Thrown out the baby with the bath water?

Is it possible that in our rush to address the issue of racial achievement gaps, we have thrown out the baby with the bath water?  Have we abandoned the most productive policy measures of the 50’s, 60’s, & 70’s in favor of “colorblind” policies that actually exacerbate the problem?  Amy Stuart Wells of Columbia University thinks so.  Here are three excerpts from the summary.  You can see the NEPC report at:

http://tinyurl.com/ot2xyt7

“After careful examination of relevant research, scholar Amy Stuart Wells of Columbia University concludes that the most popular education policies of the last 30 years – namely school choice policies and strict accountability systems – rarely mention race, diversity, or the dramatic racial/ethnic demographic shifts taking place in the public school population. As a result, she argues, these policies advance an ineffective “colorblind” approach to educational reform that ignores stark racial inequality when implementing policies and then bemoans vivid racial inequalities in educational outcomes.”

“She describes “mounting evidence to suggest that so-called ‘colorblind’ accountability and school choice policies, premised on narrow definitions of school quality and absent interventions to support diversity, exacerbate racial and social class segregation and inequality.”

“By contrast, in the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s and 1970s, when several race-conscious education policies, including affirmative action and school desegregation, were implemented that directly addressed racial inequality, Wells notes. That same period “coincided with the largest reductions in the black-white achievement gap in the nation’s history,” she observes.”

(Emphasis is mine.)