Schools reach out to close achievement gap

There’s no doubt that California public schools can engage underachieving black, Asian and Pacific Islander, Latino, American Indian and juvenile court school students—but they can’t do it alone. That was the message delivered by CSBA’s Student Issues Conference Groups in a set of well-attended workshops at the association’s Annual Conference.

After three years of intensive research, analysis, planning and dialogue, leaders of the Student Issues Conference Groups have identified a number of collaborative efforts that join parents with business, education, civic and community organizations at the local level to help schools close the achievement gap. They have also begun working with the Alliance for Regional Collaboration to Heighten Educational Success—ARCHES—an organization that funds and supports educational collaboratives throughout the state.

“We didn’t want another task force, we wanted an alliance,” said Jo Ann Yee, CSBA’s senior director for Strategy Development, Achievement, Diversity and Urban Affairs. “In order to improve student achievement, everyone needs to work together. That’s what collaboratives do. There is no silver bullet.”

Each of CSBA’s five student issues groups hosted workshops focused on the specific challenges faced by their respective student populations:

• Educators at the Asian and Pacific Islanders workshop discussed the impact of parenting and cultural norms on the development of emotional intelligence, and they described support services and interventions they’ve devised for Southeast Asian students in the Fresno area.
• The overflow crowd at the Hispanic student-focused workshop heard about the California Association of Latino School Administrators’ efforts to improve professional development for teachers and administrators, transform the culture of struggling schools and help freshmen transitioning to high school with special orientation programs.
• At conference group workshops for black, American Indian and juvenile court students, representatives from a number of collaboratives described the strategies they’ve devised to involve parents in local schools, get students excited about and prepared for college, implement culturally sensitive teaching methods and curricula that engage disenchanted students and convince failing students that they can reverse their fortunes.

In addition, ARCHES leaders hosted a workshop focused on using collaboratives to help struggling student succeed. ARCHES Executive Director Diane Siri said she discovered that business, education and nonprofit groups and parents had no opportunities to sit down together to define priorities and devise effective policies. Bringing these groups together to combine their insights, energies and talents is key to closing the achievement gap, she said, because the challenges facing low-performing students are often extremely complex.

“Our goal is to have every K–12 district in the state connected to a collaborative,” said Siri. “This is a strategy, not a program. If there are some problems that aren’t getting better, I suggest that it may be a problem that cannot be solved by a single district by itself.”

During the conference group workshops, CSBA staff also presented findings of the association’s recent survey of superintendents in member school districts and county offices of education. The vast majority of those surveyed—83 percent—said closing the achievement gap is a priority, but none reported they had made progress in boosting minority student achievement a goal in either board or superintendent evaluations.

Yee said the association plans to continue surveying members to find out whether the work of the conference groups is having an impact. 

Related link:

• Read more about CSBA’s Student Issues Conference Groups @ www.csba.org/educationissues/educationissues/studentissuesconferencegroups.aspx.