When Historically Marginalized and Underserved Populations Get Rained On, Everyone Gets Wet

Let me be clear, when we decided through policy, through practice, and through willful neglect, that some children did not need or deserve rigorous instruction, we did not just harm those children. We lowered the floor for everyone.

And the data has been telling us this for decades. But the mirage of the achievement gap, resulted in caring less about the harm being done to all children if white children appeared to be doing better than their historically marginalized peers.

The Origin Story Nobody Wants to Talk About

Brown v. Board. School integration. Busing.

These are landmark moments in U.S. history. And in these stories Civil Rights win And the country is making progress.

But, what we talk about far less is what happened to instruction in the aftermath, when Black children were integrated into schools that did not want them.

The response, in too many classrooms, in too many districts was not to maintain or raise the rigor. But to lower it, to boldly deny children a High-Quality Classroom Learning Experience.

Rather than teach to a higher standard for all students; schools, districts and states re-segregated from within. With all deliberate speed expectations were lowered and rigor was diluted in ways that were easy to explain away as “meeting students where they are.”

And it spread.

Because when you lower the bar in a classroom, you lower it for every child in that classroom and across the school. Decades of harmful tracking did not go unnoticed by students, early career teachers or veteran teachers. Narratives of deficit did not rain neatly upon historically marginalized and underserved students, it spread.

When rigor and expectations are lower in a school, every student in that building absorbs the consequences. When its lowered systemically, which is what happened, generations of students, across race, across income, across zip code, got less than they deserved and less than what is required for their success in life. #adulting

Yes, the students who are always underserved absorbed the worst of it.

But make no mistake: no one is dry.

The Data Doesn’t Lie

We have spent decades reforming education. Federal legislation. State accountability systems. District initiatives. Curriculum overhauls. Professional development. Coaching models. Every few years, a new framework with a new name.

And the data keeps saying the same thing.

We do not have sustained, systemic instructional excellence at the district or state level, anywhere in this country. What we have are exceptional classrooms. Exceptional schools, if we are lucky. But no system has cracked the code on consistency and rigor at scale.

NAEP scores, the closest thing we have to a national report card, have been largely flat or declining for decades, across demographic groups. The gaps between students are real. But so is the overall depression of what students at every level know and are able to do.

This is not an achievement gap story. This is an Instructional Failure story.

And poor quality classroom instruction has been failing all children.

When you design an education system that is comfortable with some children receiving less, you build a system that is ultimately comfortable with less. Period. The softened expectations, the loosened tasks, the normalized underperformance, those habits don’t stay contained. They become a part of the culture.

And culture doesn’t check demographics at the door. So now nation wide, the culture of public education is normalized underperformance of all, no child left underserved or undereducated.

Deficit Narratives Did Double Damage

Here is what has always irked me.

When outcomes are poor, the explanation is never “our instruction is failing these students.” The explanation has always blamed students (and families).

What student weren’t bringing with them (readiness for learning).

What their families weren’t doing (broad generalizations and assumptions).

What their communities lacked (poverty excuses).

What their circumstances made difficult (“my students can’t”).

Again, make no mistake, these narratives had two victims.

The first and most immediate victims were the students the narratives were about, Black and Brown students, students whose families are living at or below the poverty line, students with cognitive and behavioral differences. They were handed an excuse and explanation for their failure instead of high-quality instruction to mitigate it.

But the second victim was everyone else.

Because when a system learns to explain away failure rather than examine instruction, that habit generalizes. Teachers in those systems stop asking hard questions about their practice. Leaders stop looking critically at what learning actually looks like in classrooms. The professional norm becomes: if students aren’t learning, look at the students.

Not the lesson. Not the task. Not the cognitive demand. Not at the evidence of understanding.

The students.

And that norm, to deflect, has infected instruction everywhere.

A system that isn’t honest about instructional failure in one corner of the building isn’t honest about it in any corner.

Rain Doesn’t Pick Sides

When it rains, everybody gets wet.

When we built systems that were comfortable failing some children, we built systems that were incapable of fully serving any children.

The proof is in the data. National assessments don’t show a country where the majority of students are thriving while a subset is left behind. They show a country where the majority of students are not performing at grade level, where “proficient” has become the exception, not the expectation.

We have a collective instructional problem and it has collective (national) consequences.

What do you see in your schools? Are low instructional expectations visible or has it been low for so long that no one notices anymore?

Warmly-Demanding your attention to this matter, see you in the comments.

~ Dr. O

Everyone gets wet when it rains.