Can we talk? Discussions about race may be a key to closing the achievement gap
By:
Kristi Garrett
By now, most everyone knows what the term “achievement gap” means, although the key to closing it remains elusive. Despite efforts spanning a decade or more, the disparity in test scores, graduation rates and other indicators of academic success separating many students of color from many of their white and Asian peers has not been eliminated.
In a society that banned racial segregation in its schools more than 50 years ago, why do black students continue to score well below their white counterparts? What impact does race—apart from poverty or family circumstances—have on black students’ success in school?
‘Something’s not right here’
Many school boards across California have come to the conclusion that they cannot successfully close the achievement gap unless they take into account the impact of race and racism. How some of them came to discuss this realization is a story of outrage and injustice leading to advocacy and dogged determination.
When she was a parent volunteer in her son’s classroom in San Diego County’s Lemon Grove School District, Blanca Brown noticed a disturbing pattern of children of color being treated differently than white students. Her disquiet came to a head, she relates, when one day in early 2000 she watched a black student get punished for getting up to sharpen his broken pencil, while a white girl did virtually the same thing with no reaction from the teacher. “That’s what said to me, wait a minute, something’s not right here,” Brown recalls.
Speaking out
With growing evidence of inequity weighing on her mind, Brown took her concerns to the school board. “I said, ‘I’m speaking from a very personal experience, but if I look at the test scores throughout the district, there is a pattern. I’ve noticed that all African American students are underperforming.’”
To their credit, Lemon Grove school board President Robbie Montgomery and Superintendent L. McLean King were aware of the problem. They seized the opportunity to involve a parent advocate like Brown in an effort to increase racial equity in the district.
They had a vision to overturn the “old Lemon Grove ways,” Brown recalls. Those ways harkened back to 1930, when the all-white school board barred entry to children with Mexican heritage, segregating them in a lesser facility. Protesting parents fought and won Alvarez v. Lemon Grove, the nation’s first school desegregation victory—predating the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision on Brown v. Board of Education by 23 years and California’s less-known but influential appellate decision on Mendez v. Westminster by 16.
So in 2000, Brown and another parent joined the board, superintendent and staff in a one-week course facilitated by Glenn Singleton, a nationally renowned educator and founder of the San Francisco-based Pacific Educational Group, which helps raise awareness of systemic inequities and assists school leaders in developing strategies for closing the achievement gap in their schools. The district continues to pursue equity, and so does Brown—now as a member of the school board.
Same story, different scene
Ken Davis was a Lodi parent who knew firsthand about racism, so when his children started school there in the mid-1980s, he got involved. What he saw disturbed him: “I saw little black kids sitting outside the classroom, by themselves, in chairs in the hallway because they were discipline problems. Then I started looking at the data and working with parent groups and said, ‘Our children aren’t being successful. Why?’”
His concern prompted him to run for the school board, and Davis became the Lodi Unified School District’s first black trustee in 1992. Over the years, he continued to work for equity, and in 2004 the governance team called on Pacific Educational Group to help it develop strategies to create fundamental change throughout the district.
Davis, by then board president, wanted the others to learn what he knew about the effects of racism.
As a youth in Arkansas, Davis started attending Little Rock Central High in 1965, just eight years after federal troops with fixed bayonets escorted the Little Rock Nine to school each day to enforce the end of racial segregation. By then the guards were gone, so daily beatings became routine for Davis. Teachers even blocked his way to class, saying, “The law says you have to be here, but I don’t have to teach you,” he recalls.
The contrast with his elementary and middle school years was stark. Those schools had been all-black institutions where his classmates, teachers and administrators all looked like the rest of the people in his life, and they shared and valued his cultural background.
Davis adopts a poignant attitude as he recalls—in a paradox of the Supreme Court’s ruling that “separate but equal” schools were unjust—the stability of those days: “If you go back and look at the historical data, blacks did better in their own system until they went to integration. After that change was made, [their academic achievement] took a nosedive.”
Steely determination and a few supportive teachers got Davis through high school despite the outright antagonism to his presence. With strong family support, he and his siblings all went on to earn college degrees.
Shocking statistics
When Lodi Unified started its equity work with Pacific Educational Group in 2004, one of the first things they did was examine disciplinary policies. “We were shocked by the result,” Davis recalls. “At that time … [black students] made up roughly 4.5 percent of the population, but they were 67 percent of the discipline—suspensions and expulsions. My god! You talk about being out of balance.
“It was an incredible moment for the board, too. When we began to understand the data, we thought ‘Wow, how long has this been going on?’ When we started disaggregating the data, we could see where we needed to make changes, and things started to change in Lodi.”
The need for a change in outcomes for black students is painfully clear.
Today, five decades after school segregation was outlawed, a striking educational achievement gap persists. Statewide, half of all young black men reportedly drop out of high school, severely limiting their job prospects. Subsequently, blacks are arrested two and a half times as often as whites, and they are imprisoned six times as often.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 20 percent of black men between the ages of 24 and 35 have served time. But among dropouts the picture is far worse, with some 60 percent acquiring a prison record by their mid-30s. More alarming, one researcher calculated that incarceration for a black dropout in California was “practically a certainty” by the time he reaches his 50s. Ultimately, each dropout costs the state almost $400,000 in lost wages, taxes and increased social services over a lifetime, the California Dropout Research Project calculated.
