Years of lagging performance have taken a toll on black students. Now educators struggle to close the gap.
By THOMAS C. TOBIN, MELANIE AVE and DENISE WATSON BATTS
Published May 16, 2004
[Times photo: Kinfay Moroti]
In line with classmates, fourth-grader William Miller huddles against a wall as he waits to enter a “Read 180” classroom at St. Petersburg’s Woodlawn Elementary School.
Black students throughout the Tampa Bay area and Florida are far less likely to succeed in school than white students.
They are much less likely to pass the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, attend advanced classes or graduate with standard diplomas.
They are much more likely to be held back a grade, suspended or placed in special classes for mentally disabled students.
The disparity is known as the "achievement gap." It is not what the U.S. Supreme Court envisioned 50 years ago this week in the landmark case Brown vs. Board of Education, when it outlawed segregation in America's classrooms.
"The more I look at this the angrier I get," said Watson Haynes, a black civic leader in St. Petersburg who co-chairs a group pushing Pinellas County schools to put more emphasis on closing the gap.
"If the school system doesn't do anything about it, we're going to be in far worse condition than we ever imagined."
The gap appears in many forms:
More than two-thirds of Florida's black students can't read at their grade level, according to FCAT results. Only about one-third of white students perform so poorly.
Five years of education reform under Gov. Jeb Bush have barely dented Florida's gap. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as "the nation's report card," the statewide gap in reading and math is as wide as it was in 1998.
Pinellas, one of Florida's most prosperous counties, has one of the state's worst gaps. Only 26 percent of the county's black students could read at grade level last year, compared to 31 percent statewide. White students achieved at rates twice as high.
The gap is even worse in math. Black students are 40 percentage points behind white students in Pinellas and 35 points behind statewide.
Across Pinellas and Hillsborough counties, black students are four times more likely than white students to be placed in special education classes. They are one-fourth as likely to be placed in gifted programs.
Black students account for 41 percent of the school suspensions in the two counties but just 21 percent of the enrollment.
Only 37 percent of Pinellas black students graduated with a traditional diploma in 2002 - down from the previous year - while 67 percent of the county's white students graduated.
"The students can perform," said Donnie Evans, Hillsborough's chief academic officer and its highest-ranking African-American administrator. "The question is, why aren't they?"
Educators most often cite poverty as the cause of the gap, but it is far from the only one.
Among others mentioned by researchers: biased and uninspired teaching that alienates and fails to engage black students; a tendency in many black families to emphasize sports and entertainment over education; an awkward relationship between the races; and a general mistrust of schools by black families.
Feeling the heat of state and federal accountability programs, school districts are casting about for new teaching methods and other cures. But the results have been limited.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of black students are dropping out or graduating with fewer tools than other students they will compete against for jobs.
"Today our children are walking up and down the street because they can't stand to sit in the classroom," said the Rev. Louis M. Murphy, a black pastor at Mount Zion Progressive Missionary Baptist Church in St. Petersburg.
"What's wrong? Why don't they want to sit in a classroom when before we were dying to go to school?"
Unaccounted for
Judging by the brochure, what parent wouldn't take a look at Riviera Middle School in St. Petersburg?
High school credit classes.
Reading programs and activity clubs galore.
The annual seventh-grade trip to Washington, D.C.
But a problem runs just under the surface: Relatively few black students are sharing in the school's success.
Only 17 percent of Riviera's black students passed the reading FCAT last year, down from 20 percent in 2002.
This year, the school's black enrollment increased by about 100 students. When classes started in August, the Riviera staff knuckled down to the goals set by district officials focused on improving black student achievement.
Administrators wanted at least 12 percent of the school's black students in honors classes. Teachers and guidance counselors were urged to lower the bar, urging any black student with at least a C average to sign up.
The district also wanted black students to show noticeable improvement on the FCAT.
"When I brought this up to my faculty, they said, "We're working as hard as we can. What else can we do?' " said Riviera principal Al Bennett, who is white. "I told them we have to work smarter."
The school's worst readers were placed in a federally funded reading program. Tutors were made available on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The school tried to keep reading and math classes to 25 students or fewer. And 60 black students were paired with school employees who offered encouragement.
If there was a magic bullet that would end the achievement gap, educators say they would have fired it long ago.
But the achievement gap persists despite billions spent on remedies and perennial attempts by researchers to trace its roots. It is education's Middle East, a public policy monster with multiple causes and no easy cures.
Thirty years of busing showed that the remedy is far more complex than just grouping black and white children in the same classrooms.
