Quotes of the Day
As superintendent of schools in Ann Arbor, Mich., George Fornero can tick off the kind of statistics that might cause ambitious parents to consider moving across the country to get their kids into his schools. The class of 2004 in the city's three main high schools racked up a combined average score of 1165 on the SAT, 139 points higher than the national average. Eighty-five percent of their seniors go on to four-year colleges. And last year they had 44 National Merit finalists. But there are other numbers of which Fornero is less proud. The district's African-American students typically score 100 points lower than their white classmates on the SAT. The grade average for black kids is a C, a whole grade below the B for whites. And African
Americans are almost four times as likely to fail a class.
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The discrepancies baffle Fornero because the median family income in the integrated city is $71,293 and the district spends a generous $9,234 on each pupil. Furthermore, the vast majority of students come from homes in which at least one parent is college educated. "How do I market the district to African-American parents with these numbers?" he says of the black students' performance. "We can't have one set of facts we put on billboards in front of the schools and another set we don't talk about."
Similar questions about the achievement gap between blacks and whites are perplexing school administrators in suburban communities across the U.S. Nationally, black students in the class of 2004 scored 104 points lower than whites on the math SAT and 98 points lower on the verbal section. In the past, the academic-achievement gap has been attributed to the economic and social disparities between black kids attending inner-city schools and white kids going to those in the suburbs. In their controversial book exploring the issue, No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (2003), the follow-up to America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible, Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, senior fellows at the Manhattan Institute, argue that black underachievement stems from such factors as low birth weight, which can impair intellectual development, and a high number of single-parent households led by mothers too young to give their children proper educational guidance. Other experts have cited inadequate funding for poor schools and the difficulty of recruiting good teachers to work in them.
It's harder to explain the gap in places like Ann Arbor, where so many students come from seemingly similar backgrounds. After studying the difficulties of black students in middle-class Shaker Heights, Ohio, in 1997, John Ogbu, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, posited that academic achievement for those black students was hindered by cultural attitudesmost notably the fear of being labeled as "acting white" if they performed well or studied too much in school. His theories have helped inspire barbed public comments from such prominent African Americans as Bill Cosby, who bemoans negligent parenting, and Barack Obama, Illinois' new U.S. Senator-elect, who cites the "acting white" mind-set. But so far, few of those theories or laments have come with a matching solution.
Enter Ronald Ferguson, a Harvard Kennedy School of Government professor who canvassed junior high and high schoolers from Ann Arbor and 14 other integrated, middle- and upper-middle-class communities four years ago and developed a more nuanced explanation for the middle-class gap, as well as some specific prescriptions for bridging it. Looking at the affluent districts, Ferguson found that blacks and whites there weren't as homogeneous as they appeared at first glance. For starters, blacks were less affluent. Only 21% of blacks were upper middle class or higher, whereas 73% of whites were. Academically, there were few differences between the races in terms of time kids spent on homework, their desire to do well, their interest in their studies or their perceptions of how their peers valued achievement. Yet black students completed less of their assignments than did their white classmates.
Frequently, Ferguson says, teachers misread signals from black students. "The course work is rigorous at these schools, even in nonhonors classes, and I think many of these kids are struggling," he explains. "Some of the behavior that others infer as laziness is really a way of playing it off. If the work is hard and they're not doing well, in the students' minds it's better to act like they don't care rather than acknowledge that they're trying hard and still can't do it." The problem becomes more damaging when teachers interpret such behavior as indifference and lower their expectations for what the students can achieve. Without interest and support from teachers — which matter more to minorities, Ferguson found — floundering black students eventually become resigned to their low position on the academic totem pole, fail to develop essential skills and slip even further behind.
Meanwhile, many black parents, who themselves struggled to prove their worth, are reluctant to put their kids through the same bruising experience and so don't push them as hard. Ferguson's research showed that black families often have fewer learning resources, such as books and computers, at home than do white families of similar incomes. Moreover, as relative newcomers to their communities, black families tend to lack access to the informal networks white parents use to trade intelligence about the best teachers, classes and strategies for guaranteeing success. As a remedy, he suggests having teachers establish a good rapport with students early on and create homework assignments that show how academic subjects connect to real life. Black parents, he says, should become more proactive and vigilant.
