8/16/05
HOW ANOTHER STATE IS
BATTLING ITS RACIAL ACHIEVEMENT GAP
North Carolina is making
an admirable, all-out effort to close the racial achievement gap among its
public-school students. It's focusing heavily on fundamentals, especially
reading.
Test scores just
released by the Omaha Public Schools reveal a persistent, decades-old gap
between urban and suburban children, black and white. Instead of whining and
battling each other about the OPS consolidation controversy, it would behoove
us to try to do something constructive like this.
The North Carolina plan
features an Advisory Commission on Raising Achievement and Closing Gaps. They
keep the elected State Board of Education and state schools superintendent
informed on progress. Members include educators and retired educators, social
services executives, elected officials, parents, business people, an attorney
specializing in school law, a university person, and so on.
Here are the 11
recommendations the state is pursuing, and you can see the quality of this
initiative on www.ncpublicschools.org/schoolimprovement/closingthegap
Recommendation 1. The state should take steps to reduce, then
eliminate, the disproportionate number of minority students assigned to special
education. Schools should provide descriptive data, in tabular format, that
will allow people to compare the percentage of students assigned to the various
categorical special education programs in local districts with state averages
in those same categories and with those in the nation.
Recommendation 2. The state should
recognize its obligation to ensure that students have an equal opportunity to
learn by promoting, encouraging, and funding instructional approaches that
expose minority students currently functioning at or near grade level to
advanced content, challenging strategies, and high-quality work.
Recommendation 3. The state should
initiate a professionally designed public information campaign to get the
attention of parents and local communities.
Recommendation 4. The state should
direct each district to request that each school: 1) prepare an annual action
plan for creatively seeking to improve the school's image with parents and to
raise the level of connectedness to parents in general and specifically to
those not usually involved with the school; 2) keep records of parent
involvement; and 3) consider voluntary home visits by teachers and
administrators for the simple purpose of building a trusting relationship
between home and school.
Recommendation 5. The state board and
the state superintendent should make a public commitment to design and fund a
required, but flexible, professional development initiative that will ensure
that classroom teachers acquire the knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed
to be successful in teaching a diverse population.
Recommendation 6. The state should
provide the substantial time that classroom teachers need to update their
skills and gain new skills in working with diverse populations by requiring
that veteran classroom teachers accept 11-month contracts once every four
years. The report noted that, during 2003-04, 25% of all teachers (regardless of funding source for salary) could
participate in five days' training on issues related to understanding and
respecting cultural diversity and on appropriate instructional strategies. The
salary cost for an additional five days for 25% of all teachers would be
roughly $20 million. Over a fouryear period, all teachers could participate in
the training for a cost (in salaries only) of roughly $80 million.
Recommendation 7. The state should
create, fund, and support special seminars and course development for existing
university teacher education faculty members that are designed to ensure that
they command and model the specific knowledge, skills, and dispositions
necessary to prepare preservice teachers to be successful in teaching diverse
student populations.
Recommendation 8. The state board should
seek the support of the president of the University of North Carolina and the
chancellors of various campuses to require all search committees for new
teacher education faculty members to assess and rate applicants as to the
knowledge, skills, and dispositions they will need to teach preservice teachers
to work with diverse student populations.
Recommendation 9. The state should
demonstrate its seriousness about resolving the shortage of qualified classroom
teachers in North Carolina who are prepared to be successful with diverse
populations. It should design and implement a specific preparation delivery
system that provides monetary incentives for high school and community college
graduates who want to teach - preparing, graduating, and placing them in high
need schools and teaching areas. Work on this plan has already begun.
Recommendation 10. The state board should
add a "closing the gap" component to the accountability system that
sets a universal standard and sets measures and incentives at the school
district level. More specifically, the commission recommends that the state
board explore setting a "universal standard" by which to measure the
performance of racial/ethnic populations and socioeconomic groups. For example,
the one standard studied by the commission is for 95% of all ethnic/racial and
socioeconomic groups to reach grade-level proficiency by the year 2010.
Recommendation 11. The state should
commission a study to examine and profile the
history of organized education for American Indians and African Americans in
North Carolina. A document should be generated that tracks the formal academic
training of these two cultures from the beginning of public schooling to the
present. Specific attention should be paid to the state's assumption of
responsibility for educating these two groups within the public schooling
system.