Poverty is one clear cause, often leading to the kind of helter skelter family life that leaves children ill-prepared for school. But while a 1999 study by Pinellas schools strongly linked low achievement scores among black students to poverty, the study also affirmed what many researchers know: The gap involves middle-class blacks as well.
Pasadena Fundamental Elementary has the lowest poverty rate, 16 percent, of any elementary school in St. Petersburg. Yet the district's 1999 study showed that black Pasadena fourth-graders who weren't living in poverty scored 17 points below their white peers in reading, language and math tests the previous year. A similar St. Petersburg school, Lakeview Fundamental, reported a gap of 20 points between white and black fifth-graders not living in poverty.
In a controversial study published last year, the late researcher John U. Ogbu reported that grade point averages and SAT scores of black students were nearly 30 percent lower than those for whites in the middle- to upper-class Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights. The sons and daughters of black professionals accounted for 80 percent of high school D's and F's in one survey, and more than their share of discipline problems.
Some educators and black civic leaders have suggested that hiring more black teachers and administrators is a way to help narrow the achievement gap.
Phillip Porter, a black teacher at predominantly white Farnell Middle School in Hillsborough, says he tries to give black students special attention because he isn't sure white teachers will look out for them.
"Teachers may sometimes show more interest in a student of their culture because teachers of other cultures cannot relate to what the child is going through," he said.
But another prominent researcher, Harvard University lecturer Ronald F. Ferguson, reports that black teachers often fare no better at getting black children to excel. With a black principal in charge last year at Gulfport Elementary in Pinellas, the achievement gap in reading more than doubled.
Spending on the problem hasn't always worked, either. Campbell Park Elementary in St. Petersburg and Roland Park Elementary in Tampa have significant achievement gaps despite spending considerably more per student than many other schools.
The gap also thrives at schools with the best of reputations. Perkins Elementary in St. Petersburg and King High School in Tampa boast the kinds of art and foreign language programs that get parents excited. But each has a gap of more than 40 percentage points in reading and math.
Little has changed over the last three decades, as evidenced by the Pinellas fifth-grade class of 1975.
After four years in racially mixed classrooms under the 1971 busing plan, black students in that class ranked 32 percentiles below their white peers on the Metropolitan achievement test, an ancestor of the FCAT.
Today, the children of those long-ago fifth-graders are faring about the same. The percentage of nonblack Pinellas fifth-graders mastering the reading FCAT in 2003 was 39 points higher than that of black students.
The gap narrowed a bit in the 1970s and '80s, but white students began to pull away again in the 1990s. The reason: While black students as a group have boosted their performance in recent years, white students have been improving as well.
Gov. Bush's 5-year-old A plus Plan and the federal No Child Left Behind Act aim to close the gap with programs that prod failing schools to improve. But with mixed success so far, educators acknowledge that meaningful progress will require an uphill push over many years - long after today's reformers have retired or left office.
Few statistics are more compelling than a one-page chart that tracked the ninth-grade class of 1996-97 in Pinellas County as they moved through high school.
Large numbers of students of all races move away or take more than four years to graduate, which skews the numbers.
But there is no getting around the dreary bottom line: Of the nearly 2,000 black students who entered Pinellas high schools in the fall of 1996, only 240 graduated four years later - less than half the rate of their nonblack classmates.
More than 350 of those black ninth-graders dropped out. Nearly 180 simply fell off the district's radar, listed as unaccounted for.
Culture clash
Randy Lightfoot's job is to change how people think.
During a recent diversity training seminar, he told 14 Pinellas teachers to fashion name tags from magazine clippings.
Make a small collage that reveals who you are, he said. Then he took them to a table where the only magazines were Ebony, Heart & Soul, Essence and Savoy, national publications geared to black readers.
Not much there for the seven white teachers in the group, who smiled and quickly grasped Lightfoot's point.
What if a white person came to school every day and saw almost everything in black? Black principal. Black classmates. Black teachers who expected you to speak and act like black kids. Books with mostly black faces in them.
Would that affect the desire to be there and excel?
Could that be how black children feel in a school district where 80 percent of the students and 90 percent of the teachers are white?
"When I'm not a part of it, I'm on the outside looking in," said Lightfoot, who is black.
Years ago, as a teacher and coach at Dunedin High School, Lightfoot fielded a track team with white sprinters and black distance runners. His relay squad had the fastest time in the state.
"You don't put a limit on the kids," he said. "If you don't think they can do it, they can't because they're already not sure whether they can or not ... They'll just give up."
