Illustration by Andy Singer

This month, public school students in Berkeley, Oakland and across the East Bay will sharpen their pencils for the California STAR test. Their scores on these standardized tests will most likely continue to confirm what experts have seen for years—that African-American and Latino students, even many from middle-class families, are scoring lower than their white and Asian classmates.

Educators have been aware of this achievement gap for decades, but it is only recently that test scores and family income data have shown that socioeconomics aren’t the only cause. Last year, for example, poor white students outscored African-American students who were not poor on the English and math portions of the STAR test. Even as scores for all students have risen since 2003, the gap between white and Asian students and black and Latino students has stayed the same.

While educators and parents agree that there is a racial achievement gap in the public schools, many disagree about why it exists. Some say it’s really an “equity gap” that leaves black and Latino children (especially those who are low-income) without quality teachers or the resources they need to succeed. Others, like the authors of the No Child Left Behind Act, which focuses on grading schools on test scores, say that it’s a lack of consistent standards and qualified teachers. Some say it’s related to academic support at home. And still others blame a subtle, mostly unintentional racism in teachers, similar to how girls can be treated differently in classrooms than boys.

No one can say for sure what’s the cause and what’s the cure, but African-American and Latino parents alongside East Bay school leaders are pushing for solutions. And while educators are addressing the gap in a myriad of ways, it is clear that confronting race and what it means—for teachers, students, parents and principals—has to be the starting point of a solution.

“These are not just economic achievement gaps, they are racial achievement gaps. We cannot afford to excuse them; they simply must be addressed,” said California schools superintendent Jack O’Connell. “We know all children can learn to the same high levels, so we must confront and change those things that are holding back groups of students.”

School districts like those in the East Bay are now looking harder than ever before at perceptions of race and how they may contribute to the achievement gap.

It’s definitely race-based,” said Michele Lawrence, who just stepped down in February as superintendent of the Berkeley Unified School District after seven years at that post and 35 years as an educator. “When you think about school systems that are developed by a white power structure, it’s understandable that there are going to be those differences. We just have to work towards erasing those differences. Schools have to change if we’re expecting to overcome this.”

Berkeley school administrators are approaching the problem in many different ways, both large and small, including through a district-wide reading program, bringing mental health services directly into schools and offering a free and healthy breakfast to all students.

“Our lot in life is to roll the rock. It’s Sisyphean,” Lawrence said. “You have to keep trying over and over as many things as you can, until you find the combination that’s going to work.”

Two other approaches by school districts in Berkeley, Oakland and San Leandro involve tackling race head-on. One is a program for black and Latino parents, called Parents for Academically Successful Students (PASS), which exists in both the Berkeley and San Leandro schools. The other is an effort in all three districts to help teachers change their preconceptions about black and Latino children which can affect how well they do in school.

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The Berkeley school district started the PASS program a year and a half ago to inform parents of African-American and Latino children about the achievement gap, give them a forum for talking about race in the schools and encourage them to share suggestions about closing the gap.

“Typically, the more well-off white communities in districts, because of their status of privilege, they are very much in the loop in defining the educational program,” said Lisa Warhuus, manager of integrated resources for Berkeley schools and PASS. “PASS is trying to provide that opportunity for parents of color, too, to help parents be more vocal.”

PASS holds monthly district-wide meetings, where leaders educate parents about everything from how to prepare for high school, read a report card, understand the U.S. school system (for recent immigrants) and work with children at home. Recently, meetings have focused more on identifying common issues for Latino and black parents, Warhuus said, like the need for better communication between teachers and parents, and encouraging parents to volunteer at school.

One result of these meetings has been the Ujima Hour program. Ujima is one of the Kwanzaa principles relating to collective work and responsibility, Warhuus explained. The Ujima Hour program urges parents of color to volunteer at their children’s school for a regular hour, whether it is once a month or once a week, in any way they choose. Because 72 percent of teachers are white compared with the nearly 56 percent of the state’s public school students who are Latino or black, this helps these children see more adults who represent their culture and helps parents get involved at school.

