07:42 AM EST on Tuesday, January 20, 2004

Excerpts from Mary Sylvia Harrison's keynote address:

Mainly, we can celebrate that we have made great strides in accessing education since the days of "separate but equal." We've seen more minorities complete high school and go to college than ever before. But the trends in the most recent 20 years are troubling, because achievement data show that the education system has failed most of our nation's poor and minority children. There is a tremendous achievement gap that indicates that though we gained access, our kids have been denied a real opportunily to learn.

Why does the gap persist and why does it matter?

It matters because increasing numbers of children are living in poverty.

Today, 40 percent of Providence's and Central Falls' children are poor, and among cities its size, Providence has the third highest poverty rate for children. Three-quarters of Rhode Island's poor children live in the six core cities of Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls, Newport, Woonsocket and West Warwick . . .

The gap persists and matters because low expectations have sorted poor kids into dead-end tracks. The belief that our intelligence is fixed at birth has influenced everyone's behavior: policymakers, lawmakers, school boards, school administrators, teachers, parents and students. It resulted in dumbing-down courses, busy and repetitious work, inflated grades, social promotion, low state standards, lack of effort, and failure to push.

Toward the end of the civil-rights movement we were starting to close some achievement gaps. Then we waged a war on drugs, and saw a 500-percent growth in the U.S. prison population between 1972 and 2000.

In every state in the nation, education budgets have taken huge cuts in relation to the increases in spending on corrections.

. . . In Rhode Island, between 1985 and 2000, state spending on corrections went up 188 percent, while spending on higher education went down 2 percent. And, in keeping with the trend, plans are under way to build a new training school at a cost of $54 million, just as we brace ourselves for cuts in next year's education budget. What's the policy message?

What state-level expectations does this reveal to the children and youth of Rhose Island? The Minister's Alliance thinks it says, 'We're preparing you for the jail trail. We are preparing you a room at the ACI. You will not have a room at URI!'

The No Child Left Behind Act represents a positive shift in public will; this historic federal mandate requires states to make a real commitment to raising overall achievement and has a clear message: it is no longer acceptable for schools to succeed with some of their students; schools must be successful with all the students the serve.

I believe that if Doctor King were alive today, he would preach that education -- especially of the nation's minorities and poor -- is the single most urgent civil-rights issue of the 21st century. He would call on us to be the stewards of closing the achievement gap in education.

Closing the achievement gap is an economic necessity, because education is the great equalizer and a free public education is the only available ticket to freedom for the masses of minorities and poor people.