Theories abound for why many black students perform at lower levels than their white classmates. Even among experts, the answers are hard to come by.
By THOMAS C. TOBIN and DENISE WATSON BATTS
Published May 17, 2004
[Times photo: Kinfay Moroti]
Middleton High freshmen Josh Mayo, 14, center, Darick Fullwood, 15, left, Van Borders, 14, and Nigel Lewis, 15, listen as retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Jason Mims encourages them to enroll in Advanced Placement classes.
Mary Brown, the only African-American on the Pinellas School Board, asked at a recent meeting why large numbers of black students are suspended from school every year.
Simple question. Not so easy answer.
Superintendent Howard Hinesley paused the way parents do when their children ask how babies are born. Then he gathered himself and said of black students: "There are a greater number of discipline problems."
The question remains: Why?
So goes the public discourse over the achievement gap, the academic divide separating white and black students in most Florida classrooms.
Half a century after the U.S. Supreme Court laid the groundwork for integrated schools in its landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision, the low academic performance of many black students remains a major social problem.
But when educators and political leaders discuss the gap in public, they typically shun the gritty issues of race that sit at its core.
Instead, they describe the gap as a byproduct of poverty - far from the gap's only cause, but the safest one to discuss.
"What makes people uncomfortable about talking about this is they're afraid of being labeled a racist," said Roy Kaplan, Tampa Bay director of the National Conference for Community and Justice. Kaplan, who is white, conducts diversity training for local schools.
His point: One misconstrued comment at a public meeting can spell disaster for a public official.
But tap into the quieter worlds of academia, literature and plain conversation and the discussion lights up with a bracing frankness rarely found in the public arena.
Do white teachers expect too little of black students? Are black students just not trying? These and other theories punctuate a vigorous debate in a nation absorbed by race.
Michael Porter, a black counselor and author, blames the gap on teaching that reflects a white European world view.
"How can you expect an African-American child who is only taught about the glory of European people to acquire the motivating passion of self-help?" Porter asks in his book, Kill Them Before They Grow: The Misdiagnosis of African American Boys in American Classrooms. "School becomes alien to them. They see no connection between the classroom and their future. They begin to specialize in socializing, PE and lunch."
John Ogbu, a black anthropologist who studied minority education for three decades before his death last summer, described "low effort syndrome" among the black students he observed in an affluent Ohio suburb. Among his other conclusions: Black students' reliance on "Black English" hampered their mastery of reading, and their parents' participation in school events was "dismal."
The Rev. Louis M. Murphy, pastor of Mount Zion Progressive Missionary Baptist Church in St. Petersburg, said black students feel a psychological strain in white-majority schools.
"You just pick up vibes," said Murphy, who is black. "A dog knows when you're afraid of it. If you want to be open and candid and real, we've got to get past where white folk think that they're better than black folk as far as their ability to learn and perform."
Joseph Browne, a straight-A student at Middleton High School in Tampa, has more of a problem with some of his black classmates.
"To me, some black students don't want to appear smart," said Browne, who is black. "They put themselves in a box and make themselves into a stereotype. I wish there was something I could say to open their eyes."
"Cross-cultural misunderstandings'
Returning to Mary Brown's question: Why are so many black students suspended from school?
In Hillsborough County last year, black students made up 23 percent of the enrollment but received 42 percent of the suspensions.
In Pinellas, nearly one of every four black students was hit with an out-of-school suspension. That was three times the rate for students of other races.
The No. 1 offense in Pinellas middle and high schools was "defiance/insubordination." Black students received 47 percent of those suspensions even though they make up just 19 percent of the enrollment.
That disparity, which is consistent over several years, raises another question: Why is it more prominent in categories where the infraction requires a subjective judgment by a school official?
In categories where the infraction was clear - such as leaving campus, drugs, vandalism and cheating - black students showed up more in proportion to their enrollment.
The numbers could suggest a potential bias by white teachers and administrators, who make up about 90 percent of the employees in Pinellas schools.
The topic was addressed as part of a 2000 federal court settlement between the Pinellas School Board and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund that paved the way for the end of court-ordered busing.