Superintendents from the districts Ferguson studied, including Rossi Ray-Taylor, Fornero's predecessor in Ann Arbor, had created a network to share gap-closing ideas even before Ferguson began his research. His findings formed the basis for the efforts Ray-Taylor started in 2002, which Fornero expanded when he took over in January 2003. "Our goal is achievement and opportunity for all students — and I'm serious about it," Fornero says.
As a result, the high schools are lavishing attention on ninth-graders because experience shows that incoming students who don't have good study habits and preparation for the academic demands of high school usually lag behind and stay there. Huron High has added classes for middling achievers called Advancement via Individual Determination (AVID), designed for freshmen who enter with a GPA between 2.0 and 3.5 and show the potential to succeed in honors classes. The AVID classes teach them how to take notes and study for exams more effectively, and provide tutoring. Samir Webster, who came to Huron last year with pretty good middle school grades but an antiacademic chip on his shoulder the size of his blowout Afro, didn't apply himself until AVID class changed his attitude. He now has a B average. "I used to watch TV, play video games or hang with my friends rather than do homework," he says. "But now homework comes first. I've realized grades are important."
Boosting the number of minority students in Advanced Placement (AP) classes is a priority for Ann Arbor officials, but part of their challenge will be to make the students feel less alienated once they get into them. Sterling Cross, a junior at Pioneer High School, is often one of just two or three black students in AP classes because, he says, many of his black friends who are also qualified to take them are intimidated by both the rigor and the prospect of going it alone. They are worried that if they have trouble, they won't get any help and that a few poor test scores could mark them as failures. Jasmine Daniel, a junior with a 3.97 GPA, says the trepidation many minority students feel is understandable. She says two other minority students who enrolled with her in accelerated science last year transferred out because of the pressure. "I can see why they switch out or won't try at all. It's no fun killing yourself like this."
Not everyone in Ann Arbor is enthusiastic about Fornero's approach to narrowing the achievement gap. Some white residents have complained that the efforts to bring black students up to par will divert resources from other students. Accordingly, the phrases "African American" and "minority" are absent from the titles and mission statements of the various initiatives, and the programs are open to all underachieving students. Many teachers are simply ill at ease with the frank public conversations on race that the new strategies sometimes require. To assuage those anxieties, Fornero has hired Deborah Harmon, an African-American education professor from nearby Eastern Michigan University and the mother of two kids who have attended the Ann Arbor schools, to lead teachers and administrators through a cultural-competency course that fosters an appreciation for the perspectives of students and colleagues from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Separately, teachers at Pioneer High organized a faculty reading club to discuss books about race in hopes of making their colleagues more comfortable with the subject. "When we started, people avoided me in the hallways," says Amy Deller, a white science teacher who recruited members and leads the group. "But now colleagues grab me to have conversations."
Parents are making changes too. Alice and Craig Tillman enforce a library-like atmosphere — no telephone calls, music, TV or video games — while their four kids do homework. Karen Cross, Sterling's mother, says she and her husband were angry and confused when Sterling's older brother and sister got poor grades. "Knowing it's a good school system, you assume that once you show that you're educated and involved parents, the teachers will take it from there," she says. "So when the problems persist, you think it can only be because you're black." Gradually, through conversations with white parents, she discovered that they were more active advocates for their children. "I know a lot of white parents who are more than willing to tell a principal that a particular program doesn't work for their child and demand a change — and they keep demanding changes until they find the right one. Unlike many black parents, they feel that they are experts and the school staff works for them," says Cross, who became so active that she is now the school-board president.
It's still too soon to tell whether all these efforts will pay off. But there are some signs that the chasm is beginning to narrow. Among fourth-graders, for example, 92% of whites met state reading standards last year, and so did nearly 70% of their black classmates, up from a mere 35% three years ago. Nonetheless, superintendent Fornero gives Ann Arbor's performance only a grade of C because "some people still don't believe we have a problem." Until they do, he says, the path to an A will be long and uphill.
- Sonja Steptoe/Ann Arbor