Major Items for Board's Agenda This Week

The Loudoun School Board has just one meeting this month, on Tuesday the 12th. Our agenda is full of important items that many people will be interested in. You can see the proposed agenda or download the full Board Book (PDF) from the LCPS website. The four major items likely to generate the most attention are:

1. A report on a School Efficiency Reivew by MGT of America, Inc. conducted over the course of the past year at the initiative of the School Board. Representatives from MGT and the Governor's Department of Planning and Budget will present the findings jointly. The report will be distributed at the meeting. Board members will follow up with questions at a September meeting. This is the kind of independent, outside review that LCPS critics are perpetually calling for, so the results should be interesting.
   
2. The Board will consider a dramatic change to the LCPS Minority Student Achievement Advisory Committee, implementing bylaws modeled on those of the Loudoun Education Alliance of Parents (LEAP). Veteran MSAAC members asked for the Bylaws but are asking the Board to make major modifications to the LEAP version.
3. The Board will hear a presentation on a recent in-depth assessment of Sustainable Design and Construction Practices in our existing school prototypes. This is a topic of great interest to many in the community and our Board of Supervisors.
4. The Board will consider a policy change proposal made by Leesburg representative Tom Marshall which would in essence make it easier for LCPS employees who live in Loudoun County to transfer their children to a different school, and to receive early notification of the result of their transfer request. I think it's important to find ways to offer benefits to LCPS employees, especially in years when budget constraints limit our ability to provide meaningful pay increases, and I will support this proposal.

Reforming the Minority Student Achievement Advisory Committee

I'm on a little roll talking about minority student achievement this week. Today I thought I'd fill you in on an upcoming decision by the School Board to reconstitute the Minority Student Achievement Advisory Committee starting this fall.

At our June 24th meeting we received a recommendation from the administration to create MSAAC Bylaws to restructure and revitalize the organization. Until now, MSAAC has had a steering committee made up of whoever showed up. Aside from MSAAC President Herb Bryan no steering committee member has children in Loudoun Schools, and Herb's youngest graduated last month, leaving no members with students at LCPS.

While I have sat in on two or three MSAAC steering committee meetings, I haven't ever been able to attend a regular MSAAC meeting because they take place on Thursdays, a night that I commit to my family. As it has been relayed to me though, the meetings are universally frustrating for everyone involved. No parent, administrator, civil rights activist or School Board member has ever relayed to me their satisfaction with an MSAAC meeting. Each has a different perspective on why things don't go well, but at least there is universal agreement that dramatic change is needed.

According to the briefing our Board received, it was MSAAC President Herb Bryan who suggested that MSAAC have Bylaws, and the administration responded by modifying the Bylaws of another successful group, the Loudoun Education Alliance of Parents (LEAP). Full disclosure: My wife Lori is LEAP's Vice President for Programs.

The basic structure is this: the Parent-Teacher Organization at each school selects two members to represent it as delegates to the monthly MSAAC meetings. These delegates elect officers from among themselves. The delegates are responsible to represent the concerns of their schools to MSAAC, and report back to their schools on the information they learn at MSAAC. The full text of the Bylaws are available online, starting on Page 80 of our June 24th Board Book (PDF).

Since they were published last month, I have received some feedback regarding the proposed Bylaws from minority advocates, and I hope to receive more. I expect that with some possible minor modifications the new Bylaws will pass at our August meeting, and an exciting new chapter will begin for MSAAC this fall.

Shaker Heights Problem

Yesterday I wrote about the persistent achievement gap in schools, a and not for the first time. Along the way as I have sought to learn more, I heard about a topic called the Shaker Heights Problem. Shaker Heights, Ohio is a Cleveland suburb with a sizeable middle-class African-American population. Despite eliminating all of the previously assumed causes of the achievement gap between African-Americans and their white counterparts, the gap persisted. This is almost universally true across the US in rich and poor areas, in urban, rural and suburbia.

