Unequal Education
Now the focus shifts from integration to achievement for all
Robert Novak's classroom door repeatedly slams shut, with a reverberating boom so loud it feels as if it could shake the peeling paint from the walls. With each explosion, students saunter in late to join the rest of their eighth-grade classmates, who are singing, gossiping, and flirting. Novak, 27, a first-year teacher at nearly all-black John Philip Sousa Middle School, hands out a description of a research project on black Revolutionary War figures. He calls on one lanky boy to read it aloud. "He can't read," a classmate taunts. The young man growls back: "Who can't read?" The class breaks out laughing.
The student begins the passage. He stumbles and his classmates chuckle. As he struggles with the word "declaration," Novak rescues him, explaining that the Declaration of Independence inspired blacks to join the Revolution and "to fight because they believed the words of the Founding Fathers that all men were created equal." Which prompts another student to shout:
"Who were the Founding Fathers?"
It wasn't supposed to be this way at Sousa. Fifty-four years ago, Spottswood Bolling Jr., an 11-year-old African-American, walked in the front door and asked to be enrolled in what was then a brand-new, state-of-the-art facility on the white side of the District of Columbia's legally segregated school system. The principal refused, and Spottswood's mother sued.
A victory. Meanwhile, 1,100 miles away in Topeka, Kan., a 7-year-old girl named Linda Brown was also trying to gain admission to an all-white school. In May 1954, the Supreme Court decided Spottswood Bolling's case alongside the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, striking down the "separate but equal" doctrine that had prevailed for 58 years.
The impact of Brown was electric. Its declaration that educating black and white children separately was unconstitutional made real the possibility that the great injustice of segregation would at last be righted, first in the law books, then in schools, and perhaps finally throughout American life. The resistance was mighty, the results imperfect, but there was no denying the great symbolism, justice, and social import of the court's action. " Brown opened up schools, but it did more. In D.C., restrooms were no longer segregated, water fountains weren't separate," says Frederick Gregory, one of three black ninth graders to enter Sousa in September 1954. "Integration said there were no borders or boundaries."
Gregory went on to become an astronaut, the kind of inspirational achievement that reformers hoped integration would foster. But Sousa's integration proved short-lived. A decade after Gregory enrolled, Washington's whites were fleeing for the nearby suburbs, and the school had become all black. Until the early 1980s, Sousa retained a good academic reputation, but today the 406-student school ranks among the worst middle schools in one of the worst school districts in the country. Last year, for example, 48 percent of Sousa's students scored below grade level in reading. Math scores were even worse.
This, then, is the tragedy of American education. Fifty years after Brown, the nation still has not figured out how to educate all of its children. African-Americans, on average, start kindergarten behind whites academically, and the gap grows during elementary school. The ripple effect carries into high school--and beyond. Although blacks and whites enter college at similar rates, 36 percent of whites graduate with a four-year degree, compared with only 18 percent of blacks. Black jobless rates are higher than whites', and black income is lower. The achievement gap between whites and blacks remains an affront to the national creed that Novak was teaching to his class: that all are created equal. What caused this racial chasm, and why does it linger? More important, what can schools do to close the gap?
Report card. Although the Washington, D.C., schools were among the first to desegregate after Brown, Sousa's story was eventually repeated all over the country. With the prodding of federal judges, legal segregation was ended, and, in fits and starts, repeated attempts were made to integrate through busing and magnet schools. Too often, especially in big cities, white flight and resegregation accelerated. Still, throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, black scores rose on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the respected federal test known as "the nation's report card." And yet by 1988, African-Americans and Hispanics (the latter unmentioned in Brown but now becoming the nation's largest minority group) had stopped catching up to their white and Asian-American contemporaries.
Today, the disparity remains troubling, persistent, and large. Last year, 6 of 10 black fourth graders who took the NAEP reading test had not even partially mastered grade-level skills. Only 25 percent of whites scored that low. In high schools, the situation is just as dismaying: Black and Hispanic seniors on average read and do math only as well as white eighth graders.
