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Why the racial achievement gap persists in D.C. and how to fix it

2023-09-06 00:00:00.0 华盛顿邮报-华盛顿特区原网页

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When D.C. schools’ test scores were announced recently, there was that gap again: the so-called racial achievement gap. Actually, it was more like a chasm.

Eighty-two percent of White students were proficient in reading, compared with 23 percent of Black students. In math, 75 percent of White students were proficient, compared with 11 percent of Black students, according to the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC).

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In D.C., test scores improved but achievement gaps widened

D.C. Schools Chancellor Lewis D. Ferebee acknowledged the gap and listed some of the ways that school officials were addressing it, such as “ensuring that when students enter kindergarten, they have all the prerequisite skills to be successful in math every day.”

Sounds nice enough. But to deal with that particular disparity requires a whole lot more. Such as a willingness to fight to get resources for poor Black students comparable to those enjoyed by wealthy students, many of whom are White.

None of the District’s school superintendents and chancellors has come close to winning this battle. Although one of them, Kaya Henderson, did try hard and made more progress than most.

Ironically, during her years as chancellor — from 2010 to 2016 — she never even talked about a racial achievement gap.

“My goal was not to catch Black kids up with White kids,” she told me recently, “but to help them live up to their fullest potential as human beings.”

To Henderson, the disparities in test scores said more about the impact of a student’s socioeconomic status than race. So she sought ways students could use their schoolwork to improve their communities.

“We believed that if kids were asked to solve problems in their communities — not just abstract, educational, conceptual things but real-life issues that matter to them — then they would engage,” Henderson said.

Students came up with their own solutions to gun violence, drug abuse and boring schoolwork. Students as young as second grade were included — using graphs they had learned in math class, storytelling lessons from English and bicycle safety instruction in physical education to design a project called “My Community.”

The youngsters interviewed neighbors and wrote stories about each one. They made maps of the neighborhood and used graphs to plot the location of special places. Not only did they learn to read bicycle safety signs in PE, but they also learned to ride a bike.

“At the end of the six weeks, the students were out showing their maps and essays to their parents and people in the community,” Henderson recalled. “There were school parades, with kids on bicycles with their parents riding alongside them. With their newly acquired writing and verbal skills, the kids let people in the community know what was going on in the schools, and that in itself was a very important achievement.”

Henderson’s hunch had paid off.

“Kids will struggle with difficult subject matter — it’s called ‘productive struggle’ — when they think it is worth their time and attention,” she said. “And nothing is worth more to them than learning about themselves and their environment.”

Student engagement at the city’s public schools increased significantly. So did academic progress. The District would eventually boast of having the fastest-improving school system in the nation. “Some studies show that when kids are exposed to culturally relevant curriculums, academic progress goes up as much as 33 percent,” Henderson said. “That is huge.”

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Henderson also extended the school day and year at some schools in low-income Black neighborhoods. She allocated more than $20 million to build a college preparatory school for young Black men, offered new career education academies and created a free summer study-abroad program.

“We said, let’s give them art and music and foreign languages, because we know those things engage students,” Henderson recalled. “Let’s send them abroad so that their world perspective is broadened. Give them internships. Let’s treat them like we treat wealthy kids.

“And when we started doing that, that’s when we really ran into trouble,” she said.

Letters from community groups in the city’s wealthier areas urged her to stop spending so much on “extracurricular” activities for poor Black children and focus on their basic needs: reading, writing and math. The pressure was intense, but Henderson stuck to her plan.

By 2016, she had spent nearly 10 years in the top leadership positions in D.C. Public Schools, first as deputy chancellor and then chancellor. The average tenure for a D.C. schools superintendent is roughly 2？ years.

“If you rewind the controversies that occur over helping the neediest kids, it’s always about competition,” Henderson said. “Everybody wants their kids to have the best education so they can have access to the best in life. What we don’t say out loud is that we want our kids to have the best so they can beat other kids. And I was trying to make the beatable kids unbeatable.”

In 2020, Henderson resumed her focus on student achievement by co-founding, with economist Roland Fryer Jr., an online educational curriculum called Reconstruction. The lessons are designed to supplement traditional public-school courses with African American history and culture, using a special focus on the Reconstruction era. It was another way of using culturally relevant curriculums to foster the “productive struggle” that children need to succeed.

Reconstruction is one of the least-taught periods in American history but was also one of the most successful for African Americans. In the first 12 years post-emancipation, Black people built 5,000 community schools and started 37 historically Black colleges and numerous churches, banks, insurance companies and newspapers. During this period, Black people would become governors and senators and own as much as 24 percent of all farmland in the country.

Soon after its debut, the teaching of Black history became a target in the nation’s culture wars. Many books that offered the unvarnished truth of the nation’s racial history — that cast slavery as an abomination — were banned from classrooms, even in some college curriculums.

An explosion of culture war laws is changing schools. Here’s how.

I asked Henderson: Could learning that history help close the achievement gap?

But she simply does not give credence to the concept.

“The racial achievement gap was framed to highlight a national crisis with the expectation that the country would come together to help those who had been unfairly held back,” she said. “But this country is based on groups of people falling behind, or being held back, so for the advantaged majority this never was a crisis.”

Moreover, she adds, the education that many White students receive is far from world-class, despite the benefits they may accrue. Globally, there are higher standards to aim for, she said.

What she wants to do is help Black children stop internalizing negative stereotypes and make adults understand what Frederick Douglass meant when he said it is “easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”

“We’ve got to teach our Black youth that all the things they see on TV about Black people, all the crime they read about in the newspaper, that’s not who we are as Black people in this country,” Henderson said.

“If that wasn’t important,” she added, “there wouldn’t be a national effort by White conservatives to prevent that history from being taught.”

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