I value the opinion of my oldest son, Chris, who, after reading my two columns on the achievement gap from earlier this year, told me to give it a rest. Good advice, so I took it. Until I read the ad from APPLE (African-American Parents for Purposeful Leadership in Education) in the May 16 edition of this newspaper.
I won’t go into detail, but suffice it to say I thought the ad was wrong, inappropriate, incendiary, intemperate and divisive. As a former president of the high school’s booster club, I wondered how any parent organization would expend that organization’s hard-earned funds on such an ad? Did the membership actually vote to authorize the ad? What was the vote? Was there any debate or discussion?
To be sure, parent groups need not be cheerleaders for the high school, and there is a place for disagreement, but an ad that directly or by insinuation calls out the high school on its superintendent selection, special education, teacher contract and achievement gap, questioning the integrity and good faith of the staff and board surely crosses some line. Unless you have the ad in front of you, I can’t efficiently or effectively address the many misstatements, loaded rhetorical questions, half-truths and cheap shots set out there.
But the ad did renew my ongoing interest in this most interesting and important of topics–the achievement gap. Why do the black high schoolers as a group do so much worse than the white high schoolers as a group? (To be sure, many African-American students do very well at the high school.) What can be done to close or eliminate the gap? Can it ever be eliminated? This issue provides a portal for looking at the intersection of race, class, history, victimization and white guilt in our town and country.
After getting myself worked up over APPLE’s ad, I got a copy of The Learning Community Performance Gap: An Analysis of African-American Achievement at Oak Park and River Forest High School, published in May of 2003. I also read about the Minority Student Achievement Network (MSAN), a consortium of schools that share similar demographic characteristics with OPRFH. These schools include those of Ann Arbor, Chapel Hill, Madison and Shaker Heights. I read a bunch of other articles on the subject.
Here’s what I learned, and here’s what the APPLE ad neglected to disclose:
1) This achievement gap exists all over the United States. Armies of scholars, researchers, teachers and parents have studied it. Between 1970 and 1990 much progress was made in closing this gap. For example, 62 percent of the overall black-white reading-score gap for 17-year-olds disappeared between 1971 and 1988, but since 1990 the gap has not closed very much.
2) Only by comparing schools with comparable minority populations can any meaningful comparison be made. APPLE provided no such comparison. Sean Kelly did in a May 2 One View in this section. He provided comparisons with school districts similar to Oak Park. He used actual numbers. Imagine that! Oak Park’s performance is better than most. Of course, Whitney Young’s African-American students would test higher than ours – it’s a magnet school.
3) The topic is very complicated and complex. Most everything written on the topic in the newspaper – myself included – is just seat-of-the pants blather by the general public or well-intentioned anecdotal personal testimonies. The Learning Community Performance Gap is 160 pages with lots of data and analysis. Smart people who actually have degrees in education worked on it. The public debate on the achievement gap issue surely requires the high school to provide much more information on the subject, and for the newspapers to devote much more in-depth analysis of this important subject. Otherwise uninformed emotion will continue to pass as serious discussion.
4) OPRF High School has been working on this problem for more than 25 years. An internal report documenting the achievement of African-American students as related to their educational performance was written as early as 1977. There have been many interventions and initiatives involving the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of teacher hours in an effort to understand and address this gap.
These include the Structured Studies Program in the late 1980s involving students who failed at least two courses; Four For One/Hundred Program (1996-1998) established a school within a school for at-risk freshmen. During the 1990s, each of the school’s divisions was charged with the task of finding ways to narrow identified gaps in achievement. In 1997 the school’s efforts turned toward the development of small-scale instructional intervention. All faculty members participated in EEO (Equal Educational Opportunity). Three fourths of the facility completed training in TESA (Teacher Explanations and Student Achievement). OPRF has been a member of Minority Student Achievement Network since June 1999. This is just a sampling of the many programs focused on addressing the gap.
Today, the high school has a number of on-going initiatives addressing the gap. These include Algebra 1-2 Block/Agile Mind Program, MAC Scholars, College Prep Scholar program, 8 to 9 Connection Program and Learning Support Reading.
Keep in mind that all along the way, for more than 25 years the high school has partnered with black parents, teachers, administrators and community scholars in developing these programs that are designed to close this pernicious gap.
5) The achievement gap is established long before high school. According to Ronald Ferguson, the director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard, measurements of the intelligence of kids less than one-year-old, show virtually no racial or social-class differences, yet racial and social class achievement gaps are firmly established by the time students start kindergarten. Something happens before kindergarten that produces differences in profienciency. If Mr. Ferguson is right, then we better get parents, pre-schools and District 97 on board working together with District 200 on this. Dist. 200 can’t do all the heavy lifting.
Although the problem of the achievement gap is a very difficult one, the desire to close it is not. People move to Oak Park, send their children to Oak Park public schools, and teachers work in our schools because they want to live and work in an integrated community. The high school has worked and continues to work long and hard on what every educator in the country knows is one of the most difficult issues that our schools and our country confront.
While APPLE and others may be frustrated with the lack of progress, they need to cut the high school some serious slack. This is the engineering equivalent of building the pyramids, not a gazebo in your backyard. It’s going to take a lot of hard work, and it’s going to take a long time.
Perhaps I exaggerate, but if it doesn’t happen here, it might not happen anywhere.
