THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning by Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom (Simon & Schuster, 352 pp., $26). The Thernstroms take an honest look...
...As Samantha Power observes in her fascinating and troubling book, when purely humanitarian interests are at stake, American policymakers have been apt to make unfulfilled promises to halt genocide...
...The authors believe that every urban school should become a charter school that faces tough standards...
...Under the new act, strong performances by whites and Asians can no longer be used to hide dismal showings by blacks and Hispanics on state tests: Schools must report incremental gains in core subjects, broken down by race and other categories associated with disadvantage...
...Previous federal efforts (such as Title I allotments and Head Start) had done little to bring minority students up to speed...
...Hispanics perform just slightly better...
...Schools have been given the responsibility of educating every child without the freedom essential to doing so," No Excuses notes...
...Schools that can't advance face potentially serious consequences...
...The [teaching] profession does not reward imaginative, ambitious, competitive innovators...
...The Thernstroms profile a few charter schools that have been successful in educating high-risk minority students...
...Beth Henary A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power (Perennial, 656 pp., $17.95...
...The schools' common characteristics are longer days, longer years, strict rules, non-unionized teachers, principals who have control over their budgets, and students with families who want them there...
...The administration's willingness to use American power to achieve not only strategic but also humanitarian ends represents a change from much of twentieth-century foreign policy...
...But No Excuses lays out plainly a fundamental problem that, unaddressed, has let wrong solutions like affirmative action continue—and continue, and continue...
...That's unlikely, however desirable it may be...
...In the long run, it does no harm, either...
...But in No Excuses, the Thernstroms point out that most public schools face formidable roadblocks to systemic change, particularly unions that insist on seniority-based pay and promotions...
...Power examines some of the worst atrocities of the past century: the Turkish annihilation of Armenians, the Khmer Rouge's mass murder in Cambodia, the gassing of Kurdish villages by Saddam Hussein, and the 1990s atrocities in Rwanda and Yugoslavia...
...Faced with statistics like these, President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act...
...A Problem from Hell avoids partisan finger-pointing to make a plea to Americans of all political persuasions to learn the lessons of the past and support future interventions, for both moral and strategic reasons...
...Fair enough, one might say...
...No one variable explains the minority achievement gap...
...Still, the Thernstroms remind us, "It does not cost more to set high academic and behavioral standards...
...In late 2001, President Bush was given a memo from the National Security Council based on Samantha Power's Atlantic Monthly article on the Clinton administration's failure to prevent the 1994 murders of more than 800,000 in Rwanda...
...The Thernstroms take an honest look at legislation that demands all students reach "proficiency" by 2014...
...vouchers seem the more likely political path to breaking the stranglehold of our dysfunctional schools...
...Not on my watch," Bush scrawled in the margin...
...Jamie M. Fly...
...As things now stand, by his senior year, the average black student has the academic skills of a white eighth-grader...
...As some in Washington begin to argue that it is time for the troops to come home from Iraq and elsewhere, Power's book is a clarion call for America to remain an engaged moral power...
...In each case, Power presents the reader with the information available to American officials at the time and outlines the actions that could have been taken...
Vol. 9 • October 2003 • No. 4
