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Educators still struggle for equality between races
By ALAN J. BORSUK - aborsuk@journalsentinel.com

Still Separate and Unequal

The very fact that everyone knows what the phrase means when you're talking about the state of education in America means that the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision declaring school segregation unconstitutional hasn't turned into a very golden affair.

Bruised and long-suffering, the dream of equality between the races when it comes to both opportunity and success in education has to be given an "Incomplete."

As the anniversary of the decision known as Brown vs. the Board of Education arrives Monday, perhaps the brightest rays of hope come from the open and intense focus on the problem from so many educational arenas.

The gap - the difference in educational success between white and minority children, especially African-Americans - is the driving force behind the sweeping federal education law called No Child Left Behind. It is the focus of state standards and testing systems from coast to coast, of numerous political speeches and platforms, of studies, conferences, books, commissions.

And it is, many experts say, a crucial factor in shaping the economic and social future of America - a land where the majority of people will soon be non-white.

To U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige, closing the gap is "the civil rights issue of our time."

To Wisconsin's school Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster, "There's nothing more important than closing the gap."

Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips, editors of "The Black-White Test Score Gap," a 1998 Brookings Institution book regarded by many researchers as a key collection of research on the problem, wrote, "If racial equality is America's goal, reducing the black-white test score gap would probably do more to promote this goal than any other strategy that commands broad political support."

Yet 50 years after the Brown decision set in motion enormous change in the landscape of American education, there are three things almost everyone agrees on:

The gap really does exist. While many black students do wonderfully well and many white students do poorly, the overall statistics are inescapable. There is a gap between black and white school success. And it's very large.

It can be connected to a lot of things that aren't directly racial, such as poverty, but no one factor explains it in full.

The gap closed substantially in the 1970s and '80s but hasn't moved much since. In fact, it began to widen again in some areas.

The gap is on the front burner in a big way. Once almost banned from public discussion because the subject is so sensitive, it is at the top of the concerns of the American educational establishment as a whole, second probably only to the subject of money.

How big is the gap? Consider these statistics for the nation and Wisconsin:

In 2003, in the federal testing program known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, which provides the closest thing to nationwide test results, 45% of white eighth-graders were rated as proficient or better in reading, while 14% of black students and 16% of Hispanic students were. On the other hand, 46% of black eighth-graders and 44% of Hispanics rated as "below basic," the lowest category, compared with 17% of whites.

The NAEP results found that the gap between white and black eighth-graders in reading and math was larger in Wisconsin than anywhere else in the United States. Other studies have suggested Wisconsin has one of the highest high school graduation rates in the country for white students, and the lowest for blacks.

In Wisconsin, tests given in November 2002 found 81% of white eighth-graders proficient or better in math, but only 30% of black eighth-graders.

Unfortunately, such results are plentiful, and they generally suggest the gap gets bigger as the students get older, a major concern because it is the long-term result of the educational process that ultimately matters most.

In the National Urban League's recent report titled "The State of Black America 2004," a selection of statistics is turned into an index of how well blacks are faring compared with whites. According to that index, if the white educational situation overall is rated as 1.00, the situation for blacks is rated at 0.76.

Students at Milwaukee's almost-all-black Custer High School can relate to statistics like that. They experience the gap by comparing the offerings at their school, both in the range of classes and in extracurricular activities, with suburban, mostly white schools, and by seeing many of their classmates skipping school, dropping out or failing to put in the effort needed to do well.

Michael Cooper, 17, a sophomore at Custer, says, "Segregation has not really changed that much." He says he is determined, after getting off the path a few times, to do well in school, but he is concerned that classes and activities keep getting cut at Custer. "How are we supposed to advance if these things are being cut out from under us?" he asks.

Dwaun Bailey, 16, attended Menomonee Falls schools from third through ninth grades before transferring to Custer this year. He likes the school and is doing well, but he senses a gap in the way high-performing students were challenged more and low-performing students were helped more at his former schools. "I don't think they have the push in African-American schools," he says.

Talking about it
The education gap once was considered so sensitive that no one talked about it for fear the discussion would become racially insensitive, if not overtly racist. Lee McMurrin, superintendent of the Milwaukee Public Schools from 1975 to 1986, strongly discouraged discussion of the gap on the grounds that it wasn't constructive.

"Fortunately, those days are over," says Tom Loveless, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "If we can't talk about these problems, then certainly we can never get around to solving them."

Or maybe it's not so fortunate:

"Notwithstanding the seemingly good intentions, the desire to improve African-American school performance and the common sense notion that the first step . . . is acknowledging that there is a problem, this conversation will almost surely reinforce the national ideology about black intellectual inferiority," writes Theresa Perry, an education professor at Wheelock College in Boston in a new book, "Young, Gifted and Black: Promoting High Achievement Among African-American Students."

Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust, a prominent Washington-based organization that generally supports the No Child Left Behind law, says that putting data on the gap on the table is important because it shows "how systematically we've rigged the system against certain groups of kids."