Surprising as it may seem in 2004, Chief Justice Earl Warren's opinion in Brown made little reference to scholastic achievement. Instead, it focused on the psychological damage of segregation and asserted that as long as education is separate, true equality of opportunity cannot exist. But now, as the racially charged fights over desegregation recede into the past, a new national debate over how to close the minority achievement gap has emerged. Not only is integration hard to achieve, but it is no longer universally assumed to be the key to excellence. If anything, the argument has been reversed: To have any hope of luring whites into majority-black schools, educators must first raise academic achievement in those classrooms. The 2001 No Child Left Behind Act is the most prominent example of this intellectual shift. The law does not concern itself with how integrated a school is. It simply demands achievement from every student, in every school.
To reach that goal, schools must find ways to prevent disorder and indifference from overwhelming education. Novak's experience is all too common. As he tries to continue his social-studies lesson, Phillip McPherson, a 14-year-old with a high forehead and watchful eyes, swivels around in his chair and flirts with a classmate. "Phillip, turn around," Novak calls. Phillip ignores him. "That's two demerits, Phillip, turn around." Phillip picks up a pink notebook on the girl's desk and begins to flip through it. Novak moves beside him. "OK, that is detention; don't make it an hour visit," Novak says. Phillip does not look up at the teacher. Novak breathes in and exhales: "Phillip. Turn. A. Round."
Novak is not a bad teacher. He possesses, according to his colleagues, great promise, energy, and vision. He tutors students after school and tries to design class projects that catch kids' attention. But the placement of a brand-new instructor in a tough, failing school, without meaningful guidance or support, is just one example of the systemic failure of minority education in America.
Last year, for the first time, the federal government released comparative test scores for 10 cities that have traditionally been home to the most troubled schools and the lowest minority achievement. At the bottom of the list was Washington, D.C., where 73 percent of black fourth graders were "below basic" in reading. At the other end was Charlotte, N.C., where 52 percent of black fourth graders were below basic.
While these scores leave plenty of room for improvement (overall, just 17 percent of whites in Charlotte were below basic), African-Americans in Charlotte easily bested the black national average. True, Charlotte enjoys advantages that the nation's capital lacks, notably the support of a reform-minded state government and the benefits of a school district that encompasses its immediate suburbs. Nevertheless, Washington and other failing school systems have much to learn from the kind of reforms that are starting to close the gap between white and black in Charlotte.
Great expectations. Each morning, televisions flicker on in the classrooms and offices of Charlotte's Highland Renaissance Academy. Two students lead the public elementary school in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and the school's "Pledge for Success": a list of rules such as "I will wait my turn to speak." Jenell Bovis, the principal, appears on the closed-circuit broadcast to call a group of students in front of the camera. Each has read enough books and passed enough comprehension tests to reach a different milestone. At each level, students get a prize--a shirt, water bottle, or Beanie Baby--and recognition.
This is the big idea at Highland: Set individualized goals for all students, and publicly reward those who meet the targets. As a result, achievement is up at the school, where most students are poor and African-American. The number of black 9-year-olds at grade level in reading, for example, rose from 29 percent in 1998 to 75 percent last year.
Academic success for Charlotte's African-Americans was supposed to have come with integration, more than three decades earlier. The city's desegregation fight reached the Supreme Court in 1971 when, in Swann v. Mecklenburg, the justices unanimously upheld the use of busing to integrate the schools. In the years that followed, Charlotte achieved a higher degree of integration than many other cities. But the achievement gap remained. "The promise of court-ordered busing has fallen short where it matters most: in improved learning for African-American students," Superintendent John Murphy proclaimed in 1994. Indeed, when Eric Smith succeeded Murphy as schools chief two years later, he found a double standard. In low-income schools "the rigor was less," says Smith, who now leads a suburban Washington, D.C., district. "There was a tendency to say, `We feel sorry for kids, and we don't want to push them hard.' "
Making change. Highland used to be one of those low-expectation schools. But when Bovis, the principal, arrived, she expanded the time spent on reading and writing, combined phonics with literature study, and made sure the curriculum was just as challenging and interesting as at suburban schools.
