Integrating schools based on test scores and achievement
Part two of the blog on the UGA desegregation anniversary: In that blog, I noted the national retreat from the notion that classrooms need to be a rainbow hue, that the focus now is not whether black, white and brown children go to the same schools, but whether they go to good schools.
But the problem is how to create good schools when schools that are high minority are also often high poverty. And kids from poor families bring far more challenges to the classroom — homelessness, job losses, evictions, nutrition deficits, lack of space for the students to do their homework, parents unable to help kid with school work because they hold two jobs.
A classroom with three or four such children can cope; a classroom with 12 may crumble under the weight of so many kids in crisis.
Speaking to that exact situation, here is a New York Times story on how Wake County, N.C., once considered a role model in school integration, is evolving. (Take a look at the entire story if you have time.)
In 2000, after courts ruled against using race-based criteria, Wake became one of the first districts in the nation to adopt a system of socioeconomic integration. The idea was that every school in the county (163 at present) would have a mix of children from poor to rich. The target for schools was a 60-40 mix — 60 percent of students who did not require subsidized lunches and 40 percent who did.
Then in 2009, a new conservative majority was elected to the Wake school board, and last spring it voted to dismantle the integration plan. Instead, families would be assigned to a school nearer their neighborhood. This meant a child who lived in a poor, black section of Raleigh would be more likely to go to a school full of poor black children, and a child living in a white, upper-middle-class suburb would be more likely go to a school full of upper-middle-class white children.
In most places that would have been it. Not here. This is a well-educated labor force (50 percent of employees are college graduates) that works in the high-tech Research Triangle and is predisposed to finding new ways to solve complex problems.
And that’s just what they set out to do. Two weeks ago, civic leaders here unveiled their proposal for a third generation of integration: integration by achievement. Under this plan, no school would have an overwhelming number of failing students. Instead a school might have a 70-30 mix — 70 percent of students who have scored proficient on state tests and 30 percent who are below grade level.
The plan — believed to be the first of its kind in the nation — was developed by community leaders who sound nothing like the civil rights leaders of the 1960s. They sound more like members of the Chamber of Commerce — which they are. “We believe our proposal is consumer friendly,” said Harvey A. Schmitt, president of the Greater Raleigh Chamber. “We believe it will sell well in a market of high expectations.”
Advocates of the plan believe that schools balanced by achievement won’t look too different from schools balanced by socioeconomics. That’s because there is a strong statistical correlation between wealth and test scores; generally the wealthier a child’s family, the higher the child’s test scores.
Mr. Schmitt thinks that both racial and socioeconomic integration have been proxies for academic integration; that what a parent — white, black, Hispanic, Asian — wants most for a child is to attend an academically successful school; and that race and wealth have been roundabout ways to accomplish that.
He says integration by achievement will be good for business because no matter where a family lives in the county, their children can attend a high achieving school. “Companies can come into this market and not have to pay extra for employees to send their children to private schools,” he said.
–From Maureen Downey, for the AJC Get Schooled blog
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72 comments Add your comment
Dr. Craig Spinks/ Augusta
March 1st, 2011
8:37 am
Ernest and Cast the old teachers out,
How many minds are being wasted because of the disruptive and disrespectful school climates in which many of our kids of all hues matriculate?
How many minds are being wasted because our popular culture and some subcultures denigrate self-discipline, civility, parental responsibility and the intellect?
How many minds are being wasted because educrats are paid whether or not our kids learn what our kids will need to be responsible, productive citizens?
do the math
March 1st, 2011
8:54 am
“Since Dekalbite and Catlady don’t think race and IQ are related, maybe they could cite a school that went from large majority white to majority minority and the quality did not decrease significantly.”
Lee, you are obviously confusing correlation with causation.
V for Vendetta
March 1st, 2011
9:07 am
Lee,
Now you’ve got my hackles up, quoting Ayn Rand to somehow justify your racist perspective. Ayn Rand also wrote heavily on the subject of racism, which she called the lowest form of collectivism in her amazing book The Virtue of Selfishness. Your antiquated view of race ignores the largest factor in the distribution of IQ: SES. There is simply no objective evidence to support a meaningful (meaning more than ten points) difference in the IQ variations between races. SES (i.e., social class) is the single biggest variable in determining educational achievement–which, by the way, is a lot different from IQ. I have known plenty of people who have relatively high IQ scores (above 120) who failed to attain success commensurate with their perceived intelligence.