Researchers say much of the gap comes down to something that is harder to measure than an FCAT score - the often uneasy interplay between the white teachers who run 80 to 90 percent of America's classrooms and the black students who come to school with different ways of speaking, behaving and looking at the world.
"What we're finding is a cultural clash in the classroom," said Roy Kaplan, the local executive director of the National Conference for Community and Justice. Kaplan, who is white, helps conduct diversity training for Pinellas, Hillsborough and Pasco schools.
Here is how the clash plays out in many American classrooms, according to scholars and educators: White teachers, the vast majority of them well-meaning, come to work with the assumption that black children are not good learners. Rather than change their teaching methods to engage them, they push them less. The black students fall behind. They sense their teachers' lack of faith in them. They grow to doubt themselves and feel unwelcome at school. By high school, many black students come to view working hard in school as something white kids do.
The tendency to cede the academic high ground was clear at last year's Lakewood High School graduation in St. Petersburg. Graduates of the school's highly regarded Center for Advanced Technologies sat in front, a sea of white and Asian faces with special sashes over their graduation gowns.
A few black students sat among them. But most of Lakewood's black graduates sat well behind the front rows in chairs reserved for less accomplished classmates.
Improving the racial chemistry in schools will require a sustained sense of urgency, creative techniques and - somehow - a better bridging of the nation's racial and cultural divides, researchers say.
"Half of all kids entering public school today are children of color," said Kaplan, who recently published a book about the gap, Failing Grades: How Schools Breed Frustration, Anger and Violence. And How to Prevent It.
"They don't see themselves in the books," he said. "They don't see themselves as being part of the institution. So they tune out."
Ferguson, the Harvard lecturer and a leading gap researcher, cites several studies that have found teachers - black as well as white - to be less supportive of black students.
A noted 1979 experiment by sociologist Marylee C. Taylor asked 105 white female college education students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to teach a lesson to a 6-year-old student hidden from view behind mirrored glass.
The young teachers were told the child would respond to them by activating lights connected to a button panel. They were given descriptions of the child by race, gender and ability.
Unknown to the teachers, the person behind the glass was an adult who was not made privy to the description of each "phantom" student.
The results, captured on videotape: Teachers gave the phantom black students briefer, less positive feedback and were less likely to help them with answers.
In a report for the Brookings Institution, Ferguson says the apparent bias is confirmed by several studies of real classrooms.
In a 1990 survey for the U.S. Department of Education, teachers were asked to rate 3,700 black students and 12,000 white students based on how much they cared about schoolwork, how hard they worked and how they got along with the teacher.
The teachers rated the white students significantly higher than black students - starting in first grade.
Ferguson, who is black, concludes: "On average, teachers probably prefer to teach whites and, on average, they probably give whites more plentiful and unambiguous support."
He said there is no evidence to show that black teachers are any better at preparing black students.
"Even black teachers need help in learning to cope with some of the special demands that black children from disadvantaged backgrounds may present," he said.
Sheila Keller, who will retire this summer after 35 years as an educator in Pinellas and Polk counties, recalls her epiphany as a young white teacher in the 1960s.
"I found myself asking less of my black students than I was asking of my white students," she said, remembering the black student who pointed it out. "I was horrified. I was crushed. I was so ashamed. ... What I was doing was detrimental to those children."
Two mothers, one goal
Chanda Brown and Kathy Browne have more in common than a similar last name.
Both are black mothers in Tampa. Both are mindful of the factors within many black homes that contribute to the gap. By chance and gut instinct, they have focused on some of the same issues that scholars have studied.
Some research has linked the gap to television viewing in African-American households, which averages more than 70 hours a week, compared to 50 hours for all U.S. households, according to Nielsen Media Research.
Scholars also have attributed the gap to black parents who do not or cannot read to their children.
A 2001 household survey by the National Center for Education Statistics found 64 percent of white children ages 3 to 5 were read to every day the previous week. The figure was 48 percent for black households.
In addition, scholars cite the emphasis that many black children and their families place on long-shot careers in sports and entertainment.
Chanda Brown and Kathy Browne do not know each other, but they are moving together against these cultural tides. One has found success; the other struggles.
In August, Chanda Brown's rule was simple: no TV until homework was done.
Then she noticed her son and daughter rushed through their homework or claimed they completed it at school. Brown got tougher. Unless the shows were educational, no TV at all during the week.
"I sometimes feel like I require a lot of them," Brown said. "They look at their peers and their parents don't do it, so they feel I'm a bad guy."
