This post was submitted by Jennifer Holladay, who lives in Denver and also authored the foreword to Lessons in Integration: Realizing the Promise of Racial Integration in Schools, edited by Erica Frankenberg and Gary Orfield (University of Virginia Press, 2007.)
When third grade CSAP scores for reading were released last week, they revealed much more than students’ proficiency levels. They showed, yet again, that white and more affluent children tend to be concentrated in a certain kind of school, while children of color and those who live in poverty tend to be congregated in another.
The three schools that tied for first place — Bromwell Elementary, Polaris at Ebert Elementary School, and Steck Elementary School — each possess one of the district’s lowest poverty rates (just 8, 9 and 12 percent, respectively, when 73 percent of students in the district qualify for free or reduced lunch). Their student populations also are overwhelmingly white (more than 75 percent white, in a district where fewer than 20 percent of students are.)
On the flip side, the two schools that tied for last place, Barrett Elementary and Place Bridge Academy, are what researchers sometimes categorize as “apartheid schools” — schools that are virtually all “non-white” and where poverty abounds.
Of course, the segregation within Denver Public Schools is no secret. In 2006, the Civil Rights Project, then at Harvard and now at UCLA, released a scathing indictment of the problem within DPS in its report, The End of Keyes: Resegregation Trends and Achievement in the Denver Public Schools. That so many of our students have been, and are, trapped in racially and socioeconomically segregated schools remains cause for concern. After all, research has proven time and again that separate schools are inherently unequal, in terms of students’ educational outcomes and life opportunities.
Still, here in Denver, much of the talk — and action — around school reform seemingly accepts segregation as a permissible norm. That the West Prep and KIPP schools demonstrate success in high-poverty, racially-isolated environments, for example, too often deflects attention away from the fundamental purpose of integrated schooling: Opening the financial, social and political assets bound up in white, middle-class children on the larger, societal stage. (It’s easy to forget, too, that integrated schooling produces meaningful “pro-social” outcomes for students, such as increasing their capacity to thrive in diverse workplaces later in life.)
Looking at demographics for DPS, few schools are what researchers would consider “integrated”- possessing sizable white populations and at least two additional racial or ethnic groups represented in large numbers, with an ultimate mix of about 50 percent white and 50 percent “of color.” This is due, in part, to the reality that white families, especially those with class privilege, disproportionately opt out of public schools. It also relates to housing segregation, which remains pronounced. The situation further reflects a collective lack of political and moral will.
Still, there are a handful of schools holding onto the promise of integrated schooling in Denver: Odyssey Charter Elementary School, Lincoln Elementary and Highline Academy Charter School, the K-8 that my daughter attends, among them. At these three schools, third grade students scored at least 30 percentage points above the district average in reading, placing their schools among the top 10 in DPS on this measure.
Therein lies a lesson many failed to recognize with the release of the third grade, reading CSAP scores last week: A handful of schools that are comparatively white and affluent boasted the top scores, but pocketed among the top performers also are schools that afford increased access and opportunity through purposefully integrated environments.
I, for one, hope this can be a lesson observed, if not finally learned.
Popularity: 48% [?]
I confess as much as I recognize the origin of this line of reasoning, I find it a facile and badly mistaken approach to a complex issue. To start:
1. It sidesteps that many of the schools we praise as integrated have considerable achievement gaps between white students and students of color (and although the piece mixes both ethnicity and FRL, I’ll just focus on the former). Under this reasoning, consistent underachievement of minority populations can be excused so long as these students are surrounded by a suitable number of Caucasian peers.
As an illustrative example, at the author’s daughter’s own school, schoolview.org data shows that the achievement gap for proficiency for elementary students is some 26 percentage points (81% white proficiency to 55% black proficiency) before increasing even further in the middle school years to 30 percentage points (74% white to 44% black). Note that this is not isolated – it is reflective of DPS overall. It may be a wonderful school for her daughter, but I would caution using it as a model.
Until schools are measured on the integration of achievement (proficiency, academic growth, honor role, merit scholarships and similar metrics), and not just the overall student population, this oversight will persist. Integration, by itself, is just not enough – it must be matched with achievement if it is to have any significant meaning.