Please refrain from dragging Ayn Rand’s name through the mud in support of your simple-minded and racist rhetoric. Those of us who read and understand her philosophy would appreciate it.
What's best for kids?
March 1st, 2011
9:24 am
We need to look at this from Maslow’s perspective. If a child does not know where his next meal is coming from; if his parents are away most of the time; if he isn’t sure that his home will be his home for more than three months, education is not a priority for him. Survival is.
Dr. John Trotter
March 1st, 2011
9:24 am
Discipline. Discipline. Discipline. MACE has been right about all of the corruption and systematic cheating in DeKalb and Atlanta (talked about it openly long before the traditional media picked up on it). MACE is right about discipline (or lack thereof) too.
Focus on discipline, and you will get better academic achievement. Focus on academic achievement with no regard for discipline, and you will get a complete mess. Try to ride a bike with only a back wheel. You’ll end up in a ditch. The front wheel is essential. It guides the bike and provides for your safety. The front wheel (discipline) is essential for any potential power (academic achievement) which comes from the back wheel. In the public school setting, the front wheel is discipline. This is what is missing. It doesn’t matter what potential power (academic achievement) is in the back wheel if the front wheel (discipline) is missing. You end of with utter chaos. Go ahead. Try to ride a bike with just the back wheel. Try it.
Aim at discipline, and academic achievement will increase. (c) MACE, March 1, 2011.
KimZ'spackage
March 1st, 2011
9:35 am
Why the more white kids hang around the black the white kids speak like they are black and the black kids don’t start speaking good and proper English like the white kids? If you have 30 kids in a class and 10 are black the black children will learn to speak properly, but when the % gets closer to 40% black or higher the white kids start speaking more ghetto.
Dr. John Trotter
March 1st, 2011
9:49 am
Dr. Spinks: You are always on target.
Larry Major
March 1st, 2011
9:52 am
Those decades of research directly conflict with everything I’ve seen locally.
GSMST is geared toward kids with both a high IQ and exceptional drive. It took time for the notion to catch on and the first two years about 30 percent of their students returned to their home school for “academic” reasons. The 70 percent there didn’t change the 30 percent – they went back to their home school, where they probably ran 3.5 GPAs.
GCPS has 33 Title I schools on the DOE’s Title I Distinguished Schools list. Although a school has to make AYP for “only” three consecutive years to get on this list, most of these 33 schools have seven and two have nine consecutive years. The 4 to 38 percent of kids in these schools who DIDN’T qualify for subsidized meals and the 49 percent of NON-ESOL students (these are the actual numbers) weren’t mentioned as the way they achieved this.
Still, I’m not a teacher and it’s possible my life is so completely abnormal that I’ve never seen typical – so let’s ask the teachers who read this blog.
Teachers, consider 90 kids – 60 ready for new material and 30 below grade level. Which is the more efficient way to educate all 90 kids?
A) Two classes of 30 kids each ready to move on and one class of 30 that need extra help.
B) Three classes, each with 20 kids ready for new material and 10 who are not.
I’ll defer to the real life experts on this one.
What's best for kids?
March 1st, 2011
9:57 am
Option A. No doubt.
Talk about your minorities
March 1st, 2011
10:16 am
It is ridiculous to say Blacks and Hispanics can’t perform as well as Whites and Asian/Asian Americans. My husband and I are both white and have Ph.Ds. Several of my neighbors and friends are of other races or cultures and have Ph.D.s, M.D.s, J.D.s, MBAs (the husbands AND the wives). They are no less horrified about what goes on in public schools than we are, and they fight every day to insure that their children will not be drawn into the glamorous thug/ho culture of low income middle and high school. This is a prevalent black and Hispanic teen and young adult subculture in our area where 60% of children in public school are on free or reduced price lunch.
These parents are less concerned about having their children at the top of their class than they are about getting them through school without an unwanted pregnancy or an arrest record like so many of their childrens’ peers. These parents are as involved in the school as we are, if not more so. Their children show up with homework completed, and prepared for learning. One could argue that the stakes are much higher for them to get their children through college, especially their son, so that they can show that they are “middle class material.”
