Schools need incentives to follow good examples

By DANIEL WEINTRAUB

SACRAMENTO BEE

At Ralph Bunche elementary school in Los Angeles County, 97 percent of the students are black or Latino, and nearly all of them are from families considered poor. Yet year after year, the school’s students outperform their peers elsewhere.

In test scores released recently, 79 percent of black fourth-graders at Bunche were proficient in math, compared with just 30 percent in the rest of the Compton Unified School District and 41 percent statewide in California. Seventy-one percent of the school’s Latino fourth-graders were performing at grade level in math, compared with 41 percent in the district and 46 percent statewide.

But Bunche was an exception. This year’s statewide test scores confirm that a disturbing trend is showing no sign of abating: Black and Latino students persistently perform worse than whites and Asian Americans. And that is true even when poverty is taken into account. Poor white students, it turns out, do better than black and Latino kids from more affluent families.

“These are not just economic achievement gaps,” said Jack O’Connell, the state schools superintendent. “They are racial achievement gaps.”

Although California students have made progress since 2003, this year’s scores were mostly stagnant across all age, income and ethnic groups.

Just 44 percent of all students were proficient in English and language arts, and 41 percent were proficient in math.

And while student performance improves with family income, the racial and ethnic achievement gap persists. Forty-one percent of poor white students, for instance, were proficient in English, while just 40 percent of blacks from nonpoor families reached that status.

School reform

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has said he hopes to bring education interest groups and legislators from both parties together in 2008 to focus on the issue of school reform, and closing the achievement gap will be his top priority.

That’s good news, even if it comes many years too late. And lawmakers can start by offering incentives for schools serving minority kids to model what is already working on a handful of campuses around the state.

Research shows that high standards and high expectations — for students and parents — are the starting point for successful schools serving low-income and minority children. A clear and consistent curriculum linked to the state’s academic standards is another factor. And discipline, including strong support for teachers who try to keep order in their classroom, is a must.

Another crucial ingredient: highly motivated, energetic administrators who are determined to overcome the inertia that often locks schools into a cycle of low performance.

All of those things are in place at Bunche Elementary, in the city of Carson in Los Angeles County.

The school, which once ranked in the bottom 10 percent of elementary schools statewide, is now among the best. The turnaround is widely attributed to the inspiration of one woman: Mikara Solomon Davis, who was hired in her 20s to be the principal after teaching for three years and then earning a master’s degree from Columbia University.

Solomon Davis overhauled the school’s staff, hiring new teachers who believed in her methods and goals. In every classroom, grades were keyed to the state’s academic standards, which specify what students are supposed to learn in each subject. Students are expected to behave, and in her first year, Solomon Davis made that clear by issuing more than 100 suspensions, according to an account in the Los Angeles Times.

The school receives no extra money to implement its plan but does get about $500 per child directed to every school that serves students from low-income families. Solomon Davis used much of that money to pay teachers to tutor students after school.

Stunning results

The results have been stunning. In 2002, just 21 percent of the school’s fourth graders were performing at grade level in English. This year 64 percent met that standard. In fifth grade math, only 3 percent were at grade level in 2002, while today 78 percent are proficient or better.

Even at Bunche, performance has leveled off and in some cases declined over the past two years. That shows how difficult it can be to sustain a culture of excellence. But the school’s students are still doing far better than most in the state.

Jim Lanich, president of California Business for Education Excellence, who has studied California’s high-performing schools, said Bunche and a few hundred other schools serving large numbers of poor and minority children have proven that all students can learn under the right conditions. He said the state needs to “stop making excuses for poor performance” and instead replicate the best practices of schools that already have closed the achievement gap among different races and ethnic groups.

That’s true, but the trick is in figuring out how to do it. You can’t mandate top-flight school leadership. And having already laid out clear standards, the state can’t send a monitor to every classroom to ensure that those benchmarks have been integrated into the curriculum.

Instead, state lawmakers and the governor need to find the right combination of carrots to induce struggling schools to drop what they are doing now and look to Bunche Elementary and other success stories for a road map to improvement.

X Daniel Weintraub is a columnist for the Sacramento Bee. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.