2. It negates the role of choice, which is a key component of many of the schools she faults for their “racially-isolated environments”. It is one thing if a child is placed in a segregated environment; it is another altogether if this is an affirmative choice by their family (the easy analogy is historically black colleges, which I doubt the author would oppose).
Similarly, it asserts the primacy of integration over quality. With 3rd-grade reading and other scores as low as they are, one might argue that high-quality schools with minority students showing above-average rates of academic growth and/or proficiency — no matter how concentrated — should be widely encouraged. One can disagree if quality should trump integration or not, but one should at least acknowledge the legitimacy of the choice.
3. Perhaps worst of all, it not only is vacuous of any remedies, it holds out an numerically false solution. The “ultimate mix of about 50 percent white and 50 percent of color” is going to be pretty hard to get in a District that is 20% white.
Just to do the math, assuming no other students of color join the District, to get to a 50-50 ratio means the sudden enrollment of an additional ~46,000 white students (or the three times the current ~15,000 in an overall DPS base of 76,500 total students). A recent study had the entire 2008 K-12 school-aged population not attending DPS of about 28,000, so even if one were to somehow magically assume all of these students — including both drop outs and those that elect private options — both decided to enroll and were each and every one white as Wonder Bread, one is still not even close.
It is not clear to me that there is, or should be, an optimal ethnic mix, but the suggestion that Denver’s urban public schools will remain somehow incomplete until they enroll 50% white students is numerically impossible, and in my opinion (and although I recognize the good intentions) both patently illogical and deeply misguided.
The notion that the different methods of helping low-income and minority students involves a zero-sum game — chosing between succesful schools with racially isolated students or further integation — is false dichotomy.
Does Holladay think that high performing schools that serve high proportions of low-income or minoirty students should not be permitted? It is implied in the paragraph. If that was her intent, it should be put out their more plainly. Here’s what she said.:
“Still, here in Denver, much of the talk — and action — around school reform seemingly accepts segregation as a permissible norm. That the West Prep and KIPP schools demonstrate success in high-poverty, racially-isolated environments, for example, too often deflects attention away from the fundamental purpose of integrated schooling: Opening the financial, social and political assets bound up in white, middle-class children on the larger, societal stage….”
Schools that successfully help children learn, even when those children learn in a circumstance of racial or economic isolation, should not be considered an obstacle or threat to parallel efforts to help children who are suffering from segregation through integration.
Pursuing parallel efforts seems like a reasonable course of action. Can’t we work for both more integration and more higher performing schools that successfully serve low-income and minority students when they are isolated? Meanwhile, pursuing integration by prohibiting or discouraging successful schools for at-risk kids seems sadly mercenary. The mutual goal is helping the students; and the status quo in Denver is much more problematic for low-income and minority kids than the “competing” efforts to address it.
Alex Medler
In a district committed to choice (I think we have established that in Denver?) the only thing that matters is achievement. I WISH Bromwell and West Denver Prep were more diverse but until we reduce the achievement gap substantially, any school that can prove their students are learning is fine with me. I would suggest that living, working and learning in a diverse environment offers a type of learning that is enriching and worthwhile to anyone who is so fortunate to experience it. Unfortunately, that type of learning is not currently measured on CSAP’s. Maybe someday…..
I suggest Mrs. Ooms and Medler read The Coleman Report, The Other America by Michael Harrington and the study by Dr. Kenneth Clark on the effects of racial segregation on African American children. All these reports date to the 1940s and 1960s. Nevertheless, all validate that poverty and racial segregation cripple those afflicted. Further, consider the merits of economic integration. It’s true that there aren’t enough white students to racially integrate DPS. With racial and socioeconomic isolation, “choice” is an empty one for the poor, for those who lack the resources (e.g., transportation). For them, “choice” is synonymous with “inequity.”
Ed,
I don’t know if your reading suggestion is for my wife or my mother, but given your own admission that these studies are now some seventy years old and still relevant to the contemporary world, I would suggest it might be time to try a different approach.
You continue to talk about “choice” as if it is some sort of unfortunate affliction, when it is increasingly the preferred norm. The majority (about 53%) of DPS students now opt out of their local schools of assignment for some variety of magnet, traditional, or charter school that they believe will be a better place for their child (see: http://bit.ly/jhh1Im).
While you seem highly confident of your paternalistic ability to similarly convince these roughly 40,000 families that they should just pipe down, go back to and be happy with the single option you would so magnificently grant them, I expect they might also tell you to, in so many words, go read your own report.