The board set a goal that race "shall not be a factor in applying discipline." Since then, the district has tried to address the problem with intervention programs at middle and high schools, anger management groups, Saturday school instead of suspensions, conflict resolution classes and other methods.
Yet the disparity remains. In Pinellas high schools, it has worsened in recent years.
Ogbu, who studied the achievement gap in the well-to-do Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, said he observed several reasons why black students were disciplined more often than whites.
One was "cross-cultural misunderstandings" of black students' jokes. Another was the belief that black students were more likely to get into fights.
His third reason echoes what Hinesley recently told Brown.
"Black students probably misbehaved more," wrote Ogbu, who spent four months in Shaker Heights, generally regarded as one of the nation's better school districts.
Much of his work there undercuts the popular idea that the gap is almost exclusively the product of poverty.
Shaker Heights is a community of 30,000 with a robust median income of $64,000, according to the 2000 U.S. Census. More than 60 percent of its adults have a bachelor's or master's degree. Black students make up 39 percent of the public school enrollment, and most are from families with incomes in the $60,000 to $100,000 range.
Still, black students as a group performed far below whites on tests and in classrooms.
Ogbu explored the theories of Howard University psychology professor A. Wade Boykin, who said in 1986 that black students are asked to master two incompatible cultures - their own, rooted in Africa, and the culture of majority white schools, which is rooted in European society.
Boykin, who is black, cited nine features of "black American culture," noting how they differed from whites who make up "European American culture."
The two cultures, for example, have differing views of time, movement and "verve," he said. Ogbu, born in Nigeria, described verve as "the propensity of blacks toward high-level stimulation."
"Many times white people are very taken aback by us because they just don't understand," said Gwendolyn Reese, a black diversity consultant in St. Petersburg who is active in local efforts to close the gap.
"We're just vibrant, alive, colorful and expressive people," she said. "But if you don't understand that, you can see it as physically challenging to you. You're uncomfortable with that so you label it and you sit that child over to the side. You don't want to deal with it because you don't understand it. And you're fearful."
Reese said a white kindergarten teacher at a St. Petersburg public school decided her grandson was too active and wanted him tested for attention-deficit disorder. Today, she said, he thrives in a gifted school for math and science.
He wasn't a problem child, Reese said. "He was just bright and bored."
Other researchers reject the idea that African-Americans have their own "cultural learning style" or that they suffer in public schools because of it.
University of Missouri psychology professor Craig L. Frisby, who is black, notes a "chilling similarity" between Boykin's writings and the words of a 19th century educator who argued that the races were hopelessly incompatible and should be kept "distinct."
Corvette Walker, a black grandmother in Tampa, draws her conclusions from experience. She doesn't subscribe to the notion that white teachers are racist. But she thinks some are afraid to discipline black children or don't know how to deal with them.
She has seen it in the way a white teacher hesitates to take charge with her granddaughter, Destiny, at a prekindergarten class run by Hillsborough public schools. Earlier this year, the girl was being put out of class about once a week for what Walker was told were temper tantrums. The child doesn't have tantrums at home, Walker said.
The teacher recently told her the girl has no fear.
"I said that's because she's taught not to fear anything," said Walker, who has encouraged the teacher to show the girl who's boss. "She doesn't even fear God."
"The school system will not solve it'
Lisa Stokes, a black mother in Tampa, was stunned.
Her daughter, LaChrisha Stokes, brought home mostly B's and C's at Lee Elementary, a public magnet school in south Tampa. When she transferred this year to Tampa's new Academy Prep, a small private school with a focused academic program and disciplined environment for disadvantaged students, she began earning F's.
The public school had been "just letting her slide by," Lisa Stokes said. "I thought she was doing fine."
Now she expects her daughter, a fifth-grader, to bring home A's and B's from Academy Prep. "Kids need a challenge," she said. "I upped my standards. Hopefully, she will too."
Stories like LaChrisha's do not sit well with Lincoln Tamayo, head of Academy Prep, who said educators have not challenged black and Hispanic children. Twenty-three of the school's 25 students came from public schools. Almost all require extra study time.
Tamayo, born in Cuba, grew angry as he held up copies of tests showing that kids who should be further along do not know their multiplication tables and read poorly.