There unique problems facing middle class racial minorities in public education. When there aren’t that many middle class nonwhites in a school, the children have to choose between having friends of the same race who are low income, often unsupervised, low achievers and friends of a different race who are middle income, but may not understand their interests, their TV programs, their music. I’ll give the example of two families I have know personally for years in which the parents have Ph.Ds in the sciences and value education, travel, and middle class lifestyle. My neighbor told me in 5th grade, his daughter who is black was in a very friendly multiracial group, but on entering 6th grade, the groups split completely along racial lines and she was literally told “choose.” What would you tell your child in that case? These parents figured they could offset the negative effects of the “ghetto culture” but wanted their daughter to be comfortable with her racial identity so they left her in public school. She has gone through school on Step Team and cheerleading for majority black sports teams, dated and attended parties with black classmates, has black teacher-mentors, and watched several classmates drop out with pregnancies and arrests (which her parents constantly point out as negative examples). Another black friend told me his wife insisted they enroll their children in a Christian private school to avoid the ghetto culture. As a result their children’s friends are all white and Asian (they are the only black family in the school), and he is concerned that they have been too insulated from black music, art, writings, etc. and will be at a cultural loss when they are old enough to marry. Also, he worries that when they are faced with the unique pressures on young blacks, they will be poorly prepared to counter the effects. Despite this, his children are very happy at the school and are going to be well prepared for college – the fact that all their friends assume a college education is part of their future makes it easy to encourage them to study and prepare for tests.
The talk of improving schools should address the needs of the children to be in “like” groups and to feel accepted.
ABC
March 1st, 2011
10:38 am
To talk about.. : so what are you saying? The choice is either do well in school, be well prepared for success in life OR become friends with people of your “own” culture and risk it all????? yeah right, my child will be choosing being the only minority in a group of friends if that were the case.
Talk about your minorities
March 1st, 2011
10:48 am
@ABC. I should have been clear. Both the families’ children are doing very well. The daughter who stayed in public school is college-bound next year (nursing is the planned degree, economic realities will determine which school she attends). The son in this family starts high school next year coming out of advanced/gifted programs in middle school. Both kids expect and are expected to complete college and go on to an advanced degree if it is required for their chosen fields. The children in the family that chose the private school route will definitely matriculate to college. The private school is not exceptional; it has no accelerated programs in middle school and limited AP selections, so the kids will go to college, but unless they do extremely well on the SAT (historically good scores, but not amazing scores, coming out of that school) or in one of the upscale sports offered at the school (fencing, anyone?), they will not “wow” any of the big colleges in the state. I guess one could say both will end up in about the same place, academically, mainly due to the influence of well-educated, committed parents and comfortable, if not lavish, secure two-parent households. But, culturally, will one set of kids be better off than the other? All I know is that the family with kids in public school is not worried about their children’s ability to withstand pressures in the university to do drugs, drink, have unprotected sex, but the parents with kids in the more sheltered private school are very nervous about sending their kids out into the world.
Dr. John Trotter
March 1st, 2011
11:03 am
Over thirty years ago, I did research at the University of Georgia on peer pressure perceptions among academically able black male adolescents, the results of which were published in The Journal of Negro Education (a referee journal) in the Winter edition of 1981. The findings showed that many times, academically able black male adolescents felt that they had to cut themselves off from their peer group if they wanted to succeed in school. This is sad. My daughter experienced the same peer pressure in high school. Some students kidded her, saying, “You talk white.” She later admitted that she made lower grades on purpose to fit in with her peers. Our First Lady, Michelle Obama, discussed the same disgusting peer pressures with author David Mendell in his book, “Obama: From Promise to Power.” She stated that “there’s frustration of feeling like you have to camouflage your intellect in order to survive in your own community.” The First Lady said that she and her brother experienced this anti-intellectual culture while in school.
The peer pressures that our children experience in the public school setting are usually negative in nature, especially for children of color. This is a strange phenomenon in our culture because in other cultures around the world, peer pressure at school works in a positive direction as far as academic achievement is concerned. (c) MACE, March 1, 2011.
Toto: Exposing naked body scanners...
March 1st, 2011
11:29 am
Return ownership of child’s education to parents. Overturn the compulsory education law. The only education options will be parent driven. If parents screw up, their children will suffer, AND SO WILL THEY. That is as it should be. Now, the parents screw up, public education makes it worse, AND EVERYONE ELSE SUFFERS. The bad parents get off scott free.
catlady
March 1st, 2011
12:09 pm
janet, obviously you have not eaten out at many “family restaurants” lately. I see many, many white kids without speck o’ raising!