To Ed I would respond, that I do recognize a wealth of data, and research that continues on into the current generations of students and researchers, that demonstrates how seriously poverty and segregation harm children. I also agree that economic integration is a powerful mechanism to achieve better outcomes for the students that can access schools that are better integrated. But to those truths, I would add that an additional strategy to help poor children is to improve the performance of those poor students, even when they are in schools where 100 percent of their classmates are also in poverty.
I guess I ask the same question of you that I asked of Holladay. Do you mean to suggest that mechanisms like chartering and choice, that allow for the establishment of high performing schools that serve economicaly or racially isolated populations, shouldn’t be permitted because of the isolation that occurs within them even if they are successful with those students? Or are you suggesting that these high performing schools that we have now should be closed to increase the likelihood of accelerating the socioecnomic integration of the school system?
In the pursuit of better outcomes for poor children in Denver, these schools and the opportunity to create more, appear to be a net plus for the kids. I’d argue that we ought to search for ways that allow us to pursue them simultaniously with our strategies to promote socioeconomic integration. And the proponents of socioeconomic integration, of which I count myself, have bigger obstacles to overcome than the presence of successful schools serving isolated student populations.
Simply stated, Mrs. Ooms and Medler, the book, The Other America by Michael Harrington, and the Coleman Report (that formed the basis for the War on Poverty) are just as relevant today as then. Poverty continues to grow and still afflicts poor children. A malnourished five-year-old child who didn’t attend pre-school because his single mother couldn’t transport and stay with the child, begins school with a handicap that is rarely overcome. This child, as other poor children, lack the vocabulary that their middle class peers possess. Instead of focusing on “failing schools” (that translates to schools with high concentrations of lower socioeconomic children than other schools), I believe the focus should be on providing health care, a healthy diet and pre-school to the child before kindergarten. Mr. Ooms what new “approach” do you suggest? Mr. Medler, I contend that “choice” and charter schools exist primarily to serve the privileged and the lucky. That only 10% of students in DPS are in charter schools is evidence of a growing “educational apartheid” in Denver and other large urban and suburban school districts. As I stated, in that context, “choice” means “inequity” for the majority of students.
Mr. Ed,
Honestly, I don’t think you read the comments of others before you respond, since you write the same thing pretty much verbatim and don’t trouble yourself to respond to other questions of topics. The tone-deaf nature of this dialogue isn’t doing anyone much good.
If, when confronted with the plain facts that 53% of DPS students now exercise some form of school choice (see: http://bit.ly/jhh1Im), as well as that the demographics between DPS traditional and charter schools are virtually identical (see: http://bit.ly/mU7qMB) you can still mange summon the ability to shamelessly repeat your belief that “choice and charter schools exist primarily to serve the privileged and lucky” — well, I think it is probably better to allow your thoughts to wallow undisturbed in their own separate reality.
Mr. Alex. “Honestly, I don’t think you read the comments of others before you respond…” I couldn’t have stated better myself your diatribe to my latest response. Unless you have evidence that refutes the Coleman Report or Michael Harrington’s The Other America, then you’re just stating your opinion. I read the Denver Post story when it was published and wondered to myself why the reporter simply accepted as fact what DPS offered as fact. What evidence do you have to refute the 2006 Harvard Civil Rights Study Project, “Denver Public Schools: Re-segregation, Latino Style,” that Latino students in DPS are increasingly segregated and isolated from the mainstream ? Or will you continue to “…shamelessly repeat your belief…” that charter schools exist for the many and not the privileged and the lucky? Or will you “…wallow undisturbed…” in your own “…separate reality…”?
Ed: why don’t you tell me the specific position or policy you think I oppose and the statement I wrote that makes you believe I oppose it. Ideally, you might tie this in to the ideas and post that began this thread, but that might be too limiting a constraint, so feel free to digress…
To Mr. Ooms and Mr. Augden: I challenge you to meet, face to face, and spend time meeting top come up with a proposal you will make TOGETHER to the school board to learn what might help, by designing some solutions to try in a few places. You are both committed to the same kind of breakthrough, so LEAD by working TOGETHER to come up with something(s) to try. If you both agree, I’ll pay for the facilitator and the venue, or anything else you both agree you need.