Michael Olneck, professor in the Educational Policy Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says, "Brown deserves every bit of historical recognition it can get as being part of transforming the racial order. That said, the degrees of inequality in education that persist are extremely large and very consequential. They're far less than 40 years ago or 30 years ago. They're not far less than 15 years ago, which is really disturbing."

There is no firm reason why the trend line in black test scores, particularly on the NAEP nationwide tests, showed a definite rise from the mid '70s through the '80s. There is also no clear understanding of why it stopped.

Some researchers and advocates suggest that the impact of court-ordered school desegregation and the 1960s' War on Poverty were being felt the most at that time.

Others suggest other reasons, such as generally rising expectations in black families at the time. School integration advocates point out that the gap stopped closing about the time the trend toward judicial support for integration waned.

Whatever your theory, there's a pretty good chance you're right. But not as right as you might think.

No one factor or even small group of factors seems to explain the whole gap, researchers have found.

In the 1998 Brookings book on the gap, Jencks and Phillips conclude, "Taken as a whole . . . what we have categorized as the 'traditional' explanations for the black-white test score gap do not take us very far."

The two wrote that research showed that "many common explanations for the test score gap . . . did not seem to be as important as their proponents claimed."

Poverty, for example, is often cited as the key to why the gap exists: The black population, overall, is poorer than whites, and therefore blacks do worse in school overall. But the Center on Education Policy, a non-profit group based in Washington, said in a 2001 report, "African-American and Hispanic families tend to have higher rates of poverty and lower levels of parent education, both of which correlate with lower achievement in children. When test scores are adjusted to compensate for these two factors, the gap shrinks - by about a third, according to one estimate - but it does not disappear. In other words, racial/ethnic differences in family income and parent education can explain some, but not all, of the achievement gap."

Education Testing Service, the huge private testing company based in Princeton, N.J., issued a report last fall examining 14 factors believed to be connected to the gap. It broke them into three categories: early childhood experiences, things related to school itself, and factors affecting students' lives outside school. The specific factors ranged from weight at birth to how much time kids spend watching television to the rigor of a school's curriculum.

The conclusion: In all 14 cases, minority students overall were on the less-desirable side of both what was being measured and of school performance. All of the factors matched up with the racial gap, in other words.

The list didn't include factors many people cite: the legacy of slavery, the history of blacks being systematically denied educations or given inferior schooling, very high rates of single-parent households, generally headed by women who did not go far in school.

About the only things that have been rejected resoundingly as explanations by all reputable quarters are beliefs that there is a something inherent in the races that causes whites to do better in school than blacks - racist explanations, in other words.

Searching for solutions
As for solutions, steps that were heralded by one political or educational camp or another as sure to bring big results - integration through school busing, accountability and testing campaigns, changes in reading and math curricula, community education programs, class size reduction programs, after-school programs - have sometimes had some positive effects.

But the gap remains.

In fact, Andrew Porter, a prominent education researcher formerly of UW-Madison and now of Vanderbilt University, wrote in a recent paper that "many initiatives to close the achievement gap have actually widened the gap."

Is improved funding the answer? Nationwide, experts say, the gap between what is spent per student on educating white children and what is spent on educating black children is one gap that has narrowed over the years.

On the one hand, it remains true in general that white suburban children have better facilities and more challenging programs than central city students, leading advocates to say that more is needed to solve the gap than simply equity in per-student spending. On the other hand, some in education argue that the fact that the academic gap has remained while the funding gap has narrowed shows that more money isn't the answer.

The big, new kid on the block when it comes to efforts to close the gap is the federal No Child Left Behind law, which calls for testing of all third- through eighth-graders in reading and math, qualified teachers in every classroom and potentially strong sanctions against schools where minority children are not doing as well as white children.

The law is controversial.

Haycock of the Education Trust generally supports the law and says, "If you believe, as I do certainly, that the first step in making progress is grabbing folks' attention, this law has done exactly that and has succeeded wildly in doing that."

But UW-Madison's Olneck says his view is that "you simply cannot pass a law that kids are going to score at certain levels or they're going to pass this or that. You might as well pass a law that says there won't be a drought."

Two areas that are getting emphasis these days, both in Wisconsin and nationwide, are improving early childhood education and raising the quality of the teachers and teaching in schools that deal with minority children. Both could be expensive at a time of tight resources, and neither offers quick solutions.

A prominent Harvard expert, Ronald Ferguson, says in an interview, "I think we're in the middle of a long process, like when you're in the middle of the forest and you can't quite see for sure where you're going to come out. We kind of have to keep going with it."

Is the dialogue constructive?

Ferguson answers, "The dialogue is better than no dialogue. We can imagine a more informed dialogue. . . . There's not a single recipe or even a short list of recipes that we're trying to push everybody to implement. It's really a search that is being conducted broadly. In some ways it's trial and error. . . . It's something that may take us a generation to achieve."

But how much patience is there? How much should there be?

At a recent conference of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Alliance of Black School Educators, one educator became exasperated when the discussion covered things she had heard before. She wanted fresh solutions, and they weren't coming.

"I don't hear 'new' right now," she said. "This is real . . . and it needs to be changed."

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