From a 1998 Washington Post Story:

Most troubling to educators is the growing consensus that the achievement gap now seems to largely defy the explanations that were once offered.

Some researchers say that wide income differences between blacks and whites, and school segregation -- once cited as crucial factors in the achievement disparity -- are now believed to play relatively small roles in the current gap. Family structure appears to be even less of a factor, research has shown. And even school spending is no longer seen as decisive, given that the once yawning disparity between the average amounts of money spent to educate black and white students has been all but eliminated in recent years. Also, most research has thoroughly discredited the notion that the gap reflects innate differences between the races.

Five years later John Ogbu, a Berkley anthropologist specializing in minority education issues published a study called "Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb."I found an interesting essay about the book in the San Francisco Chronicle called "Why Fixing the Schools Isn't Enough." The summary is that this is consistent with the multi-generational after-affects of ethnic oppression.

Ogbu points to the Buraku people of Japan as a comparison. They are ethnically identical to other Japanese. During Japan's feudal ages, the emperor designated the Buraku to be the laborers, the lowest class. To this day, the Buraku lag behind their Japanese counterparts in academic achievement. Yet when they immigrate to other countries, where they are seen simply as Japanese and not Buraku, the the gap gradually disappears. Their school achievement rises.

Third-generation descendants of Koreans who had been forced into labor in Japan in the last century are among the poorest-performing students in Japan. But Koreans who immigrated to China in search of a better life are the highest-achieving minority group in China.

Ogbu's book was controversial, and some academics fault the research. Ultimately he concluded that it was the failure of parents, and not the school district, the led to the gap. Even critics of his book seem to agree that the fundamental difference between these students is not at school but the degree to which parents oversee their own children's education instead of leaving it entirely to the school. If I understand these reports correctly, they conclude that what the schools need to do more than reach out to the students is reach out to their parents.

I also found the following National Public Radio stories, also from 2003, to be very informative. If you only listen to one, listen to the second story, which profiles a suburban Ohio High School that has successfully eliminated the gap.

NPR: Ohio School Narrows Black-White Achievement Gap
NPR: Tackling the Achievement Gap at Reynoldsburg High

I don't have any conclusions to draw from all of this, I'm not going to recite everything that LCPS does to close its own achievement gap or make recommendations for what it should do. I'm just putting some resources out there that have been interesting to me and which may interest you also.

Tomorrow I will write about a current LCPS proposal to dramatically change the way in which minority parents receive information from and provide input to LCPS regarding their children's education.

Keep the Achievement Gap?

An interesting piece by Washington Post Education Columnist Jay Mathews caught my eye today, titled Forget About the Achievement Gap.

Why don't I like talking about the achievement gap? Because we use the term in a way that suggests narrowing the gap is always a good thing, when that is not so. Here are some ways the gap could narrow: Low-income scores improve but high-incomes scores don't; low-income scores don't change but high-income scores drop; low-income scores drop but high-income scores drop even more. In each of those cases of gap-narrowing, something bad is happening.

In case you weren't aware, the Achievement Gap Mathews refers to is the persistently lower academic performance of kids who are poor or who identify as Black or Latino. I've written about this before here and here. Mathews' vehicle for this exploration is a study called High-Achieving Students in the Era of No Child Left Behind published a month ago by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. The study concludes that

Gaps are narrowing because the gains of low-achieving students are outstripping those of high achievers by a factor of two or three to one. The nation has a strong interest in developing the talents of its best students to their fullest to foster the kind of growth at the top end of the achievement distribution that has been occurring at the bottom end.

Mathews concludes:

Why not curtail all this achievement-gap talk? Let's focus instead on the progress of every child, no matter if she or he starts the year two grades behind classmates or two grades ahead. All children deserve a chance to climb as high as they can.

This is an interesting topic for Loudoun County families, so many of whom are well educated and affluent and expect the best education available for their high-achieving offspring. We also have a significant number of our neighbors struggling to get by on little education of their own. Some of their kids do very well in school, and others struggle.

