Unfinished Business

The problem of the twentieth century," wrote W.E.B. DuBois, "is the problem of the color-line."

DuBois' century-old portrait of the color line -- the relationship between darker and lighter races "in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea" -- has shifted as the result of wars, revolutions, migrations, laws, and social change. But race remains a volatile issue in the 21st century.

In fact, say Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom in their new book, No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, racial inequality is "the nation's great unfinished business." In this follow-up to their 1999 book America in Black and White, the Thernstroms call racial inequality in schools "the most important civil rights issue of our time."

Fifty years since the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, they say, educational equality along racial lines remains elusive. Other experts agree, citing persistent racial problems that show up in wide achievement gaps between white and minority students.

A stubborn truth

One of the "most disheartening situations" in U.S. education is the achievement gap between black, Hispanic, and Native American students and their white and Asian peers, says Gina Burkhardt, executive director of the Illinois-based North Central Regional Educational Laboratory (NCREL).

The picture Burkhardt paints in NCREL's Closing the Achievement Gaps, a large-scale study launched in 2002 and expanded in 2003, is bleak but not completely without hope. For instance, Nancy Kober, a researcher with the Center on Education Policy, says past achievement trends provide a glimmer of optimism. In her contribution to NCREL's study, Kober notes that minority students' achievement rose significantly during the 1970s and '80s.

Achievement gaps widened again in the 1990s, however, and have remained wide to this day. Kober's analysis of recent national data shows just how wide:
| On the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 1999 reading test, the scores of black students at age 17 were about the same as those of white students at age 13.
| On the 1999 NAEP science test, Hispanic 9-year-olds scored more than three grade levels lower than white students of the same age.
| On the 2000 SAT college entrance exams, black students on average scored 123 points lower on the math test and 95 points lower on the verbal than white students; Hispanic students, on average, scored 89 points lower in math and 70 points lower in verbal than white students.

Students of all races have made gains in achievement, Kober points out, but white students still outdistance minority students by an increasing margin, thus perpetuating -- and widening -- the racial achievement gaps.

Leverage of the law

The goal of improving minority students' achievement is embedded in the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). To comply with NCLB requirements, states and school districts must administer statewide reading and math tests each year in grades three through eight, and they must report results for academically targeted groups of students, including racial and ethnic minorities and children living in poverty. Beginning in 2002-03, state and district report cards must use test scores to portray overall achievement, as well as achievement by subgroups of students.

Written into NCLB is the hope that, faced with consequences for failing to make "adequate yearly progress," low-performing schools will concentrate on raising achievement for all students.

For the first time in the nation's history, says Harvard University's Ronald Ferguson, raising achievement levels among racial and ethnic minorities and closing racial achievement gaps are "explicit goals of federal policy."

But closing achievement gaps will depend on more than standards-based reforms and standardized tests, says Ferguson, a public policy specialist at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He points to schools that are "reputedly excellent" but where, in fact, black and Hispanic students are consistently underrepresented at the top and overrepresented at the bottom of the achievement spectrum.

Ferguson is troubled that unequal achievement doesn't command more attention in so-called high-achieving schools. Too often, he says, such schools are excellent for honors students on their way to prestigious colleges and universities, but they fail miserably with most of their poor, minority students. (See sidebar on this page.)

Defying the odds

Many school officials believe they can do little to combat poverty and other out-of-school influences on student achievement. But Kati Haycock, director of the Washington, D.C.-based research and advocacy group Education Trust, calls that belief a myth.

Haycock cites examples of high-poverty schools across the country where minority students consistently perform at or near the top on state tests. The leaders in these schools know the myth is wrong, she says, and they refuse to use socio-economic or other factors as excuses to deny minority students high-quality learning.

Many schools in Texas and North Carolina, for example, have defied the myth, according to the Education Trust. Statewide, Hispanic eighth-graders in Texas are 25 points ahead of their peers in Minnesota on the NEAP writing test. And in North Carolina, black eighth-graders are 17 points ahead of their peers in Michigan.

Success stories on a smaller scale are equally encouraging. Ginger Reynolds, a researcher with Learning Point Associates and NCREL, describes "programs with promise" in "Identifying and Eliminating the Achievement Gaps: A Research-Based Approach."

An example is Sageland Elementary School in El Paso, Texas. Situated in the nation's fifth poorest congressional district, the school has a student population that is 70 percent Hispanic. Sageland's student achievement scores have gone from the bottom quartile in all academic areas to as high as the 96th percentile.

Principal Triana Olivas attributes the increases to several efforts: adopting instructional best practices; promoting heavy involvment by parents and the business community; and developing a communitywide school reform effort that involves scrutinizing disaggregated student data and using the information to deploy and redeploy existing resources.

Reynolds reports similar increases for minority students at Seattle's Nathan Hale High School. Administrators there credit team teaching, mentoring, interdisciplinary studies, teacher development, and a schools-within-a-school model for improving minority students' test scores, attendance, and discipline referrals.

Lack of faith

In an attempt to explain the achievement gap, researchers at the Education Trust studied selected schools and communities across the nation. It came as no surprise, Haycock says, to find that many minority students attend underfunded schools and receive poor-quality instruction.

But a number of other in-school factors also contribute to widening racial achievement gaps. In several schools, the researchers found students sharply divided along color lines. In Providence, R.I., for instance, they noted that 23 percent of the school's students are black, but only 9 percent of black students are admitted into the district's gifted and Advanced Placement courses. And they found similar racial imbalances in Austin, Texas; Durham, N.C.; Boston; and San Francisco.

Haycock also reports a "teacher gap" in high-minority, high-poverty schools. On average, she says, teachers in these schools have less experience, attend less-selective colleges, and fail certification tests more frequently than teachers in wealthier schools with fewer minority students.

Another factor that Haycock found pervasive -- and perhaps most damaging -- is teachers' lack of faith in the ability of minority students to learn and succeed. During six years of observing teachers and students in high-minority and high-poverty classrooms, Haycock says, the researchers frequently found that teachers gave minority students few assignments, and the work they did assign typically had little meaning and was of little value. In one class, for instance, an 11th-grade English teacher told her students to "read To Kill a Mockingbird and color a poster about it."

Race still counts

Fifty years after Brown, few Americans would approve of intentional racial segregation. Why, then, are racial achievement gaps allowed to broaden and deepen in many school districts?

One answer is deeply ingrained racial stereotypes, says Washington, D.C., lawyer Judith Winston, general counsel for the U.S. Department of Education under the Clinton administration and a member of the federal Brown v. Board of Education Commission.

It's a sentiment shared by others, including Samuel Casey Carter, whose study for the Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation documents 21 high-performing, high-poverty schools. He attributes much of minority students' success in these schools to principals who "hold their students and teachers to the highest standards." Although the schools Carter studied are different on many counts, they work from a common belief that "children of all races and income levels can meet high academic standards."

A 1999 government study of nine successful elementary schools in Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, and East St. Louis, all of which enrolled mostly high-poverty minority students, points to the need for strong school leadership to reduce racial achievement gaps. In these schools, researchers found, the principals set high expectations for teachers and students and create a "collective sense of responsibility for school improvement."

I don't know if school leaders have the power to combat deeply ingrained racial biases and stereotypes. But I do know, from recent experience, that they need to step in when blatant -- and not-so- blatant -- racial indignities take place in their schools.

Not long ago a prekindergarten teacher told me, without shame, that she refuses to call her four-year-old black students by name. "Lakisha, Jamal. What kinds of names are those?" she said disapprovingly.

I've never been so disheartened, and I can't stop thinking about the color line that teacher has created in her classroom.