Today, the rules for teachers at Highland are clear: Ignoring struggling students is unacceptable. The drive to teach even those children who regularly disrupt lessons is apparent in a February visit to Karen Crawford's second-grade class. Crawford has gathered seven "brinkers"--children on the verge of passing the state tests. The group begins to read a passage on dinosaurs. One student, Glen, starts looking around. Crawford asks him to focus. It works for a moment: Glen offers that "germs" may have killed the dinosaurs. Then he starts pestering the girl next to him. Crawford has him move back to his own desk, which is turned backward to deter him from constantly rummaging through it. But she doesn't just leave him there. As the others reread the dinosaur passage to themselves, Crawford crouches beside Glen, talking to him about listening and self-control. "Glen," she concludes, "you are a smart boy."
Unfortunately, the attitudes Highland has worked hard to stamp out still linger in many D.C. classrooms. Like most educators, Lucius Stephenson, an eighth-grade teacher at Washington's R. H. Terrell Junior High, says he believes all students can learn. With high-achieving kids, Stephenson pulls out all the stops, working with students during lunch and after school on extracurricular projects. But, on one recent morning in his second-period science class, he is ignoring the students who ignore him. In the middle of the room, a group of girls discusses a flower one of them received for Valentine's Day, their science books untouched. In the back of the class, another student pounds on his table, talks to himself, and then puts his head down to sleep. Stephenson directs his attention almost exclusively to the three students who sit up front and gamely answer his questions. Stephenson complains that teaching at Terrell is harder now than it was when he started at the school a decade ago. "This neighborhood has gotten worse; there is killing all around," he says. "There are no parents to support you."
All that is true, but an increasingly influential group of tough-love reformers says it doesn't help for teachers to focus on it. "It is pretty clear the achievement gap has roots in school and nonschool factors," says Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust, an organization that works to improve minority education. "But if you tell teachers the gap has two sources, they want to fix the out-of-school stuff first. They never get around to doing the things they can do."
Teachers can start by setting high goals for all students, Haycock says. But reforms that do not provide at least simple incentives to meet those expectations will inevitably fall flat. Take, for example, the efforts of Terrell Junior High to give all students a new word to learn each day. On the morning of February 13, Principal Francis Nicol announced that day's word: "tawdry." The word was supposed to be discussed and used in classes, and perhaps it was. But the only obvious appearance of "tawdry" at Terrell was on an easel in a lonely corner of a language-arts classroom.
Compare that with Charlotte's Randolph Middle School. On the morning of February 11, Principal Jackie Menser announced that "precise" was the word of the day. In every class Menser dropped by, from special education to advanced algebra, students flagged her down. "It is impossible to know the precise number of french fries on my lunch tray," said one. Menser smiled and placed a colorful sticker in the student's notebook. "It is remarkable," Menser says, "what middle school students will do for a sticker."
Does money matter? The failings of black education in America have been linked to many root causes, key among them the nation's original sin of slavery and the lingering legacy of Jim Crow. Since well before Brown, many have believed that the education of black children has been hampered by a related factor: inadequate funding. In 1940, southern states spent more than twice as much on white schools as on black. Today, large urban schools and their suburban counterparts spend roughly equal amounts. But because of the problems of poverty, many advocates argue that majority black and Hispanic center-city schools need far more money than majority-white suburban schools.
The view that money would go a long way toward solving the problems of minority schooling prevails in Elizabeth Davis's class at D.C.'s Sousa Middle School. As part of a project on how the school is faring 50 years after Brown, Davis is having her eighth graders brainstorm a list of things that Sousa needs. Angela Oladiji, 14, notes with irony that although Sousa's 50-year-old library books are a problem, the bigger issue is that the library has been closed since the school laid off the librarian in December. With prompting from Davis, other students list things they would like to see, including working computers, repaired windows, and a recreation room.
Sousa undoubtedly needs a library. And the state of the facilities in too many poor schools is horrifying. But it's unclear that money itself will bring success. In 1966, sociologist James Coleman found that school budgets had little effect on academic performance. The point has been hotly argued ever since. Kansas City famously poured millions into expensive magnet school programs, trying to spend its way to academic excellence. Such efforts did not succeed. Today, many reformers say that while denying the importance of money is foolish, how a school spends its money is as important as how much it spends. D.C. spends about $10,000 per student, putting its spending slightly above nearby Montgomery County, Md., a wealthy suburb known for its top-notch schools. By contrast, Charlotte currently spends $7,288 per student. Washington "doesn't suffer from a lack of resources," says Paul Ruiz, the city's former chief academic officer.