The PASS program has also helped launch several smaller African-American and Latino parent groups at different schools. One such group is Families of Color United for Success (FOCUS), started two years ago at Oxford Elementary School.

“My motivation was parent involvement,” said Oxford principal Janet Levenson, who taught at Oxford for 10 years, left to work at the district for six years and returned as principal in 2005. “When I came back I saw that families [of color] were still not involved. My goal was to give parents a forum to air their views. Parents were saying to me, ‘I don’t feel comfortable. I don’t feel welcome.’”

A small K-5 school in north Berkeley, Oxford’s 266 students this year are about 33 percent white, 26 percent African-American, 11 percent Latino, and 6 percent Asian/Pacific Islander. Despite 85 percent of parents in the 2005-2006 school year having some college education and 68 percent a college degree, test scores of black and Latino students were still significantly lower in 2005-2006 than the scores of white and Asian students.

At Oxford’s FOCUS meetings, parents discuss everything from test scores to experiences with racism and prejudice. Oxford parents and FOCUS members Kim Oliver and Kanika Shelly say the group makes a difference.

“I’m a Katrina evacuee and when I first got to Oxford I felt extremely isolated. When I went to the PTA meeting, I was the only peppercorn in the bunch,” said Shelly, who has an 8-year-old daughter at Oxford. “I didn’t feel welcomed. Now that I know that there are other parents feeling the same thing, I feel like I have an advantage. We can put our heads together so we can fight for our kids.”

At Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in north Berkeley, where Lee Nora Glover-Owens helped start a similar group this year called King Families of African-American Students 4 Academic Achievement, families also meet monthly. The group has already started an electronics-free family night every Wednesday, encouraging families to take walks, read and have dinner together instead of watching television or playing computer games. Although Glover-Owens says it’s too early to know if this work will affect grades or test scores, she sees other results already. “Because of the group, there has been more black parent volunteerism throughout the school,” she said. “We’re still looking for more. It’s just a start.”

King’s 925 students are about 34 percent white, 24 percent African-American, 17 percent multi-racial, 16 percent Latino and eight percent Asian.

Jason Lustig, King’s new principal and the former principal of Cragmont Elementary for 10 years, notes that some groups for black and Latino parents existed before the district launched the PASS program. He credits the PASS program with helping the school governance councils (made up of teachers, staff and parents who decide how to spend the school’s public funds) grow more diverse. This year’s emphasis has been on funding ways to raise achievement for all students.

“The parents in Berkeley have been great and care about all kids but it’s just not the same as when you have a diverse group having the conversation,” said Lustig, “It’s making a difference in a short amount of time.”

But diversifying these councils and encouraging parents to get more involved at school certainly can’t solve all the challenges facing black and Latino children.

“It’s a nice outlet for us to share our opinions with other families that we can relate to. But I feel as though the district and the schools could be doing more. To me these small parent groups are very small minimal attempts at fixing a huge problem,” said Oliver, who also served on Oxford Elementary’s governance council. “Participation obviously isn’t a problem for me but my child still isn’t doing math and reading proficiently. I don’t see one hundred percent involvement from the white families, then why are their kids still doing well?”

And while Lustig praises the addition of the voices of parents of color on the councils, he, too, cautions that the road to narrowing the achievement gap is a long, hard one.

“To get that much more acceleration, we have to acknowledge that we have to work a lot harder. Families have to acknowledge that, too,” Lustig said. “There is a huge difference [in achievement] by the time [students] get to middle school. They have to work really hard to catch up. I don’t think that’s clearly understood by everyone in the community.”

Former Berkeley Superintendent Lawrence agrees that it can’t be done overnight and moreover, cuts in state and federal funding are another blow. “In a time when they’re ripping the heart out of public education,” she said. “It makes our job even harder to address these barriers.”