‘From the top’
Sporadic efforts to equalize opportunity at a few school sites won’t correct the inherent advantages and disadvantages society imposes on different racial groups, says Davis, who, with the Lodi board, led a culture change in the district. “If there’s going to be systemic change, it has to come from the top. … It’s spelled out in our vision, our goals and our mission statement.”
Singleton, of Pacific Educational Group, says direction from the governance team is an essential part of addressing systemic racial disparities: “School board members, in conjunction with the superintendent and executive administration, must engage in “Courageous Conversations About Race” as they examine and rewrite district policies, including but not limited to, school attendance boundaries, teacher evaluation and staff hiring. It is in this aspect of school governance that inequities in opportunities, access, resource allocation and expectations for success, between underserved student of color populations and their White counterparts, are created and perpetuated.”
Greg Hodge, a former board member in the Oakland Unified School District, agrees that a frank discussion about racism is necessary if schools are to root out systemic inequities.
“I think it’s got to be a direct conversation,” he says. “You’ve got to get up under the discomfort people have talking about race and racism generally in the country, let alone in the community. … The fact that you have an African American in the White House I think enhances the conversation around race and what race means and what racism means in terms of public education.”
Understanding racism
The only way to root out systemic racist attitudes and practices, equity educators say, is to explore the ways race has shaped a person’s own opportunities and beliefs—often at a subconscious level. The foundation of that understanding is an awareness of white privilege.
That’s not an easy discussion to have. One reason, explains author Beverly Daniel Tatum in “Learning about Racism,” is that the concept presents a serious challenge to most Americans’ belief in the United States as a merit-based society. When injustices are brought to their attention, “the bliss of ignorance or lack of awareness is replaced by the discomfort of guilt, shame, and sometimes anger at the recognition of one’s own advantage because of being White and the acknowledgement of the role of Whites in the maintenance of a racist system.”
Some think racism consists only of harmful acts or attitudes directed against another group. But there’s more to white privilege.
To illustrate some of the cumulative advantages that come with white privilege, consider the benefits the GI Bill offered veterans after World War II. While it’s true that all veterans had the opportunity to go to college, blacks returning to the segregated South had limited choices. Ironically, “the G.I. Bill exacerbated rather than narrowed the economic and educational differences between blacks and whites among men from the South,” found researchers for the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Thus, white veterans could choose to graduate from any number of colleges, get good jobs, buy homes and build wealth that they then passed along to their children. Those children grew up also expecting to go to college and buy a home, often with help from their parents. That was not so often the case with black families.
Cindy Marks, a Modesto City Schools board member and CSBA Director for Region 8, defines white privilege as “advantages or favorable outcomes I’ve had in certain situations based on my race as opposed to obstacles or obstructions others have experienced based solely on race.” She said it was Pacific Educational Group’s two-day workshop, “Beyond Diversity,” that really opened her eyes to the privilege she has experienced as a white person.
As part of the diversity training, participants score themselves on some everyday experiences like shopping, using credit, buying toiletries, getting served at a restaurant, looking for a job, using public transportation, interacting with the police and so on. The participants are then lined up by their scores. Almost without exception, those with the highest scores—those with the most positive experiences—are all white, and those with the lowest scores are all black. For many of those with high scores, it’s a startling revelation about the privilege they enjoy compared to colleagues of color.
“I thought, ‘This is something we’ve been experiencing and I didn’t even know about it until today.’ For me it was such an eye-opener,” recalls Marks, who was in the high-scoring quartile of about 200 participants. The experiences she heard that day left a lasting impression.
“I was so emotional I could hardly share, because I could tell that the little bit of discrimination I faced as a white child in a non-white neighborhood was nothing compared to the amount of discrimination that the African Americans and Latinos in my group had experienced in a white neighborhood based on their race. I couldn’t even express it because I was so moved by the amount of pain and sorrow that I had heard my colleagues express over those two days of training.”
Systemic inequities
Schools’ organizational structures and labor contracts are sometimes configured in ways that perpetuate systemic inequities, explains Jumoke Hodge, elected last fall to her husband’s former seat on the Oakland Unified school board. For example, she cites the frustration of parents in one classroom where the teacher had been out all year, leaving their children in this Year 3 Program Improvement school to fall behind as substitute after substitute rotated through.
“Here’s the thing: Parents have been screaming and yelling … since the first sub hit the door the first day,” Hodge observes. “We need to recognize just how unconscious we all are to white privilege and the different ways we address issues. When those in the African American and Latino communities experience injustice or a lack of attention to their situation, quite often they’re accused of complaining too much, they’re way too angry … I’ve seen 100 poor, black, angry people show up at a board meeting, and you still don’t get the same kind of voice.”