Brown, 31, tells herself she's doing the right thing. She remembers that her mother's interest in her education was strong at first, then it waned. Her grandmother pressed her to do chores, not homework. She recalls how teachers wrote her off when she became pregnant at age 16.
Today, she makes education the focus of her household.
She wants to be a motivator for Elisha, 15, and Michael, 10. That means setting rules that bring raised eyebrows from some other black families.
Once the children finish homework, they do chores, then read. They might play board games until bedtime, or Brown will read to them and quiz them.
Even with health problems that sometimes keep him out of class at Kenly Elementary, Michael "wants to be like Michael Vick," the star NFL quarterback, Brown said.
Elisha hasn't been working to her potential at Blake High, so Brown has added more rules: No phone calls to female friends during the week. No talking to boys, period. No driving until she maintains a 2.5 GPA or better.
She brings home A's, B's and C's, though her mother demands better. Elisha rolls her eyes. She knows she could handle advanced courses that would help in college, but won't take them. "That would be too much pressure on me," she said.
Her mother keeps pushing.
In another African-American household not far away, Kathy Browne keeps pushing, too.
"There are not a lot of blacks who are succeeding in academia," she said. "They're succeeding in entertainment, sports. Unfortunately, that's what a lot of kids want ... I raised three boys and I didn't want them to be a statistic."
Browne's two oldest sons graduated at the top of their classes at Leto High School. Her fourth child, a 14-year-old daughter, also is an honor roll student.
Her youngest son, Joseph, is nicknamed "5.0 Joe" for his grade point average. Midway through his junior year at Middleton High in Tampa, Joseph ranked first in his class. He has made straight A's since second grade.
"If you could package the perfect kid, that's him," said Middleton assistant principal Marc Hutek. "He just has this inner drive. You can see it all over him. He wants to be the best."
Even at Middleton, where 85 percent of the students are minorities, Joseph was one of only three black students in his advanced placement English class last fall. He also takes Latin, Japanese, advanced calculus and honors American history.
What sets him apart from many of his black peers?
His mother says she had high expectations for her children and exposed them to people who are reading and working and achieving.
Early on, Kathy Browne and her late husband decided to limit their children's exposure to television.
They also made sure their children had books and computers. Kathy Browne volunteered at their schools.
Her practice runs counter to what gap researcher John Ogbu found in Shaker Heights. He concluded that many black parents there placed too much responsibility for their children's education on school officials, were not involved enough in schools and did not closely supervise homework.
Black parents have complimented Kathy Browne on her children's academic achievements. But fellow black students frequently tease Joseph about his bookish ways.
"They say I don't act black," he said. "I hear that a lot. But I don't care what they say about me. They are not going where I am going."
"A society problem"
Who is responsible for closing the gap, and how can it be done?
Many say that states and school districts are at fault.
The NAACP last year filed a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education, saying Florida still runs a "dual system" of schools and must fix it.
An August 2000 lawsuit by a black parent alleges Pinellas County has failed to provide schools "that meet the needs and requirements of students of African descent."
Another group - Concerned Organizations for Quality Education for All Students - is pressing the Pinellas School Board to tackle the gap more aggressively.
Their suggestions include district-wide cultural training to make teachers more sensitive to behaviors that black children bring to school. They also don't buy the district's claim that it is trying hard to hire more black teachers.
"We've got a society problem. It's not just that the black families don't care about their kids learning," said Louis Murphy, the St. Petersburg pastor. "It's time for America to start being real."
Others say the solution lies within the black community.
The gap won't close until African-Americans "take responsibility for our own people and try to do better by them and stop blaming the white man," said Corvette Walker, a 40-year-old black grandmother in Tampa. "It takes a whole tribe to raise." In his 2003 book, Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb - A Study of Academic Disengagement, John Ogbu urged black parents to "get inside the school and participate."
If mistrust of white-dominated schools is a barrier, he said, black parents must get past it and treat the education of their children more pragmatically. This, he said, is the attitude of recent black immigrants who do better in school than black Americans.
Getting involved is easier said than done, said Marguerite Williams, a black Tampa grandmother who has been an activist on school issues. "Whites take more time with their kids," she said. "Blacks are too busy trying to provide for their families. It all depends on where you came up in life."
Among school officials, the trend of late has been to take responsibility for the gap rather than blame poverty and other conditions beyond their control.
Pinellas assumed that posture in June 1998 with a much-heralded report that stated, "Individual students are not the problem." Schools were responsible, it said, and educators had to find new ways to teach. There would be "no excuses," superintendent Howard Hinesley said in live and videotaped messages to thousands of teachers.
