Wednesday, March 27, 2024

IL school data: black-white achievement gap is bleak

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We reported, as did the New York Times and NBC Nightly News, that there is a profound achievement gap between black students and white students in terms of their proficiency in reading and mathematics. In terms of skills of the 21st century, the information age where reading is so important, the time of globalization where we can’t sweep our low mathematics proficiency under the proverbial rug, we have to change our ways, and the changes go all the way back to early childhood. The high school scores we report are just the downstream effects of what happened in these kids’ lives when they were at ages more critical to turning them into lifelong learners.

News agencies are making a big deal out of this result, which arises from an analysis of results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test given last in 2009, known as the nation’s report card. We show results here from just last school year. Experts, as much as anyone can be called an “expert” in the area of school reform, say not all of the difference can be explained by poverty, but poverty is certainly one of several contributing factors.

“Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys,” the Times reported. [New York Times (free registration required)]

First, our daily snapshot of Illinois high schools. This one considers ACT composite score alongside the percentage of black students at all the public high schools in Illinois. It also provides the percentage of students who are considered “low income,” based on their eligibility to receive free or reduced-price meals in school, and the total enrollment at the school, just to give you an idea of how many human beings we’re talking about here that schools are not serving properly.

irc.schoolsnapshots.org/sch_zoom.pl?q=1011:1052:1036:1031

Sort the report by “% Black” and notice the dark gray result in the “ACT Comp(osite)” column. This means that the schools with the highest percentage of black students earned ACT composite scores in the bottom 20 percent of the state, on average. I could not present a clearer snapshot of the profound and disheartening black-white achievement gap from Illinois if I made up the data myself.

Scatterplot (c) Chicago Voxitatis, showing ACT Composite score on the horizontal axis, as reported for the average at public high schools in Illinois for the graduating class of 2010, with percentage of students at those high schools who are black

Clearly, the cluster near a 100 percent black student population is centered around an average ACT score of about 16, while the cluster near a black student population of 0 percent is centered around 21. The actual means are 15.65 for schools with more than 80 percent black students and 20.56 where blacks account for less than 10 percent of the student population. The latter group, with 474 schools, is much larger than the former, which contains only 54 schools, but even if we limit the low-black schools to having fewer than 1 percent black students, we still have 254 schools and the mean drops slightly, to 20.40. (Source: Illinois school report cards, issued Oct. 30, 2010, by the Illinois State Board of Education … Illinois is one of about nine states where every student takes the ACT in high school as part of the state’s compliance with the laws in No Child Left Behind.)

What is perhaps the biggest news, however, is not the achievement gap (we’ve known about that for a long time) but rather that not all of these schools have a huge proportion of students receiving free or reduced-price meals. Some of these schools have small enrollments, though, so when statistics people take averages, they tend not to notice these schools.

Yet, I believe in some ways, these schools hold at least a part of an answer — or, if not an answer, a vital part of a solution strategy, aimed at giving black boys the education to which they are entitled as citizens. There are just a few pink rows in the “ACT Comp” column when it comes to schools that have a high percentage of black students, but they do exist. Furthermore, there are just a few schools that have low poverty rates and a high percentage of black students, but they do exist.

What I think this means is that low achievement has absolutely nothing to do with skin color. It has nothing to do with poverty, per se. If skin color or poverty could explain this achievement gap, I wouldn’t be able to find any schools that buck the trend. But these schools do exist, right there in front of my eyes, as I view the Illinois school report cards.

The problem may be that parents in black communities, where they are still in the home (and that happens at a lower rate than in predominantly white communities), more frequently have no job. They tend to send fewer high school graduates to four-year colleges (only 1 out of 20 students at US colleges is a black male). They read less to toddlers when putting them to bed, so that black boys in the first grade have no idea what joys they may find in reading. In fact, the whole ritual of putting toddlers to bed may be foreign to people who live in black communities, let alone reading to them, and that starts to get at discipline in the homes, churches, and therefore, in our schools.

And when a young girl is worried about her safety or where her next meal is going to come from, it’s difficult to do homework. I want to leave you this evening with a quote from Annice Brave, an English teacher at Alton High School and the 2011 Illinois Teacher of the Year. I interviewed Ms Brave, and during that interview, she shared this piece of advice with me:

What about my brilliant minority student last year whose family was evicted twice and whose mother had a total mental breakdown? I don’t think this girl would have tested well. This year, her twin brothers are in my classes. They have just become wards of the state. I spend time after school with them working on college essays, yet they are too distracted by their chaotic lives to complete their homework. They probably won’t test well either. There are hundreds of other students in my school facing similar challenges, circumstances that can’t be measured on multiple choice tests. We must always remember that a child is more than a test score … [full interview]

Paul Katulahttps://news.schoolsdo.org
Paul Katula is the executive editor of the Voxitatis Research Foundation, which publishes this blog. For more information, see the About page.

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