Now that she’s more familiar with the perspective of black parents, Marks understands why they react so strongly to racial injustice. Several years ago, when a white student made a racist comment that, although in jest, sparked a near riot at the high school, 200 African Americans appeared at a board meeting to protest the lack of corrective action. “At the time I was thinking, why has this become such a big issue?” Marks says. “But as time went on and African Americans kept coming to our board meetings upset about achievement gaps and expulsion issues, suspension issues,” the board saw the need to address the deep-seated racial issues that were simmering in the community. The district called in an anti-racist educator to help them begin a dialogue about race.
Marks helped cofound a district committee that now focuses on equity for black and Hispanic students. She makes it a point to attend various events sponsored by ethnic groups to improve communication: “It’s opened a dialogue that we didn’t have before. I’m trying to encourage [the other white Modesto school board members] to go to some different things, because the more events we go to, the more times we have interactions with one another in a nonconfrontational environment, the better able they are to come to us before the problem escalates and 200 people are coming to your board meeting irate about something. That’s not what we want to have happen, because we wouldn’t have the open dialogue in that situation.”
Greg Hodge agrees that talking about systemic inequities—institutional racism— is a difficult but necessary task for board members throughout the state. “I think people are afraid if they have the conversation about race, that somehow they’re going to be accused of being racist as a person. And I think the most important conversation is about the institutional racism which creates barriers for every kid in a particular district to get the resources and opportunities they need to thrive.”
Holding the same high expectations for all students—regardless of their circumstances—is critical, he insists: “A lot of times teachers in a classroom have lower expectations for the black and brown boys. And that expectation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and plays out over the course of their K-12 experience.”
“If your thought is that some kids are just not going to college,” Jumoke Hodge adds, “then we don’t necessarily have to teach them or see that there’s a course or curriculum or ensure that there’s an A-G sequence that every child needs. … Those are the kids that are tracked into low-wage jobs” and end up in prison or living an unhealthy lifestyle, she says. “If [work to close] the achievement gap is to alleviate that and bring about a better quality of living for young people, then we’d best have high expectations.”
Starting the conversation
Linda Perry was a board member in San Leandro Unified School District in 2003 when a convergence of factors brought the issue of race and racism to the fore in the San Francisco-area community. The city was becoming more diverse, and a local black comedian poked fun at the city’s “lily white” roots. The board had just hired a new superintendent, Asian American Christine Lim, and a plan to increase equity in the district was one of her charges.
The board, administrative staff and school principals began by sharing their racial autobiographies with one another. “Some of the stories I knew, and some I had no idea,” says Perry, who is white. “It made us aware of both our individual racial inferences and our class as a group. Again, it was a way of starting the dialogue around race.”
That next year, 67 persons from throughout the district formed the initial equity team to receive training from Pacific Educational Group. Team members then became the trainers at each school site, dedicated to aligning all the equity efforts that had been occurring sporadically at various sites into one districtwide goal.
To help evaluate the situation in each of their classrooms, school officials did “equity walkthroughs,” closely observing conditions and practices. Teams investigated the degree to which teachers engaged their students, whether there were books that reflected the students’ culture and whether the arrangement of desks marginalized any students.
“At first I think there was a fear some teachers had that this would be used in the evaluation process against them,” Perry says, but she assured them the goal was merely to gather data in order to develop strategies that would better hold the interest of low-performing students. “At the end of that process, we came up with [a list of] ‘can’t continues,’ like adults allowing students to check out [mentally], lack of bell-to-bell teaching, isolating students of color … and ‘must dos’ like using the board-approved materials.”
As in Lodi, San Leandro created a new, uniform discipline policy, and suspensions decreased dramatically. A new culture of high expectations for all students was cultivated. Parents were encouraged to participate actively in discussing their children’s needs.
“It wasn’t just lip service. We had tenets and models now. We had curriculum and support materials,” Perry says. “It became about equity, access and achievement for all.”
Signs of change
Board members who have been at this equity work say they are seeing changes in their schools.
“Yes, I’m seeing signs,” says Perry. “From the student level, I’m seeing more engagement. I’m seeing more student activity, and from a variety of students. It’s part of the culture now, it’s part of the grading. It happens at every school site. And we’re seeing results in the actual scores.”
She cites a first-time pass rate on the high school exit exam at San Leandro High this year of 79 percent, which is up 10 percent for black students and 12 percent for Hispanic students.
Far from done
Despite encouraging indicators, most of the board members taking steps to root out systemic inequities in their districts realize the job is far from done.
“I will know that I’m done with my part of the work with this district—which is now on its eighth year—when I can look at the data and race or ethnicity will not be a determining factor in performance,” Lemon Grove’s Brown says.
Davis, in Lodi Unified, will see his first grandson start school soon. Yet he recognizes that the issues of race, expectations and student achievement that he faced, and his children faced, will likely still confront his grandson as well.
“We’re not at a point where I believe he won’t have to deal with these issues. I know he will,” he says. “It didn’t stop with me, it didn’t stop with my kids, and I don’t believe it will stop with my grandson. I think for me it may be a lifelong work.”
Kristi Garrett (kgarrett@csba.org) is a staff writer for California Schools.
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