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East Bay teachers and staff are doing some of the most difficult work by looking hard at their own racial and cultural backgrounds. They are examining their own experiences with race and considering teaching techniques that can better reach black and Latino students.

Teachers, and sometimes entire school staffs, are meeting regularly in groups to discuss what can be uncomfortable subjects so they can be more effective in the classroom. They are sharing racial experiences including what it’s like to be a white woman teaching African-American students or an Asian man teaching Latino students.

While educators still believe that all children can achieve at the same level regardless of race, this approach is a shift from decades of moving toward the goal of a color-blind society, and away from the idea that we should avoid acknowledging our racial differences.

“We are walking to the edge together,” San Leandro Unified School District Superintendent Christine Lim said of the work around race her teachers and staff have been doing over the last five years. “It takes all of us together to address the racial predictability of the achievement gap.”

Since Lim began as San Leandro’s superintendent five years ago, she has been working with Glenn Singleton, author of Courageous Conversations about Race: A Field Guide to Achieving Equity in Schools. He is also the founder and president of the Pacific Educational Group in San Francisco which helps schools address what Singleton calls “systemic racial education disparity” through leadership training, coaching and consulting.

“We have never posited that race is the only factor affecting achievement but it is clearly a missing factor in educators’ efforts to address the achievement disparities,” Singleton said. “Why is there such resistance to tackle the issue of race? The reality is that African-American, Latino and Native American Indian students are outperformed by their white counterparts at every economic level.”

Singleton believes that changing teachers’ beliefs and expectations about African-American and Latino students is the key, much as it was 30 years ago when educators looked closely at how teachers treated boys differently than girls. He credits the continued success of girls in the classroom to those long-ago changes.

“In our response to gender disparity, we were free to acknowledge that a gap existed between girls and boys. As a response, professional development programs . . . helped educators recognize and examine the different expectation levels they held for girls and boys,” said Singleton, who was hired last year by state schools superintendent O’Connell to lead his executive team in developing greater racial understanding and consciousness. “What was identified specifically were ways in which male instructors favored boys, particularly in areas of math and science, and how curriculum materials often failed to show images of women and girls engaging in favorable experiences. Why can’t that method be used for race?”

Lim credits Singleton’s work in her district with helping narrow the achievement gap. In San Leandro, improvement over the last five years—since she moved to the district after 32 years in the Berkeley schools—has been significant. From the 2006 to the 2007 school year, the district boosted its Academic Performance Index scores by 13 points, and five schools significantly raised their scores, one by 47 points. And even more noteworthy is that while white, Asian and Filipino students gained an average of 11 points, African-American students’ scores rose 21 points and Latino students’ 16 points.

“The key is accountability and support for the principals. They can’t run away from this because it’s critical and it’s hard,” Lim said. “This is messy and scary stuff but we’re here talking the same language as a team. It’s just an amazing time for us. Our data shows us that our work is really working.”

San Leandro’s success stems from a consistent district-wide plan to improve many pieces of students’ classroom experience. Of the district’s 8,700 students, 38 percent are Latino, 17 percent are African-American, 17 percent are Asian, 15 percent are white and eight percent are Filipino. Together with her staff, Lim conducts what she calls equity walkthroughs at different schools once or twice a month. Members of equity teams look carefully at schools to make sure that teachers and staff are complying with district expectations, which include using multiple teaching methods to engage all students and not isolating students through old habits of sending children into the hallway or the corner for time-outs.

But Lim stresses that all of these specific changes would not be effective if she and her staff did not begin by looking at race.

“You take off your mask and hear what it’s like to be a black man being pulled over multiple times for no reason. What does it mean to be white and have privileges?” said Lim, who has shared with her staff what it was like growing up as an Asian girl expected to keep quiet—to be seen, not heard.

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At Youth Empowerment School (YES) in Oakland, whose 236 high-school students are 51 percent African-American and 47 percent Latino (there is just one white student), principal Maureen Benson and her staff began working with Singleton last fall.