One student in Davis's class has a different idea about what the school system suffers from: "We need teachers who are willing to help students learn," eighth grader Dozje Brown tells the class. Too many kids keep quiet, out of fear of the kind of teasing that occurred in Novak's class, she says later. "You don't want to say, `I don't know,' because you'll look bad."
Culture controversy. More researchers are beginning to explore the roots of such attitudes, contending that this behavior may contribute to the gulf between white and black achievement in school. It's a controversial subject. Harvard lecturer Ronald Ferguson says that blacks are more likely than whites to tease classmates for making mistakes. "It is a destructive dynamic that leads to anxiety," says Ferguson. "And anxiety interferes with concentration." Other researchers, like the late anthropologist John Ogbu, have found that black high achievers get mocked for "acting white." But scholars like New York University Prof. Pedro Noguera say that anti-intellectual attitudes prevail in all youth culture, black and white. "There are a lot of kids who have been turned off school, not just African-Americans," he says. "I see a lot of white kids like that."
Still, Noguera does believe that differences in black and white parenting have a big influence on children's academic success, both while kids are in school and before they arrive. "Black parents are more trusting that school will take care of things," he says. "And that is a big mistake." Black households, agrees Ferguson, are much more likely to treat education as a job for teachers, while whites are more likely to tutor or coach children as early as preschool. "The real issue is historical differences in parenting," he says. "That is hard to talk about, but that is the root of the skill gap."
Indeed, economists Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt say that even before kindergarten, black-white differences in children's language and number skills are influenced not only by family income but also by such factors as the number of children's books in a home. But whether the source of the achievement gap is the attitudes of parents, kids, or both, the solution is the same, argues Harvard historian Stephan Thernstrom, coauthor of No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning. "[Most] schools are not doing anything significant to close the gap," he says. "But schools radically reformed can make up for these problems."
The perfect score. A side door off the library of Charlotte's Highland Elementary leads to a room filled with stacks of great children's books, from Harriet the Spy to Holes. While the kids attend art or gym, each grade's teachers gather here to draft lesson plans, discuss students, and talk tests. At one recent meeting, Bronwyn Roberts, a literacy specialist, brings up a student who had been doing well on the district's twice-monthly mini-assessments. "All of a sudden he was blank," she says. Demetrus Keaton, the boy's classroom teacher, has an answer: His sister, who had been reading to him at home, recently got a job that prevents her from spending time with him. The teacher promises to talk to the boy's mother.
Educators in Charlotte have found that regular assessments shine a light into the achievement gap, forcing schools to rethink what they are doing to make sure every student learns. The city's testing program goes far beyond what is mandated by the federal or state governments. Charlotte makes all students take three "quarterly" tests before the North Carolina End-of-Grade Test. Majority-poor and low-performing schools must give students "mini-assessments" every two weeks. Weak results allow administrators to mobilize tutoring and other extra help. In poor, minority schools where parental involvement can be rare, the tests effectively take the place of the kind of family pressure that often forces suburban schools to excel.
The true test of Charlotte's ability to drive up black performance occurred last year. In 2001, court oversight of Charlotte school desegregation ended. The following year, the number of predominantly minority schools went from 28 to 41. But black educational progress did not end. Last spring, the gap between blacks and whites continued to shrink.
Critics say a heavy reliance on testing risks stripping creativity from classrooms. But in Charlotte, educators say that the constant testing actually gives good teachers more freedom. Principals who might have looked askance at an unorthodox teaching method now have an objective tool to measure whether the approach works or not.
At Randolph Middle School, John Singletary sends his seventh graders to the board in groups of four, each working a problem on scientific notation. In a chanting voice, he urges his students to focus on the upcoming state assessment. "We have three months till the End-of-Grade Test," he announces. "We have to get ready. We have to develop skills. We are going to drill and practice. Drill and practice. Repetition makes it better." Students either answer questions thrown at them, hop up to work at the board, or solve problems at their desks with Singletary supervising. "They fight like they don't want to do it," says Singletary, "but they want to learn."