Maybe it is because I'm not a professional educator or academic that Mathew's approach utterly baffles me. By suggesting scenarios where "low-income scores improve but high-incomes scores don't" he links achievement and income and posits that income and achievement necessarily move together. This may be a historical reality, but it should not be a future assumption. He even treads dangerously close to social darwinism by tying his statements to the "best students" phrasing of the report to his own "high income" grouping.

There will always be a top tier and a bottom tier. People have different abilities. Nobody desires to hold back the top tier until the bottom tier catches up. But it is our moral responsibility to try to create a world where the tiers are no longer passed down through generations.

What Every Teacher Ought to Know

Each year in August, before the start of school, LCPS calls all of its teachers together for three days of training workshops. Hundreds of workshops are offered, every teacher is required to attend, but as I understand it no one session or topic has been required of teachers in the past.

At last week's meeting of the Minority Student Student Achievement Advisory Committee's Steering Committee, Superintendent Hatrick agreed to make cultural/racial diversity/sensitivity/awareness training mandatory for all teachers during these workshops. I caught the tail end of the meeting, I don't have all the details. The details are probably still under development and the details aren't the subject of this post.

There is considerable debate between the some members of the MSAAC & NAACP leadership over whether LCPS has an acute problem with discrimination. That debate is also not the subject of this post.

I am certain that my friends on the Special Education Advisory Board will be interested to hear about the implementation of mandatory training, because they too would love to have mandatory training about students with special needs for all teachers. I'll bet that the parents of kids with food allergies wouldn't mind a mandatory training for elementary teachers about the dangers and difficulties that their kids face at school every day. That's not the subject of this post.

"Get to the point, Stevens."

Okay, here's the point... as a community, we put tremendous expectations on the shoulders of our teachers. They're not just teachers. They're also counselors, social workers, law enforcers, life coaches and cultural engineers. We want them to teach our personal views of morality, give every one of our children an individualized education, and cleanse our nation of the stench left behind by centuries of institutional racism that has become unlawful just within my lifetime. And we want it done before mid-June. With each graduating class we hope that we've finally overcome all of our nation's problems with ignorance, poverty, bigotry, crime, personal debt and substance abuse.

We don't just send our children into these classrooms, we send our hopes and desires for what the future of our nation will be, and our advocacy of what it should be. I suppose it has always been this way to some degree.

There was a little-noticed film in 1998 called Alien Nation, in which one of the main characters, an outsider who comes along with his people out of slavery and into this country, marvels at the way that Americans continually set standards that we never reach and still raise the bar with every generation. I've edited the quote slightly so that it makes more sense in this context. The original can be found here.

You are very curious to us. You invite us to live among you in an atmosphere of equality that we've never known before. You give us ownership of our own lives for the first time and you ask no more of us than you do of yourselves. I hope you understand how special your country is, how unique a people you are. Which is why it is all the more painful and confusing to us that so few of you seem capable of living up to the ideals you set for yourselves.

The point then my friends, is that we're asking our schools to be everything that can't bring ourselves to be.

This isn't wrong. But it is something we should be aware of as we're doing it.

Minority Teacher Hiring

There is a story in today's edition of Leesburg Today called School Leaders 'Discouraged' by Minority Teacher Hiring Report. The story quotes me, accurately, from both an email that I sent to an individual and from a written response to the reporter. The quotes were of necessity edited for space but therefore leave out significant things I said. I thought I would provide the full text of my responses, and the numbers in a more readable form, here for you.

The discouraging fact is that minority teachers are drastically underrepresented among LCPS faculty. The following numbers are accurate as of fall 2006:

Ethnicity	Students	Teachers
White	65.6%	93.5%
Latino	12.2%	8.1%
Black, not Hispanic	8.1%	3.8%
Asian/Pacific Islander	11.7%	1.4%
American Indian	0.3%	0.1%
Nonspecified	2.0%	0.3%

Nonetheless, the news isn't all bad. Until 2004, the rate of minority licensed candidates hovered between 5% and 6%. In 2005, the number doubled to 11%. In 2006, the number jumped again to 16%. The LCPS goal for 2007 was to have the number increase to 21%. I am awaiting a response as to our success in meeting that goal.

