The Owl Newsletter

The Gaps in Our Gap Dialogue

ISSUE 78 | DECEMBER, 2007

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This owl flew to Sacramento in mid-November to attend the Achievement Gap Summit. I found the State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell rallying thousands to declare the achievement gap to be the next chapter in the struggle for civil rights, which caused this owl to have flashbacks. Superintendent O'Connell was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle as saying: "We institutionalized lower expectations. We're all guilty."

Two days after the event, KQED radio reporter Elaine Korry covered the gap summit for the California Report. At the end of the story, SPI O'Connell explained his view of the problem.

"We need to make sure that we're addressing the teacher distribution issue, the resource issue, the expectations issue, so we can provide that personalized, individualized educational opportunity for each student."

Reporter Korry, however, then closed the story with this shocker: "O'Connell says that perhaps the first step will be racial sensitivity training for all teachers in the state." In one step, the state school chief asks us to leap from correcting flawed laws and policies to the realm of individual attitude readjustment. Where is the problem, then? Outside of us in laws and policies, or inside our own hearts and heads? Is Jack O'Connell really telling us that we're the problem?

OPPORTUNITY GAP OR ACHIEVEMENT GAP?

Some of the 4,000 educators who attended the event were shocked to hear a keynote speaker, actor Edward James Olmos, berate those in the audience. One superintendent told this owl, "If I have to listen to one more speaker tell me I'm culturally insensitive, I may have to tell Jack exactly what I think.

The LA Times editorial of November 20 noted the same tension.

Hardly had the figurative strains of Kumbaya faded when racial fault lines erupted. Before the end of the first day, numerous white educators had stormed out. At workshop after workshop, they had been asked to examine their attitudes toward and expectations for black and Latino students. Only once that was done, they were told, could they initiate change in their schools. Hurt, resentful and angry, the white educators heard this message: Stop being racist.

This owl couldn't help but note two types of tension in the air. The first type was between those who wanted educators to look inward and join Jack in admitting "we're all guilty, and those who wanted to look outward toward laws and policies that create inequality. Those looking outward favored legal and policy changes that would equalize opportunities to learn.

The second type of tension was between those who considered the achievement gap to be largely the responsibility of those who lead and govern schools and districts—and those who considered others to be responsible: legislators, county and city agencies, parents, and students themselves.

WHAT CAN EDUCATION LEADERS CHANGE?

As this owl flew from session to session, I was lucky to hear two presenters who grasped these distinctions well.

The first was Doug Reeves, whose candid and lively talk included research on the social barriers to good grades. The chart he shared showed three trendlines, one for Latino/Hispanic students, one for African American students, and another for white students. On the y-axis was grade point average. On the x-axis was a popularity scale. For all three ethnic groups, popularity rose with grade point average until Latino/Hispanics hit 2.3 (about a C). It then started diving. When the grade point average of African American students hit 3.5, their popularity also started to tank. Only for white students did popularity increase with grade point average. With social standing as important as water and air, it is no surprise that so many students choose popularity over good grades, Reeves remarked. He was ready to acknowledge the obvious, that some students are choosing to hang back.

See Doug Reeves' Powerpoint presentation, in PDF form.

The other speaker who moved this owl with his candor was state school board president, Ken Noonan. On a panel that included several other board members—Yvonne Chan, Johnathan Williams, and Alan Bersin—Ken Noonan criticized the notion that the achievement gap could be closed entirely. He favored, instead, striving to narrow the gap, and he encouraged people to think about how educators manage time.

"Let's consider, for a moment, schooling to be a run. The goal is to finish the race. I believe in my heart that all students can finish this race. But I can't imagine that it will be at the same time. I say, keep the finish line in the same place for all students, but let's give students more time to finish. I believe what is missing from the education equation is time."

Ken Noonan was the only speaker this owl heard who brought attention to a policy factor, something that adults in charge should be able to change.

The speaker this owl wished could be heard was the late John Ogbu, the Nigerian-American scholar whose candor and clarity on the deliberate underachievement of African-Americans advanced the discussion of achievement gap enormously. The book Eminent Educators: Studies in Intellectual Influence, published in 2000, identified Ogbu as one of "four intellectual giants of the 20th century." Ogbu's death in 2003 was a loss for us all.

FLASHBACK TO 1957

In 1957, President Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce the federal desegregation order that Gov. Orville Faubus had defied. The era of segregated schools was ending, perhaps not peacefully, but decisively. The hope of many was that unequal educations would become equal when black and white students sat in the same classrooms, learned from the same teachers, and read the same books. The legal premise was that separate schools could not be truly equal. The moral premise was that all of us deserve an equal opportunity to learn.

Well, desegregating schools was necessary for an equal education, but it was far from sufficient. It was more complex than we'd bargained for in 1957. And it remains more complex than we acknowledge now. There is not one reason alone for unequal achievement, and there is not one remedy to create equal opportunity.

Perhaps this owl has an old bird's memory of those powerful times of 1965 to 1968, when Dr. King and Malcolm X were moving from the particulars of racial justice to the universal nature of the causes of inequality—causes social and individual, national and international, economic and political.

FLASH FORWARD: MEASURING WHAT MATTERS

Whatever you think about the reasons for an achievement gap, this owl believes there are things you can do to move toward Ken Noonan's goal: narrowing the gaps. The first step is measuring what matters.

It may be gaps in out-of-field teaching in your high schools. It may be the gap among your middle schools in eighth-graders' participation in algebra. It may be the gap in the condition of buildings across your district's school sites. It may be the gap separating the schools with the best teachers from the schools with the least prepared. Or it may be the gap separating boys from girls, and one ethnic group of students from another, in the rate at which they complete the A–G curriculum.

Measure what matters. And share your measurements with your staff and your public. Inquire with open eyes and the courage to face evidence of your allocation of resources and your students' academic achievements.

REFERENCES AND OTHER READING

The achievement gap Web site, San Joaquin County Office of Education.

Elaine Korry, KQED news report, "California Teachers May Get Racial Sensitivity Training," November 20, 2007.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "Forty Acres and a Gap in Wealth," New York Times, November 18, 2007. Professor Gates takes his inspiration from an unusual survey from the Pew Research Center. The survey found that 37 percent of African Americans polled believed that "... blacks today can no longer be thought of as a single race because of a widening class divide."

Jeannie Oakes and UC Accord, "California Educational Opportunity Report, 2007." This collection of reports looks at just those factors that districts can control that can fairly be called opportunities to learn. It examines teachers, access to the college prep curriculum, AP courses, and persistence and graduation patterns.

Doug Reeves and the Leadership and Learning Center (formerly the Center for Performance Assessment).

John Ogbu's entry in Wikipedia is a good place to start learning about his work.

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