The report came to be known as a "plan to plan" that would be the foundation for further action. Since then, however, the gap in Pinellas has not narrowed and in some categories has widened.
Members of the Concerned Organizations group say the "plan to plan" has never taken flight.
"I feel that the words are there but the gap would not continue to exist if we were doing a better job," said Mary Brown, the first black person elected to the Pinellas School Board and the board's most vocal critic of the gap.
"If we were a company and our profit was the number of children who turn out to be productive citizens," she said, "we wouldn't be in business."
In Hillsborough and Pinellas, state and federal accountability programs have brought a new sense of urgency to closing the gap. But the stepped-up pace raises questions about why it took so long for the urgency to gather.
"It has not been the focus, the priority, until recent years," said Hillsborough schools superintendent Earl Lennard, who is white. "Some of the measures that have been tried to improve it have not paid off."
One thing is clear: If black students are to catch up, they will have to improve at a significantly higher rate than whites over several years.
"That's very difficult to accomplish," said Hinesley, who has been criticized for his methodical approach to the gap in 14 years as superintendent.
Hinesley, who is white, said he is satisfied for now that black student performance is inching up in some categories even if they still trail white students.
Eliminating the gap, he said, will "take a lot of time."
In general, the efforts in both counties are aimed at doing better on the FCAT, the primary gauge of success in Florida education.
But some say the nuts and bolts focus on standards and testing overshadows the softer work of helping teachers relate better to their black students.
Kaplan, the local diversity trainer, calls it "the interpersonal stuff." It should be mandated, he says, just like the FCAT.
Hinesley says he has tried to build a culture among Pinellas' 8,000 teachers that insists they give their all for every student, regardless of race or problems related to poverty. But he concedes it has been a struggle to get them all on the same page.
"They resent it," he said of some teachers. "Particularly if they've been there a while."
Kaplan has run into rebellion during diversity training sessions.
"I used to dread going in there because they're all in denial about, "This is not me,' " he said. "And I am the messenger of bad news. I had teachers cry. I had them get up and leave."
Mary Brown, the School Board member, has a problem with that. "Maybe they have to ask if this is the place they want to teach," she said.
So educators and political leaders press forward on twin fronts - one relying on testing and standards, the other focused on the trickier job of creating racial understanding in the classroom.
As a longtime educator and the great-great-granddaughter of slaves, 73-year-old Adelle Jemison would settle for progress on either front.
Years before the ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education, Jemison was educated in all-black schools by black teachers. She said they may have done a better job with black students than many white teachers are doing today.
"When we desegregated," she said, "I was happy about that because I felt that the children - my people coming behind me - were going to really sail. I thought they were going to really go to the moon.
"And when I discovered that that wasn't happening, I thought, "Well, if you can't do more than my teachers did with us, don't do less. Please, don't do less.' "
- Times photographer Kinfay Moroti contributed to this report.
ABOUT THIS SERIES
To produce this special report on the achievement gap, a team of reporters spent months analyzing data and talking to students, parents, educators and researchers.
They watched teachers take diversity training and students struggle through reading programs. They listened as parents expressed fear for their children and anger at the education system they think is to blame. They heard those in charge of the system talk about their frustrations and ideas for solving the gap.
The report focuses on Pinellas and Hillsborough counties, the area's two urban school districts. While schools in Citrus, Hernando and Pasco counties have racial disparities in their classrooms, they have far fewer black students, and fewer of the social and cultural problems that make the gap so intractable.
The report does not address Hispanic students. The gap is wider for black students, who have been the focus of efforts to solve the problem for half a century. And the gap for Hispanics is complicated by language issues. The Times will write about the Hispanic achievement gap later this year.
This report runs over four days:
Today: An overview of the problem.
Monday: A look at the causes.
Tuesday: An examination of what is being done in the Pinellas and Hillsborough school districts, and why their efforts took so long.
Wednesday: A look at the Norfolk, Va., public school system, which has made significant strides in narrowing its achievement gap.
Five reporters and two photographers helped put this series together:
Thomas C. Tobin, 45, is an education reporter in St. Petersburg.
Monique Fields, 34, is an education reporter in St. Petersburg.
Melanie Ave, 36, is an education reporter in Tampa.
Denise Watson Batts, 36, is a general assignment reporter in Tampa.
Letitia Stein, 24, is a general assignment reporter in Brandon.
Kinfay Moroti, 34, is a photographer in Clearwater.
Jamie Francis, 41, is a photographer in St. Petersburg.[Last modified May 21, 2004, 13:10:46]
