Academic Gap Follows Racial Lines

By Imran Vittachi, Jason Allen, Carlos Cruz, Chris O’Connell, and Sasha Khokha
CORRESPONDENTS

John Selawsky, a member of the Berkeley School Board, checked his watch.

It was nearly one o’clock on a recent afternoon, time for students from Berkeley High School to return to class after a 50-minute lunch break. But there they were, still on the street; scores of them.

For Selawsky, the sight epitomized the school’s dysfunction.

“We can’t begin to do anything unless we make sure that they’re in class,” he said.

Truancy, however, is just one of several factors that board members, school administrators, teachers, and parents of black and Latino students cited to explain the district’s failure to address the most glaring problem at Berkeley High: an academic gap largely defined along racial lines. For years now, black and Latino students have lagged well behind white and Asian-American students.

The other factors they listed include: a culture of permissiveness; too many administrative changes (including the announcement this month that principal Frank Lynch will be leaving after less than two years); ineffective pressure from parents of black and Latino students, who make up the majority of underperforming high school students; and a weak board.

The Board of Education has known about the serious academic gap since at least 1996, when the Western Association of Schools and Colleges noted it in a report and stopped giving the high school the normal, six-year accreditation certificate. In the last couple of years, the awareness has been heightened even further by the association’s threat to withdraw the accreditation altogether.

Nevertheless, the school board has failed to narrow the achievement gap at the 3,400-student campus, where 32.6 percent of the student body is white, 31.5 percent black, 10.2 percent Latino and 7 percent Asian-Pacific Islander.

“The buck stops at the board,” Selawsky said. “We’re not serving (the students) in the way that they need to be served.”

The majority of students who cut class or school are black and Latino, according to the June 2000 findings of the Diversity Project, a joint study by a group of Berkeley High School faculty members and UC Berkeley graduate students.

Truancy proves costly

The study shows that blacks make up the vast majority of suspended students and that their numbers have actually increased over the past four academic years. In fall 1999, black students received 76 percent of 642 suspension referrals, compared with 12 percent for Latinos and 9 percent for whites, according to the Diversity Project’s report.

While Latino students have wavered between 10 and 15 percent since 1997, for black students, the 1999 percentage represented a 6 percent increase from fall 1998 and a 10 percent increase from the 1997-98 school year.

The Diversity Project report also found that while white and Asian/Pacific Islander seniors maintained a mean grade-point average of 3.3 and 3.7, respectively, over the 1999-2000 school year, the mean GPA of black students and Latino students – whom, the study noted, generally came from poorer backgrounds – was 2.4 and 2.6, respectively, for the same period.

Permissiveness and complacency

Permissiveness, district observers said, fosters high truancy and other forms of bad behavior.

“Berkeley High lets anybody be a truant,” said Laura Menard, a member of the local PTA and high school Safety Committee. By doing so, the school also loses badly needed funds.

During the last academic year, high school attendance data showed, a yearly total of 16,183 unexcused absences amounted to $427,231 in lost revenue.

Susan Wengraf, a longtime Berkeley resident and member of the city Planning Commission, put the problem of truancy down to Berkeley’s liberal political culture. By her reading, a sense of guilt among the city’s baby-boom generation conflicts with an obligation to impose discipline on students. Rather than risk the scholastic welfare of her own children (who are now adults), Wengraf enrolled them at local private schools.

“I see our parents as being conflicted; I see the district as being conflicted,” she said. “I have some questions about whether that’s in the best interests of our children. Children need rules.”

Rick Ayers, a teacher at the high school, complained about complacency among his colleagues. They feel, he said, that they’re doing a sufficient job of teaching since many of their students graduate to go on to respected universities.

“We see people going to Harvard, UC Berkeley and Yale,” he said. “There hasn’t been a lot of self-examination. It’s only this year that the school district said we better do something else here.”

Board Vice President Shirley Issel views the high school’s problems as being basic ones that affect all students.

“Every kid needs toilet paper. … They’re not sexy – they’re basic issues, things we have to do to have an orderly, functioning institution that knows your kid’s name (and) gets their grades right,” said Issel, who also questioned the Diversity Project’s accuracy.

“Every parent is furious that no one picks up the phone (at Berkeley High),” she said. “That hurts every kid. You do not have to be a minority to have trouble communicating with the school.”

Seeking answers

At the same time, however, board members, the superintendent, and high school administrators, who were interviewed for this article, appeared to have no clear answer as to how the district proposes to deal with its biggest problem.