So while there is much room for improvement, there are also good strides toward improvement.

The following are the preliminary numbers for the new hires, released this week. A full and final report will be made in September.

African American - 6.6%
Hispanic 3.8%
Asian - 3.5%
American Indian - .4%
Bi-Racial - .9%

Total 15.2%

Note that these numbers do not include teachers from the Visiting International Faculty program. When including those teachers (who live and work here for three years), the Hispanic number nearly doubles to 7.3%, the other numbers don't change significantly.

And my reaction to these numbers...

The proportion of African American teachers we hired this year is below the proportion of African American students in our classrooms. The share of new Latino and Asian teachers is far below the share of Latino and Asian students and actually fewer than our returning teachers. We need to do better. We're letting our community down.

We need more information before we come to conclusions though. These numbers, though they are the true benchmark, don't tell the whole story. Are we not targeting enough minority candidates? Are identified candidates more likely to teach somewhere else? Are minorities opting for a teaching profession in smaller numbers? Are the institutions graduating minority candidates not preparing them for the rigorous qualifications that we insist on? These are the questions I'll be asking.

NAACP & Minority Achievement

Last Tuesday, August 14th, the Loudoun NAACP came before the School Board and spoke about disparity between minority students (in particular those who identify themselves as Black or Latino) and students who identify themselves as White. The three areas of disparity are: Test scores, Suspensions & Expulsions, and Graduation rates. You can read the NAACP's letter for yourself, or watch the webcast on the school website. Leesburg Today also ran a story about it.

The school system has been working very hard to improve these disparities for over a decade now. About every 3-4 years, the NAACP stands up again and points out that the problems still exist. You can read some of the NAACP materials from years past, and also read about LCPS efforts from the Minority Student Achievement Advisory Committee website.

I have started to immerse myself in this issue, and I am finding that the more I know, the more I realize that I don't know. So you'll need to give me time before I have anything to say beyond the fact that A) the disparities are real, significant and important and B) our teachers and administrators are doing everything they can to eliminate them.

You can find out more about school testing results from the Virginia Department of Education website.

CAMPUS Graduation

On Wednesday evening I attended the graduation ceremony for CAMPUS program graduates, minority students who will be the first in their families to go to college. First, I want to congratulate these 50-odd young men and women for being pioneers in their families and communities. It is important for people in families where college is an expectation to remember that this widespread college accessibility is recent phenomenon that many families have yet to envision for their children.

According to this 2000 white paper, only 25% of Americans are college graduates and just over half of Americans have attended any college at all. We've come a long way from the days of my father's childhood when three quarters of Americans weren't even high school graduates and only 5% were college graduates. We've come so far by encouraging students who might not have considered college as a viable option for themselves in a grand variety of ways.

Jay Mathews is an education columnist for the Washington Post, and recently wrote a piece called Multiplying Benefits of College for Everybody. In it, he cites studies showing the substantial benefit to people of every educational and economic level in attending college. I have read other, equally convincing pieces that suggest we are focusing too much on college and not enough on technical disciplines. There are two arguments against sending everyone to college. One is that a college degree is only advantage when not everybody has one. The second is that so many college grads spend a hundred thousand dollars or more on a liberal arts education and then start their career in low-paying entry-level jobs, whereas a high school grad with an education in auto maintenance or technology can easily make over $50K/year right out of the gate and with no further educational expenses.

I'm not in a position to mediate this dispute, so I'm setting it aside to get back to the most important point. There are many families in this great country who are waiting for one of their own to attend college. LCPS has a great program to help students in these families be leaders even in their young years, and both the students and the folks who keep this program going deserve a big round of applause from everyone in our community.