A Report Card on the Race Card

In the public schools of 2003, the issue of race is the 800-pound gorilla. It may be politically safer to downplay it—or try to ignore it—but how can you avoid something that takes up so much space and creates so much tension?

“Any time you add race to the discussion of education, it’s usually in a very tactful manner,” says Jimma McWilson, executive vice president and chief operating officer of the San Diego Urban League. But the reality is blunt: With more than a third of the state’s annual budget earmarked for public education—and additional millions for school districts to boost achievement at low-performing schools—why are so many students still slipping through the academic cracks? Why can’t they fill out job applications? Change a $20 bill? Read a simple manual? And why does race so often seem to factor into this?

If the huge monetary investment in public education is not providing a good return for all students, McWilson says, then the issue comes down to race—a subject most people don’t want to talk about. “When they do, they link it to low socioeconomic, linguistically disabled people,” he says. Still, McWilson says, there are many high-performing, high-minority schools with many students for whom English is a second language. And those schools need to be studied, he says, to see what is working and why.

In San Diego, as with many high-growth cities, there are certain unassailable facts about race and education:

# Schools in high-minority, low socioeconomic neighborhoods generally perform significantly lower on key standardized tests that measure academic achievement.

# Dropout rates among African-American and Latino students are significantly higher than for white school populations.

# Student transience rates—moving from one school, or one school district, to another—are higher for African-Americans and Latinos, providing less continuity in tracking a student’s progress.

# In the nearly 25 years since San Diego city schools were ordered desegregated in the Carlin court decision, the makeup of the district’s student population (currently 140,000) has taken a 180-degree turn: Today, it is about 70 percent minority and 30 percent white; in 1979, the year Carlin was handed down, it was 70 percent white and 30 percent minority.

# More than 60 languages are spoken in San Diego city schools, with 22 percent of the district’s students having limited English-speaking ability; nationwide, the figure is 9 percent.

“Education works in lots of ways for lots of kids,” says state Assemblyman Mark Wyland, a member of the Legislature’s education committee, whose District 74 includes coastal communities from Carlsbad to Del Mar and the inland cities of Vista, San Marcos and Escondido. “But there are certain groups for whom it isn’t working. And if it isn’t working for them, it’s not working for all of us.”

Achievement gaps and race issues are “synonymous,” says San Diego city schools superintendent Alan Bersin. “The integration battles of the past have given way to the effort of trying to close the gap.” He notes that while the 1954 landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, sought to end school segregation, today’s education goal “has become equal opportunity for every child.”

Bersin adds, however: “We have not produced that opportunity, which creates a lot of the political tension that attends public education today. Education for every child has never been realized, and that’s the sense of urgency surrounding public education.”

For community leaders such as McWilson, equal opportunity is more than a goal; it’s a matter of survival. “Education is the only way African-Americans can achieve equality in the United States,” he says.

Bersin says it’s not surprising that race issues in education draw such fervent comments. “We are passionate about our children,” he says. “But because issues such as class and race are overlaid in the context of urban public education, the situation becomes even more subject to people’s competing views.”

Bilingual education is a prime example. In June 1998, Proposition 227 was passed by 61 percent of California voters. The initiative allows some instruction flexibility for English learners to be placed in bilingual classes, but generally requires that they be placed in mainstream English-only classes after two years. Opponents of the measure viewed it as a political move designed to address the public’s discontent with California’s school system; bilingual education, they claimed, became the scapegoat.

For René Flores, who teaches Spanish at Chula Vista High School, that inequity, bred by politics, is decidedly unfair. Why are Spanish-speaking students expected to learn English in two years, he asks, when English-speaking kids learning Spanish as a second language are given four years?

“This idea goes against research,” Flores says. “It goes against a language teacher’s best professional sense. Under the best circumstances, it normally takes an average first-grader three to four years to learn enough English to be mainstreamed. Some politicians cannot accept that demographics have changed over the last 10 to 15 years.”

In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that even though students have equal access to the classroom, if they don’t understand what’s being taught, equal access to learning is denied. “I wonder if we are not denying linguistic accessibility to a very large portion of our student population,” says Flores, who is also a South Bay teachers’ representative to the San Diego Education Association, the union representing teachers in the San Diego Unified School District.

Where the story of race in education once was told in the numbers of children who were forcibly bused to achieve desegregation, today’s focus is on the numbers in test scores—the most accepted, but still controversial, measure of whether the achievement gap is closing. A host of perceived reasons is often cited to explain the achievement gap. These include teacher insensitivity to cultural differences, lack of minority teachers, lack of materials and resources, parental indifference and lack of individual student motivation.

McWilson says reading test scores for African-Americans in the city school district rose between 1980 and 1987, remained steady for the next two years, then began a steady decline. Bersin’s Blueprint for Student Success strategy, a highly structured, back-to-basics reform measure launched three years ago, helped stop the decline and increased reading, language and math scores for African-Americans and Latinos.

When politicians institute ideas or projects not necessarily based on pedagogical concerns, says Flores, “Teachers are caught in the middle. Some of the most effective teachers are prevented from implementing their most effective teaching strategies. They are obligated to follow some other curriculum, which may not be as effective as the ones they are using.”

However, when schools did go their own way, it was a failure, according to Ron Ottinger, president of the San Diego city school board. “If teachers had their druthers, each teacher would select what he or she taught and how they taught it,” he says. “We moved away from teacher-centered education. Instead [with the Blueprint], we relied on research to show how best to teach reading and math. It’s a sea change in culture.”

Says Bersin: “There’s been a lot of tension over the last generation. But the one variable the schools have control over is the quality of their teaching. With that, you can overcome the poverty in people’s learning.”

John de Beck, a longtime San Diego school board member and a vocal critic of Bersin, echoes McWilson’s challenge to study high-performing students in what traditionally have been low-performing schools. “The truth is we have an awful lot of kids that come from Southeast San Diego or from marginal schools who are very successful,” de Beck says. What makes them successful needs to be investigated and data collected, he adds.

Former teacher Robin Whitlow, executive director of the San Diego Education Association, agrees that a tracking system is necessary to measure individual student achievement from the beginning of a student’s school career to the end.

“I think we are locked in the notion that schools have to have a two-four-six system—the two sides of the book, the four walls of the classroom and the six bells that ring,” she says. “We’ve all been through it, and it’s comfortable because it’s familiar, but I don’t know that it any longer serves the students we are educating.

“We need to look at a system that moves children along as they achieve and is more able to meet their individual needs no matter what they look like, no matter what their socioeconomic needs are,” says Whitlow. “If their needs are going to be different from child to child, we don’t sufficiently address that in the system that currently exists.”

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