What would King say?

The other offending question was, “Each tree has 56 oranges. If eight slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?”

The slavery/math questions have prompted nearly 1,000 comments on my AJC education blog, Get Schooled. The story has gone viral; among my emails last week was a angry note from someone in Norway calling for the teacher’s dismissal, a demand seconded by the Georgia NAACP.

I wonder if King would think the slavery questions warranted a national debate about race; more likely, he would have seen them as a clumsy error by a teacher eager to meet a district mandate.

While I am not downplaying the lack of judgment on display, it would seem that the teacher could be reprimanded and marched to training, especially if this is a first infraction and he has had good evaluations in the past. (We don’t know much about that as Gwinnett is not giving out any information or revealing the fate of the teacher.)

King likely would agree that it is certainly time for an open and honest conversation about race in education. But I would venture that he would prefer the conversation range wider and farther than the single misstep of a single teacher.

Instead, King might want to talk about the stubborn achievement gap and the high dropout rate among minority students. The issue has almost disappeared from the national political stage of late.

I listened to a conversation last week that King would have enjoyed far more than the math musings. Speaking at a daylong Education Week conference, Margaret Spellings, education secretary under George W. Bush, berated both parties for their indifference to the lagging performance of poor and minority students.

Castigating her own GOP colleagues, Spellings said, “They want to close the doors of the Department of Education rather than close the doors of the dropout factories around the country.”

Spellings was only getting warmed up. She lamented what she sees as a return to an era when federal dollars were handed out to schools with no expectations of success, an era in which, she said, “The federal government funded failure. It is going back to a time of putting the money out and hoping for the best. We tried that for 40 years, and we had flat achievement and a growing gap. ”

“The idea that the federal role is too intrusive now and is prohibiting the closing of the achievement gap is ridiculous,” she said. “No Child Left Behind and federal policy get blamed for a lot of the dumb stuff that teachers are on the front end of, but that is the latest excuse for under- achievement.”

Citing the current effort by states, including Georgia, to win waivers from critical accountability measures of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, Spellings said, “Do not exempt some states by giving them permission slips or hall passes. We have to believe that all our students can learn, each one of them.”

That’s the issue King would likely have made his focus: Do we believe that every child has the potential to learn? Do we care enough about the least-prepared students to provide them with the best prepared teachers?

Another speaker at the Ed Week conference was Marc S. Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy. He, too, raised points that would have interested King.

Tucker echoed Spellings’ concerns that the United States has not fully embraced the belief that all children can learn to high standards.

“In most of the high-performing countries, that is an objective,” Tucker said. “In this country, it is a slogan.”