In his famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King, Jr. declared,
I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.
MLK decried equality for children of all races, and his monumental contribution to the realization of this dream should forever be remembered. However, it seems that some education reformers in the U.S. have already forgotten the words of King. Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia, and Florida have all implemented new race-based standards into their public education systems with the approval of the Department of Education. While No Child Left Behind did divide children into subgroups based on ethnicity, it did not set different standards according to those subgroups. The race-based standards in these four states do not alter curricula or test questions, but they set different goals for percentages of students expected to pass based on the racial subgroups. (more…)