Pedro Noguera, a former board member and grade K-12 classroom teacher who now teaches at Harvard University, put the inability of district officials to solve the race issue partly down to the chaos of fires breaking out at the school, construction projects and changes in the school’s administration.

Noguera added that while things at the school are widely perceived as going well for white students – whose parents make up a powerful constituency in board elections — the school’s more privileged interests aren’t pushing for sweeping improvements. That, he said, does not apply to less active parental groups who represent “black and brown” students, but whose voices are unheard.

And, if Selawsky believes that the buck stops at the board, Noguera is not hopeful.

“The school board is basically asleep at the wheel,” Noguera said in an e-mail response to a reporter’s questions, from Cambridge, Mass. At Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, Noguera researches how schools and districts respond to socio-economic forces that shape cities. “They have no clue about what should be done.”

Even Selawsky acknowledged that when he says the responsibility stops with the board, there is often a lot of give. Recently, for example, the board approved academic standards for seniors even though a majority of board members said publicly that the standards were weak and vague.

Board President Terry Doran, however, said, “The tension that exists as you sit on a policy-making body is how involved you should be in carrying out the policies that we pass.

“I think that we could have carried out a more forceful policy in who we hired as superintendents and principals,” Doran said. “I think that we could have been more aggressive in asking questions from our superintendents and principals in what they were doing.”

All of this is difficult, however, when there are so many changes. Berkeley High has seen at least three principals come and go since 1995. But now, the board is looking to a new superintendent to take charge and keep them appraised of the job that’s being done at the school. First-year Superintendent Michele Lawrence, however, has no ready answers.

“There is no magic program you put in, and suddenly the achievement gap is gone,” she said.

Parent frustration grows

Before announcing his resignation this month, Lynch said Berkeley High would enroll failing students in a newly started tutoring program for students with learning problems, “Pathways to Progress.”

But parents of African American students were upset about Pathways. To Katrina Scott-George, a parent active with the pressure group Parents of Children of African Descent, Pathways is typical of what she described as the district’s collective deafness to concerns raised repeatedly by black parents.

“We just keep talking, and you don’t get that a piece is missing,” she told the board at its Sept. 19 meeting. Its five members did not respond publicly then to her criticism.

Scott-George was upset that the district had turned down a proposal from African American parents to continue the Rebound remedial program, an intensive learning program organized last spring by black parents. It prevented some 50 failing ninth graders – all black students – from being held back this year, parents said.

“We’re talking about nobody is doing okay,” Scott-George said, adding that less than 20 percent of African-American males who entered the current 10th grade class had a grade-point average of 3.0 or better.

Scott-George said black parents are increasingly frustrated that their efforts have little or no impact. “I think (board members) feel that they are taking it seriously, but I don’t feel they’re doing enough,” she said. “I don’t think they know how to do things differently from what they’ve been doing.”

Selawsky agreed the parents of minority students have less clout. While the board acts promptly on white parents’ demands to sanction new AP courses, for example, more often than not there is a delayed reaction in the way it responds to the concerns articulated by other parents. In short, when it comes to something that white parents want, Selawsky said, they get it, and there’s not much discussion about whether it’s the best use of district resources.

“The parents of kids on their way to the UC system are well connected,” he said. “They know how to work the system, but others don’t know how to work the system. Parents who haven’t been to college don’t know how.”

Latino parents also complain that no matter how hard they apply pressure to improve things for their children, little is done.

Latino parents interviewed said their children become locked into the English as a Second Language track, though their children have lived in the country for years. They believe the ESL-oriented classes are unnecessary for children who already know how to speak English.

Liz Fuentes, a bilingual-program teacher at Thousand Oaks Elementary School whose son graduated from Berkeley High School last year, works with some 300 to 400 Latino families whose children attend Thousand Oaks. She said that school officials have made no attempt to reach out to the Latino parents by communicating with them in their mother tongue.

“The bigger problem has been lack of access and equity in the process,” Fuentes said. “The school has made very little effort to translate things into Spanish. You can invite all the parents you want, but if it’s not in Spanish, they won’t respond. (School officials) don’t go out of their way to make things accessible.”

Both Fuentes and Scott-George bristled at the suggestion that minority parents had grown disinterested in organizing themselves into pressure groups that could effectively advocate change.

“What’s keeping people from participating is not that they’re apathetic, but there are a myriad of different reasons,” Fuentes said. “The high school calls meetings but has no translators; or it’s difficult for working parents to make the meeting times; or people feel they are distinctly in the minority – they feel uncomfortable.”