Documenting disparities in educational experiences of poor and minority populations got a little easier this week with two new reports providing some useful data. Education Trust has produced a massive and eminently informative report card on not just how the nation is doing but also how each individual state stacks up, offered up in 50 handy and comprehensive state report cards. Surely low performing states can begin to look at other states and realize they can do better. For example, while the national average of secondary teachers in high poverty schools lacking a major or minor in a field is 34 percent, in Florida, it's a whopping 47 percent. The report pulls in data from many disparate sources to provide the best picture to date of educational disparities.

Click on the link below and check out how your state measures up . . .

For a not nearly so ambitious but graphic look at the impact of the achievement gap, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF) surveyed over 3,000 teachers in three states: Wisconsin, California and New York. In "Fifty Years After Brown v. Board of Education: A Two-Tiered Education System," NCTAF examines numerous areas in which poor and minority students continue to get the short end of the stick, including some eye-catching (and stomach-turning) findings on the state of school facilities. In New York, for example, 63 percent of teachers in "high-risk schools" reported seeing evidence of vermin (cockroaches, mice, and rates) while only 15 percent of teachers in low-risk schools had similar unpleasant sightings. In a similar vein, teachers in high-risk schools in California were twice as likely to report that their schools' bathrooms were dirty, closed or inoperative.