At YES, as its name suggests, students are encouraged to speak out and participate in school decisions. In January, as Benson met with three new students on the first day of the second semester, she emphasized that at YES, one of the most important things about the school is that all students have a voice. The school’s small size allows teachers like Tim Bremner to go out of their way to help students.

“Last year I was getting bad grades. [Mr. Bremner] helped me get my grades up. He’d get in my face when I didn’t want him to,” said Asia Taylor, a 15-year-old sophomore who describes herself as half-black and half-Latino.

But Benson said the small size, committed teachers and more vocal student body are not enough. “There’s a dramatic change that needs to happen,” she said. Her school’s equity team is now studying a concept called the “universal stranger” that considers whether black and Latino students see themselves as belonging in a classroom’s academic setting.

It’s too early to tell how a frank discussion of race will affect student performance at YES, but 11th-grade U.S. history teacher Bremner, who has been at YES for four years, thinks it will make a difference.

“Everyone’s affected by race but nobody talks about it. To talk about it is really difficult. The paradox is that’s what has to happen in order for things to change,” he said.

The students at YES are evaluated every three weeks and seem to appreciate their teachers’ high expectations. Teachers at other schools have not always treated them as fairly as their YES teachers, agreed three students from the student unity council leadership class.

Taylor remembered a teacher from middle school who would let only the Asian students make class banners. She asked repeatedly if she could help, but the teacher always said “no.” After Taylor told her parents, they spoke to the teacher.

Antonisha Davis, 17 and a senior, remembered feeling isolated when she switched elementary schools within Oakland from Lafayette to Chabot because there were far fewer African-Americans at her new school. She felt that teachers there did not believe in her. She also described going to play at a white friend’s house and her friend’s mother looking her up and down critically after opening the front door.

“I just cried,” Davis said.

Davis’ experience moving from a poorer school to a wealthier one illustrates how hard it can be to transcend not just race but class, which also contributes to the achievement gap.

Brad Stam, chief academic officer for the Oakland Unified School District, agrees that race needs to be a large part of working to narrow the racial achievement gap, which he likes to call the “equity gap,” but he still believes that the gap is due to many other factors like socioeconomic differences and lack of access to experienced teachers. While he praised the work in the district by Singleton and Sharroky Hollie, who focuses on altering teaching strategies to better reach black and Latino students, Stam also pointed to Oakland’s commitment to small schools, of which the Youth Empowerment School is an example. YES was established as one of several schools that emerged from the reorganization of Fremont High School four years ago. Similar restructuring of large schools has resulted in the Oakland district opening about 40 small schools in the last four years, Stam said, about 85 percent of which have been a success.

In 2005 the district launched Expect Success, a reform plan that aims to raise expectations, improve accountability, and provide better service to schools.

“For the first time we really brought to center stage the size of the gap and whether the gap was narrowing or expanding,” Stam said. “It’s race and class. Being white is another culturally distancing factor that gets in the way. I’ve also seen teachers of color who are middle class have it get in the way, too.”

The district is also working this year with Russlynn Ali, executive director of Education Trust West, an Oakland organization that works toward closing the achievement gap. While Ali does not discount the importance of considering race when looking at the gap, she agrees that economic status is crucial as well. “It’s not race and poverty that causes the achievement gap,” Ali said. “It’s that kids of color and low-income kids get less of everything that research says makes a difference in public education. Nothing matters more than the quality of the teacher.”

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In addition to analyzing their racial backgrounds and attitudes in an effort to close the achievement gap, educators are also learning practical ways to change how they teach African-American and Latino students. Enter Sharroky Hollie, the founder of the Center for Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning, a nonprofit which trains teachers to use methods that recognize the different cultural backgrounds of black and Latino students.

