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Reading, Writing and Race in San Diego Schools
(page 2 of 4)
It has been nearly 50 years since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that “separate but equal” schools are inherently unequal. Across the country and through the decades, school districts responded with everything from forced busing plans to magnet and other innovative school programs to achieve racial integration of students. In more-recent years, there has been a nearly 180-degree shift, with the courts saying, in effect, that race alone cannot be the basis for making certain public and civic decisions.
“The change in the law also coincides with the change in the politics of communities of color,” says Alan Bersin, superintendent of the San Diego Unified School District, the state’s second largest, with nearly 142,000 students in 176 schools. “This is a view that says integration is a secondary goal compared with the right [to give] our children a quality education in neighborhood schools.”
In 1977, a San Diego Superior Court judge ruled, in what is known as the Carlin decision, that 23 of the district’s then 160 schools were “racially isolated” and academically underachieving. A desegregation order was issued. At the time, the district’s overall enrollment was about 70 percent white and 30 percent minority.
Today, those numbers for city schools have flipped, with nonwhites accounting for 72.6 percent of the public-school district’s students. (“White” and “nonwhite” are terms the district has used for more than a dozen years in documents. The most recent enrollment data show Latinos forming 37.5 percent of the student population; African-Americans, 16.5 percent; Filipino, 8 percent; Indochinese, 6.3 percent; Asian, 2.7 percent; Pacific Islander, 1 percent; and Alaskan/Indian, 0.6 percent.) Progress has been made in closing the achievement gap noted in the Carlin case, but the racially isolated schools identified by the court lag behind others in standardized test scores. (See the related story on page 96 for a discussion of students taking tests in English when that is not their native language.)
Like or loathe the standardized test results, schools have to live with them. Test scores determine how much extra funding schools may receive from the state if they improve their numbers. They also determine whether schools face penalties or even closure if scores drop. Scores routinely grab headlines, often forming the general public’s overriding—or only—perception of how well its school system is doing.
Not all educators agree on the tests’ validity and value, with some questioning whether tests introduce standards and accountability or whether they only introduce stress.
“I’m extremely dismayed by this increasing emphasis on standardized test scores,” says Leland Saito, a professor of ethnic studies at UCSD. The tests, he says, are an excellent indicator of how well a student can take a particular test. “But as an indicator of actual academics, it’s much weaker,” he says. “And as a way to compare how one school is doing with another school, it’s a very, very poor indication.”
In mid-January, the state Department of Education reported that more than two-thirds of San Diego County schools ranked in the top half of 8,500 schools statewide, based on standardized tests given in grades 2 through 11. For the San Diego Unified District, 95 of 151 schools ranked in the top half of the state for what is known as the API, the Academic Performance Index. A few samples from the latest numbers:
To give a fuller picture of scores, there are also state rankings to show how well schools perform when compared to others in the state that have similar demographic characteristics, such as ethnicity and income levels. These numbers are ranked 1 to 10, with 10 meaning the school’s academic performance is in the highest percentile when compared to schools of similar background. In the preceding examples, La Jolla High is ranked an 8, San Diego High gets a 10, and Lincoln High—one of the district’s 23 court-identified racially isolated schools—ranks a 4. What equal-access issues are in play here? Here is one simple example. Lincoln High may offer a course in, say, physics. But there is only one physics class, and it’s only offered during one period, the same period when a popular elective is offered. La Jolla High may offer physics during six different periods. The La Jolla student has access to a wider range of options. A twist on the equal-access issue involves the amount of experience a teacher may have. Communities with lower-achieving schools have complained for decades that it is the “new and green” teachers who traditionally are assigned to their schools —teachers who may not have as rich a repertoire of skills in dealing with kids, both scholastically and from the standpoint of discipline. This is a sensitive topic for the San Diego city school district and its teachers, who are represented by the San Diego Teachers Association. Under terms of the district’s contract with SDTA, teachers with the highest seniority must be selected for any opening. This “post-and-bid” procedure mandates that a teacher selected for a school vacancy must be chosen from among the top five candidates with the most seniority in the district. And teachers often bid for the higher-achieving, less troublesome schools. Norma Trost, executive director of communications for San Diego City Schools, says she does not know of another school district that uses such a process, one she says has been in force with the district for “as long as anyone can remember.” It would be inaccurate, and unfair, to say lower-achieving schools never attract senior, dedicated teachers—a visit to almost any school campus can show otherwise. More subtle factors also may come into play. “At a school like La Jolla, you have students from wealthy families where parents are involved and where a C is out of the question. You don’t have to do quite as much as a teacher to get your kids motivated,” says Cindy Page, a teacher at Crawford High School in the Mid-City area. “In an inner-city school, you have to motivate them and then try to take them where they need to go.” Providing necessary skills to teachers is also an access issue. “Some teachers who are being asked to teach kids to read, in all honesty, don’t know how to teach kids to read,” says Trost. “Why? Because they teach fifth grade, and kids should know how to read by the fifth grade. Or they teach eighth grade or 11th grade. There are different strategies to use as children get older and still are not functionally literate.” Trost says the district knows it must do more in this area of teacher development. “But it’s a money issue,” she adds. “Every time you ask a teacher to stay after school to get training, if it’s beyond their workday, you have to pay them.” (The average annual teacher salary in the city school district is about $50,000; overtime pay is about $26 per hour.) Teachers also pay. It’s hard to find one who, at some time, has not had to dig into her or his own pocket to buy basic supplies for the classroom or to provide a needed enrichment program. These common occurrences are “a moral outrage,” says John Chane, dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in San Diego. “The community that ought to be supporting education as its number-one priority, and putting its dollars into it, doesn’t address that issue well at all,” he says. The community’s commitment to fund programming, he adds, needs to be “out of the political arena, and that is hard to do.” Many local community groups do help. The San Diego Foundation, for example, in partnership with the local Girard Foundation, has its Teachers Fund, where any elementary-school teacher in San Diego County may apply for a grant of up to $1,000. In addition to supplying materials for basic skills, teachers seek funding for many “innovative programs that bridge racial, ethnic and economic issues,” says the foundation’s associate vice president, Patricia Sinay. She says the fund has provided more than $250,000 in grants to nearly 300 elementary-school teachers throughout the county since the program began in 1995. For the current school year, $75,000 has been allocated. |
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