The failures of the Washington DC public school system are detailed in a long article today in the Washington Post about Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee. Appointed in 2007 to head the school system that is supposed to educate children who live in our nation’s capital, Rhee is quoted in the article with this frank assessment:
“The reality in Washington, D.C., is that we continue to fail the majority of kids who are put in our care every day,” she said at a panel discussion last month. In a draft five-year action plan, introduced in October, she targets 2013 as the year when the D.C. student experience will be “dramatically different.”
The four years from now to 2013 is the standard length of high school! Yuk: an entering freshman this fall can hope to graduate from a dramatically different school in four years.
Something that could bring some potent immediate equality to the DC high school students is to give each of them a smartphone like The President and all the important people on Capitol Hill have — with full access to browse the internet. The smartphone in a student’s hand does not know what color she is or to what school he is assigned. The smartphone is unaware of who the student is who is browsing the internet’s vast knowledge. As I reported here last week, Google CEO told this year’s Carnegie Mellon graduates that “Information is a tremendous equalizer.”
Are you thinking the kids would not use their smartphones to learn? Maybe all of them will not take full academic advantage of personal access to the internet. Yet dubious negative expectations cannot justify confining yet another 4-year crop of DC teenagers to the failing public high schools without internet access of their own. You can be very sure kids at the schools where the “important” people in Washington send them will have that access. The smartphones the public school students would use do not have the negative expectations of their owners that a lot of people in Washington have.
