation.

A new study out of Johns Hopkins University discussed in the Washington Post found that white teachers expect significantly less academic success than black teachers when evaluating the same black student, and that "this is especially true for black boys."

When a black teacher and a white teacher evaluate the same black student, the white teacher is about 30 percent less likely to predict the student will complete a four-year college degree, the study found. White teachers are also almost 40 percent less likely to expect their black students will graduate high school.

The researchers analyzed data from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002, an ongoing study following 8,400 10th grade public school students. That survey asked two different teachers, who each taught a particular student in either math or reading, to predict how far that one student would go in school. With white students, the ratings from both teachers tended to be the same. But with black students, boys in particular, there were big differences — the white teachers had much lower expectations than black teachers for how far the black students would go in school.

The public education system the McCleary-first crowd is proposing we fully fund is not teaching or caring for students of color or students from low-income backgrounds as well as it is white students from at least middle income. And the hidden truth here is that they are asking communities of color and their advocates to wait, as if somehow more money will buy equity, or as if funding a flawed system should absolutely take precedent over trying to fix it.

Nothing in McCleary that I've found speaks directly to these racial and social inequities. Our state House has voted to "close the opportunity gap" five times since the McCleary decision, yet the gap remains, seeming not to care that it has been rhetorically vetoed. There's reason for skepticism, even if the money was there.

So, yes, I demand that we fully fund our schools.

I also demand mandatory implicit bias testing for all public school teachers.

Take a look at this fascinating nugget from a Washington Post article about implicit bias among NBA referees:

“‘Racial bias is a malleable trait,’ says study co-author Joseph Price. ‘Large-scale public focus on a specific type of racial bias in a specific group can make it go away.’ Price says the same could hold true for any situation in which implicit racial bias plays a role – from police officers deciding who to pull over to teachers deciding how to grade an essay."

Let’s make sure our teachers know what their blind spots look like before we send them in to influence a classroom full of children.

Let’s make sure we can fully support the system we’re fully funding.