Executive Perspective
Common Refrains in AASA's 150 Years
By Daniel A. Domenech/School Administrator, December 2015

AASA has been celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. It was on Aug. 17, 1865, that a group of superintendents met in Harrisburg, Pa., and organized the National Association of School Superintendents, our initial name.

The first convention of the new association was held in Washington, D.C., the following February. Some 150 years later we will again hold our national conference in February but this time in Phoenix.

Nine states and 20 cities were represented at that conference in 1866. After a welcome from the mayor of the District of Columbia, presentations were made on such notable topics as school statistics, greater uniformity in the school system, the creation of a national bureau of education and the defects in the current state system of schools. At this same meeting, Birdsey Grant Northrop of Massachusetts was elected to be the association’s first president.

A Time of Worry
In “AASA, The Centennial Story,” written by Arthur Rice in 1964 as a history of AASA’s first hundred years, we get a description explaining the motivation behind the formation of the new association:

“The organization of the National Association of School Superintendents came at a time of much justifiable worry about the future of public education. Everywhere, school people were pondering the role of education in a period of reconstruction. They were worried, and not without reason, about where money could be found to get public education back on its feet after four years of war-time neglect. And there was deep concern about how free public education might be brought to the newly emancipated Negro.”

Today we still are worrying about where the money will come from to adequately fund public education and the issue of equity has yet to be truly addressed and solved. In 1954, the Brown decision declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional, and in 1965, President Johnson signed into law the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to bring full educational opportunity to all students. Yet educators continue to grapple with an achievement gap that has persisted for all of the years that AASA has existed.

We do acknowledge that as a whole, America’s public schools today are the best that they have ever been. But, as No Child Left Behind poignantly brought to our attention through the disaggregation of data, there is continuing disparity between the performance of white and nonwhite students, between the performances of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch and those who are not. Brown and ESEA attempted to address the issue of equal educational opportunity, but they did not address equity. Providing every child with the same level of access is different than providing each child with what each child needs. That is equity.

Pursuit of Equity

We see equity in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. This law requires school districts to provide a child with a handicapping condition the services he or she needs and not just the services that are provided to all nonhandicapped children. A school system cannot tell the parents of an autistic child that he will be placed in a regular classroom to receive the same instruction as all other children. The child must be placed and receive whatever services are stipulated in his or her individual education plan.

Admittedly, nonhandicapped minority children and students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch do not have the same level of impairment as a child classified as disabled, but they are affected by circumstances and conditions that impact what they learn and the rate at which they learn. Ample evidence correlates low achievement with poverty. Schools in low-income areas lack many of the resources available in middle-income and higher-income schools. Attempts to attract quality teachers and administrators to low-income areas often are countered by the lower salaries offered.

During an economic downturn, the schools in impoverished areas suffer more than their higher-income counterparts. AASA’s analysis of the impact of sequestration demonstrated it was the schools dependent on federal funding that suffered the greatest losses.

A Force of Advocacy

So 150 years later, AASA continues to advocate for equity to ensure that all children get the quality education they need. We support transformational changes to the system that will lead to child-centered, personalized learning, competency-based opportunities that could conceivably erase the achievement gap between the haves and have nots.

You can learn more about this by attending the National Conference on Education in Phoenix on Feb. 11-13. Register at http://nce.aasa.org/.



Daniel Domenech is AASA executive director. E-mail: ddomenech@aasa.org. Twitter: @AASADan