Lee: Disfunctional (unhelpful for school success) culture: Putting coke in the baby’s bottle, your five year old not being able to count to 20, your child not knowing what a napkin is for, having a child with a “daddy of the week”, having your child’s first sentence “Get outta my face, you %$$#&,” your child answering to “Dammit,” parking you child in front of the TV while you go on a date, your child coming to school reeking of the dope you have been smoking, not knowing which school your child goes to, or what grade they are in…need I go on? No race involved in any of these.
Not My Job...
March 1st, 2011
12:17 pm
@Catlady. Your last statement resonated with me. The department head I know at UGA has no idea how old his kids are or what grade they are in. He does not know the name of the school they attend, nor has he ever been to a Parent-Teacher Conference. This Hispanic Floridian has a Ph.D., so it is not ignorance per se, but a cultural bias. His wife “handles all that family stuff.” If your culture is for the man to work outside the home and the woman to work inside it, you better hope that woman has an interest in education and a clue how to make it happen.
Bothered
March 1st, 2011
5:41 pm
@ Dr. John Trotter – Your studies are unfortunately true and something that has bothered me for years. As a white female that came from a predominantly white high school, I often experienced reverse discrimination…
Why? My best friend was an over-achieving black student who was discriminated against on a daily basis from other black students. They called her “white washed” and said she was a disgrace to “her community.” I never understood why anyone who was educated, an incredible athlete and valedictorian would be considered a disgrace to their community. She went on the graduate with honors from Stanford. Some disgrace right?
With that said, my opinion on this article is this, I think education has little to do with money or race. It has to do with parents. We both came from lower middle class families, maybe even poor by today’s standards, but we had parents that cared. We came from families that supported us, made us do homework, made us want more than what they had. We were taught the value of work and taking pride in your actions. I do not think that busing students all over the county will really back that big of a difference because at the end of the day, what matters most is family values. Not money. Not race.
So how about instead of busing students we start a huge campaign against teenage pregnancy? We start a huge campaign about accountability? You want a nice car? Work for it, don’t steal it. How about we teach manners and simple human decency?
Levin
March 1st, 2011
6:33 pm
Great idea! Let’s punish the high achieving kids by putting them with the low achieving ones. Once again the smart kids get the shaft. How about we set up a system where we reward achievement? Instead we have a system where teachers spend most of the there time with kids who don’t achieve. Just think how high our highest achievers could climb if we actually rewarded them with the increased instruction time they’ve earned instead decreasing their instruction time because they achieve?
Lee
March 1st, 2011
7:50 pm
@V, so…. I can’t quote Ayn Rand because you don’t like what I said after the quote.
Interesting concept……
Oh yeah, thanks for the Pavlov like response of calling me racist and proving my point…. I knew I could count on you…
Lee
March 1st, 2011
7:52 pm
@Catlady, and all this time I thought culture referred to the Arts, Literature, and Bar-b-que.
(Drive 50 miles and the BBQ changes, sorta like those wine regions in France and Italy)
amazed
March 1st, 2011
11:22 pm
How do they propose to do this? Rejuggle where kids go every year? Sounds better in theory than practice. But it is a good effort to try to deal with a culture of failure in some schools where education is devalued.
@Lee Modern geneticists (try Spencer Wells) will tell you that race is a cultural concept and has nothing to do with genetics. BBQ is only considered culture in the southeast where they also have these outmoded concepts about race. However, BBQ can be an art form.
V for Vendetta
March 2nd, 2011
8:51 am
Lee,
You can quote whoever you like. It just seems to me that if you believe in the pseudoscience that supports your obviously racist agenda, you probably also fundamentally misunderstand Rand’s philosophy.
“Pavlov like”? There’s nothing Pavlovian about identifying someone who is disciminating against a group of people based solely on their race as a racist. catlady is correct: there are many detestable behaviors to be found in poverty; few of them have to do with race. (Though I would argue–which I’m sure you, Lee, would enjoy–that the preponderance of such behavior in certain cultural groups is precisely what holds them back in education. However, as you so astutely observed, the culture of poverty changes from region to region.)