Promoting Educational Equity in a Period of Growing Social Inequity the Silent Contradictions of Texas Reform Discourse

Since the appearance of A Nation at Risk in 1983 and several subsequent reports, public schools have been viewed as being in crisis. Neoconservatives see a moral crisis and the collapse of traditional views of family, religion, and individual character. Neoliberals link the crisis to human capital theory, arguing that our schools have failed to provide U.S. corporations with a competitive workforce-an argument more compelling in 1983 than today. Others, including the authors of these articles, see the real crisis as a system that reflects and reproduces the savage inequalities of our society (Berliner & Biddle, 1995; Kozol, 1991). Although I welcome this shift in the current discourse of crisis from moralizing and human capital theory to equity, I believe that those, like these authors, who work under an equity umbrella need to be more explicit about both the substantive and strategic issues entailed in achieving social justice for poor and minority children and their families. Therefore, my response to these three articles will dwell less on the specifics of the articles than on their claims to address the plight of poor and minority children through the Texas accountability system. Along with the Fuller and Johnson (2001 [this issue]) article, I have painstakingly read several other statistical analyses of the Texas reform (Carnoy, Loeb, & Smith, 2000; Haney, 2000; Klein, Hamilton, McCaffrey, & Stecher, 2000). They appear to be about equally divided in their support or criticism of the Texas accountability reforms. As I read these articles, I felt a sense of deja vu, having read so many pro and con statistical reports on bilingual education, on the reading wars, and, more recently, on vouchers and charter schools. Despite the current obsession with research-based practices, these research debates, which often revolve around arcane statistical minutiae, resolve little for two reasons. First, they say more about the dilemmas of appropriating research metho