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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2007 > August > 15
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Is it racist to track minority group scores?
I got a couple of curious calls this morning from angry Fairborn residents. One caller was very blunt — based on the story I wrote this morning, either I was a racist or Fairborn Superintendent Dave Scarberry was.
Why?
Because the story noted that in Fairborn, the school district was prevented from making “adequate yearly progress” under the federal No Child Left Behind law because the test scores of the district’s African American students, special education students and poor students were too low.
The callers said it was unfair to single out these groups. In their minds, it was akin to blaming these kids for blocking the district’s success on the state report card.
But here’s the irony of this complaint — No Child Left Behind required school districts to track and report the scores of minority groups and penalized those that failed to help the kids in those groups achieve better as a way to FORCE districts to pay MORE attention to them.
Let’s start with what today’s story actually said:
“At Fairborn, Superintendent Dave Scarberry said the district missed AYP because black children, kids in special education and poor children did not score well enough on state tests.”
(Note: Scarberry actually used the term “African-American” instead of “black” in our interview and my story included that phrase. But it was changed by editors because the Dayton Daily News’ style is to use the term “black.” An editor said paper does not identify any minority groups by their continent of origin in this way. We also use the term “white” rather than “European American” for the same reason, the editor said.)
This is, first of all, completely true. NCLB requires Fairborn to show steady progress for students in nine “subgroup” categories — African American, American Indian, Asian, Hispanic, multi-racial, white, special education, economically disadvantaged (a euphemism for poor) and for those learning English as a second language.
Fairborn made enough progress in six of those categories. For three of them, the school district did not meet NCLB’s expectation — African Americans, kids in special education and poor children. If a district falls short on any of these subgroups, NCLB says they failed to make AYP.
Fairborn was not alone. In the graphic in today’s paper, 38 of the 60 area districts failed to meet AYP. There are a couple of other ways you can miss AYP, but for most of them one of these subgroups didn’t make enough test score gain.
Why does NCLB place such an emphasis on this? Lawmakers were responding to a hidden crisis that was typical to many school districts in the past — schools reported average scores that disguised just how badly they were neglecting minority kids.
Consider a typical suburban district that might have only about 25 percent of kids who fall into one of the “subgroup” categories other than “white.” In the past, this school might have been meeting most of the state standards and looking pretty good come report card time.
But what we didn’t know back then was that while the average scores compared well to other districts, there was a huge disparity between the majority and minority kids within the district. While 75 percent might have been doing very well, the 25 percent of kids who were still learning in English, in special education classes or who were black or Hispanic might have been scoring dreadfully low. And nobody knew about it.
This was a common problem before No Child Left Behind, a big enough problem that lawmakers wrote a law with the expressed intention of shining a bright light on the performance of minority students and requiring school districts to help those kids achieve.
That is the exact opposite of racist.
But it is worrisome that when we tell people what the data shows some react with anger. One caller told me we should not be identifying which groups of kids did poorly and to do so was blaming them and that was racist.
Let’s look again at what the story said. It identified three Fairborn subgroups as failing to make AYP. In the next paragraph, Scarberry is quoted saying the district is studying the test questions and has targeted the kids in those subgroups for extra help.
Again, is this a bad thing? NCLB forced school districts to pay attention to the minority groups that are not keeping pace academically and as a result Fairborn is making plans to help those kids do better.
What is your take on NCLB subgroups? Is it the right or wrong to identify which minority groups are not making progress?
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