Bob Doherty's eighth-grade English class could not be more different. Doherty gets the students with the lowest scores on standardized tests. The front of his classroom has a little stage where he plays his guitar, putting student essays to music. Doherty wants his kids to stop being anxious about writing and get excited about it. Like the other eighth-grade teachers, he is working on leads and introductions. But his instructions are much less formal. "I'd like to see an interesting first sentence, something that grabs you," he says, and leaves it at that. At one girl's desk, he stops and draws a box around a sentence she has written. "You have three mistakes," he says. "Find them and I will give you $10 million." She stares, then puts a period after a "Mr.," splits a run-on sentence, and puts a comma in front of a dependent clause. Doherty hands her a photocopied "check" for $10 million--currency good in his classroom auctions, where kids bid on snacks and drinks.
Both of these teachers get results. Overall, 76 percent of Doherty's students last year showed significant improvement on the state test. Singletary, meanwhile, helped 29 percent of his students move into the highest category on the North Carolina math test.
Lessons to learn. Not surprisingly, then, experts say that the most important factor in determining whether children, black or white, will learn in a given year is the quality of their teachers. Minority students, who start out behind their white peers, are often consigned to bad schools and burned-out or brand-new teachers, says Haycock, the Education Trust director. "Kids who come in behind get less of everything we know they need," she says. Closing the achievement gap will require identifying teachers who get results and luring them to the schools that need them most.
"Phillip, turn around." This time, without hesitation, Phillip turns back to his work. The teacher, Jason Kamras, continues helping another student, Jasmin, work with a pre-algebra problem. The same group of Sousa students who earlier tortured Robert Novak now sits attentively learning math. "With Mr. Novak, if you don't want to learn, you can go ahead and get out of learning," Phillip says. "Mr. Kamras is all about learning."
Kamras's work at Sousa shows the dramatic difference a teacher can make. He came to Sousa in 1996 through Teach for America, which places bright young college graduates in low-income urban and rural schools. Save for a stint at Harvard's education school, he has been at Sousa ever since. His class feels very different from the rest of the school. The door closes quietly. Kamras has repainted the walls himself. And his students are improving. In 2002, Kamras, then teaching seventh grade, persuaded his principal, William Lipscomb, to have his students take two daily periods of math. After the double dose, seventh-grade math scores soared. This year, all students at Sousa have math twice a day.
Raising black achievement will require schools to embrace the new priorities--high expectations, great teaching, and a focus on accountability--that have been integral to Charlotte's success. These are among the most important lessons America's schools must learn five decades after Brown.
All are apparent in Kamras's room. He keeps the class fast paced and exciting, he tolerates no misbehavior, and he forgets no one. After working with Jasmin, he calls on the class to get ready for a math game called "Face Off: Ladies v. Gentlemen." The game gives each student a chance to match math skills against a classmate. Here Phillip shows he is one of the smartest students in the class. No longer does he instigate disruptions. Extraneous talking costs the offending team points, and throughout the game Phillip diligently works to shush his teammates. He buys in. He gets it. He is learning.
A Lingering Divide
High school graduation rates have risen steadily for all groups, but striking racial and ethnic differences remain. Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that the academic gains black and Hispanic 17-year-olds made during the mid-1980s have leveled off. But some urban schools are doing much better on the NAEP than others.
Percentage of Black Fourth Graders Scoring Well Below Grade Level
National average (all races) 24 percent.
Math 2003
Charlotte 27 pct.
Houston 38
New York City 42
Los Angeles 58
Chicago 61
District of Columbia 67
Reading 2003
Charlotte 52 pct.
Houston 57
New York City 57
Los Angeles 70
Chicago 67
District of Columbia 73
Average National Test Scores for 17-year-olds
Reading
[Data unavailable]
[Chart labels] 230, 250, 270, 290, 310
White, Hispanic, Black
1971, 1985, 1999
Math
[Data unavailable]
[Chart labels] 230, 250, 270, 290, 310
1971, 1985, 1999
White, Hispanic, Black
High School Graduation Rates Among Americans 25 Years and Older
[Data incomplete]
2000
White 89 percent
Black 79
Hispanic 57
[Chart labels]
0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 pct.
1940, 1050, 1060, 1070, 1080, 1990, 2000
Source: National Center for Education Statistics, Education Statistics of the United States
Rob Cady--USN&WR
With Nancy Bentrup, Monica Ekman and Margaret Brady
This story appears in the March 22, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.