Achievement by the numbers: Stats tell troubling tale

Dramatic increases in the number of Hispanic and other immigrant students, especially in California, have combined with stricter state and federal accountability requirements to focus attention on public education’s inconvenient truth: Schools are falling short when it comes to educating students of color, English learners and poor children.

There are many statistics that measure the disparity in student performance among different ethnic groups of California public schoolchildren. “Closing the Achievement Gap,” the report released earlier this year by Superintendent Jack O’Connell’s P-16 Council, ventures into the breach and comes out with some stark insights. Here are just a few samples, taken from 2006 measurements:

Sixty percent of white students and 64 percent of Asians were proficient on state English-language arts standards, but—

• Only 29 percent of African Americans

• 37 percent of American Indians

• 27 percent of Hispanics

• and 27 percent of economically disadvantaged students

mastered these standards.

On the state’s math standards, similar gaps exist between whites and students of color, English learners and poor students. In math, however, Asian students outperformed all other students by a wider margin. Nearly 70 percent of Asian students scored proficient in math in 2006, compared with only:

• 53 percent of white students

• 24 percent of blacks

• 35 percent of American Indians

• 30 percent of Hispanics

• 30 percent of students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds

According to the California Department of Education, nearly half of California’s K–12 students are Hispanic, and 7.6 percent are black. In this state, then, so-called “minority” students are the majority—making it all the more imperative that schools reach these traditionally “underperforming” students.

O’Connell stresses that “difficult discussions” about race must be part of any discussions about the achievement gap. In testimony before the state Legislature’s Joint Education Committee earlier this year, the superintendent said that it’s tempting to blame differences in family income for disparities in student achievement. But it’s also clear, he said, that race is a huge factor in determining which students fail and which succeed.

“In fact, African American and Hispanic students who are not poor are achieving at lower levels in math than their white counterparts who are poor,” he testified. “These are not just economic achievement gaps, they are racial achievement gaps. We cannot afford to excuse them; they simply must be addressed.”

Disaggregating the data

Although there’s plenty of controversy over the federal No Child Left Behind Act, even its harshest critics admit that the law has highlighted the struggles of students of color by requiring schools, districts and states to report test scores and other measures of academic achievement for separate subgroups of students, rather than reporting statewide or schoolwide averages.

Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, served on the federal commission that reviewed the controversial law in 2007. He describes himself as someone who “cares in my very marrow” about the importance of providing quality and equitable education to all comers.

Speaking at Superintendent O’Connell’s two-day Achievement Gap Summit in Sacramento last fall, Edley discussed the key role NCLB has played in underscoring the disparity in achievement between different economic and racial groups. Edley said the law is important because it holds schools accountable for results.

Under NCLB, he said, it doesn’t matter that school board members, administrators or teachers are well-intentioned or hard-working. What matters are the data: high school drop-out and graduation rates, test scores, teacher quality and enrollment in and access to college-preparatory and Advanced Placement classes.

By any of these measures, students of color, English learners and economically disadvantaged students wind up at the bottom of the heap.

“In that narrow sense, I think one could argue that NCLB is one of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation in 50 years,” said Edley, who was appointed earlier this year by O’Connell to help set “achievement gap benchmarks” to measure how successfully California schools are closing the gap.

It’s critical that educators use hard data to measure student progress, devise educational strategies and gauge whether these strategies are working, he said. But that hasn’t happened. “We invest so little in research and development that if public education was a company, we’d sell all our stock,” he said.

Part of the challenge, Edley said, is convincing “people to care about kids who don’t look like their kids. We need to build a political and moral consensus [about the need] to do what needs to be done.”

—Carol Brydolf