Abstract

What's Good Enough?

The author argues that pressure on U.S. schools to achieve educational standards may help poor and minority children catch up to their wealthier peers. While gaps between the academic achievement of white and minority children were reduced in the first decades after the end of legal segregation, they were never eliminated. By almost any educational measure, the average black or Latino child continues to lag behind her white or Asian counterpart. That threw the issue back to the states, where it has remained ever since, but where, in an accumulation of crucial state Supreme Court decisions and associated legislative reforms, the drive for decent schools for poor and minority children has taken a new, unexpected--and perhaps encouraging--set of turns. At the heart of those cases is the principle of adequacy, a legal idea, rooted in variously worded state constitutional provisions, that's as promising as it is awkward. Advocates of educational equity have attempted to turn the "standards" movement--which has been championed by conservatives--into a lever for progressive change. With the enactment in 2002 of the No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush's school accountability law and his prime claim to "compassionate" conservatism, the Administration has perhaps unwittingly given the adequacy movement additional steam.