“I think there should be a focus on culture as a distinction from race. The other part of the focus is transforming instruction, the way we teach and learn, and not simply changing curriculum programs every seven years and expecting the gap to close,” Hollie said.

Culturally responsive teaching “validates and affirms the home language and culture of students,” by recognizing that some black and Latino students—particularly those who are poor—may speak a different form of English than whites, that their grammatical mistakes teachers correct are not mistakes to them, but a different dialect. Hollie is not saying that black students be allowed to speak only what he calls African-American vernacular, an approach which drew national attention to Oakland during its Ebonics controversy in 1996. (Many thought that the district was recommending teaching Ebonics to black children. This, in fact, was never the case.) Rather, he advocates that teachers learn to understand why black and Latino students speak the way they do, and help them learn standard English so they can compete in a standard English world.

For example, if a black student says, “You don’t never have no money no more,” a teacher might ask her to rephrase the sentence as, “You never have any money,” using fewer negatives the way a standard English speaker might. Hollie explained that multiple negatives add intensity to a statement. To ask a student to limit her sentence to two negatives changes her meaning. Once the teacher understands what multiple negatives mean, she can guide the student to rewrite it something like this, “You never, ever, ever have any money.”

So rather than making the student feel bad or stupid about her speaking style, the teacher can help her translate her speech into standard English. Latinos who speak English as a first language share similar challenges with African-Americans, Hollie explained, in that they speak English shaped by another language. Latinos who are learning English for the first

time do not fall into the same category.

Hollie’s teachings are not limited to language differences. In his work with black students, for example, he teaches them to speak more quietly when moving through a predominantly white world. And again, he does not tell the students that being louder is bad, just that some languages are louder than others. He also talks to students about dress, and walking in a more business-like way. He trains teachers how to speak to students so they don’t feel inferior because of how they’re used to behaving and to consider inherent cultural differences.

“What has been tried in terms of closing the achievement gap has failed miserably and we have to turn to alternative approaches,” Hollie said. “Ours is representative of really appealing to all children, in terms of being responsive to what they need in the classrooms, along the lines of cultural languages.”

Hollie founded his nonprofit to help African-American and Latino children but he is quick to mention that his methods help children of all races and cultural backgrounds. One example is how teachers quiet down a noisy class. In a traditional classroom, teachers might count backwards, ring a bell or turn the lights on and off, Hollie said, but it’s important to “incorporate call and response into all cultures.” Hollie likes to say “peace” and have the students respond with “quiet,” and then go back and forth until the class is silent. He says the interaction and the interplay can often be more effective for quieting children of all races than traditional ways.

Lustig, principal of King Middle School in Berkeley, finds Hollie’s approach, now used in about 40 Oakland classrooms, very effective. “What I really like about Hollie’s work is it’s taking a wide-ranging approach that is not specific to African-American students,” he said.

Teachers and educators will continue to work to close the achievement gap in any way they can, but it’s clear that confronting race head-on is a crucial first step in the long path to equal academic achievement for all races.

“These are big issues. They will not be tied up in a one-day seminar. It’s about being uncomfortable,” said YES teacher Tim Bremner. “If you’re not uncomfortable, then you’re not doing the work that you need to do to address the issue.”

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Sarah Weld is The Monthly’s associate editor and a freelance writer, whose two children attend an Oakland public school.

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Statewide Stats

The chart compares the test scores of economically disadvantaged students to nondisadvantaged students, broken down by race. The following are percentages of California students in grades 2-11 scoring at grade level or above in English and Math on the 2007 California Standards Test called the STAR.

English

Students	A	B
Asian-American	77	48
White	67	41
Latino	42	26
African-American	40	24

A ~ Nondisadvantaged
B ~ Disadvantaged

Math

Students	A	B
Asian-American	76	54
White	56	38
Latino	36	29
African-American	30	22

Disadvantaged means students who qualify for the federal lunch program. Non-disadvantaged means students who do not qualify for the federal lunch program.

Source: California Department of Education