"I think we feel sorry for them and we don't want to make them feel bad about themselves," he said. "We've become a nation of victims."
Some research suggests teaching is not the only reason many black students perform poorly.
Roslyn Mickelson, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, began with a question: Why did so many black families express a reverence for education "and then behave in ways that have little relationship to their stated attitudes?"
To find out, she surveyed 1,193 Los Angeles area high school seniors about their attitudes regarding education. She also found a way to measure the difference between the students' "abstract" and "concrete" attitudes.
The results: Black students embraced the idea that education was the key to success, often more strongly than whites. But it was only in the abstract.
When it came to concrete attitudes about where education would get them in life, their positive feelings dropped.
White students, Mickelson concluded, had a road map to success in the accomplishments of their parents and friends. For them, the connection between hard work in school and upward mobility was clear.
Black students, she found, had a different road map - one that saw family and friends in less promising jobs, despite their education. That outlook caused them to slow to an academic trot, like a baseball player who stops sprinting when it's clear he'll be thrown out at first.
The 1983 survey remains valid today, Mickelson said, noting that a North Carolina survey published in 2001 yielded strikingly similar results.
Mickelson piggybacked on years of work by Ogbu, who found that black students in Shaker Heights declined to take advanced courses, did not study as much and did not participate in classes as much as white students.
He found that many black students viewed high performance in school as "acting white" and did not connect academic success with success later in life.
"We hear a whole lot about black males. The only thing you don't hear is about how they're doing at the higher end of academic achievement," said Jason Mims, a black retired Army officer who volunteers in Hillsborough schools, where he pushes black students to take more challenging classes.
Makis Denis, a 15-year-old black freshman at Tampa's Middleton High School, where Mims spoke recently, appreciates the encouragement.
"It makes me feel like I'm not all alone," Denis said.
In Shaker Heights, Ogbu said he witnessed white teachers who never assigned homework in classes dominated by black students and failed to punish disruptive behavior.
But he refrained from placing all the blame on teachers.
Did black students perform poorly because of low teacher expectations? Or did teachers have low expectations because black students performed poorly?
"It was difficult to determine which came first," Ogbu wrote.
Critics accused the University of California-Berkeley anthropologist of providing fodder for whites who think blacks are the sole cause for their own problems in school - an idea that is universally rejected among gap researchers.
"People can hate me for pointing these things out," Ogbu, 64, said in an interview with Education Week before he died in August. "But you can't leave it all to the school system. This is something (African-Americans) have to solve, because the school system will not solve it."
One solution could be training for young black parents, said Norm Brown, a retired Pinellas County government official who is married to School Board member Mary Brown.
"I see (black) parents in huge numbers at the football games but I don't see them at the PTA meetings. My question is, "Why?'," said Brown, who is black. "If they would just put in equal time on their children's education, what a difference that would make."
"The children don't feel it."
Something vital was lost in the long-ago transition from segregated to integrated schools.
This is the view of seven people around a table at the Enoch Davis Center in St. Petersburg.
All have become active in a local effort to revive the gap as a major issue. All were educated at some point in all-black schools. All remember the committed black teachers who now seem more important than the new textbooks and newer schools that came with court-ordered busing.
Louis Murphy, the St. Petersburg pastor, was in sixth grade in DeLand. He started the year in a predominantly black school where black teachers expected and often got A-level work. He ended the year in a predominantly white school that felt "cold." The white teachers, he said, avoided his gaze and expected less of him than his black teachers had.
"I'm not saying that only black folk can teach black folk because there's some excellent white instructors that are just good people," Murphy said. "The difference was love - people that really cared. ... (Today) it's just different. The children don't feel it. There's no desire to be in school."
That African-Americans would pine for the days of segregation is a testament to how deeply the gap hits home.
Many at the table said one solution is to hire more black teachers.
The federal court order governing Pinellas' actions after the end of busing says "substantial representation" of black teachers is "essential" for all students, but especially black students. It calls the lack of black teachers a "critical shortage." It compels the district to improve its recruiting methods.
Eight percent of Pinellas County's faculty is black, while black enrollment is 19 percent. The district failed to meet this year's goal of a faculty that was 10.25 percent black. The long-term goal is 18 percent by 2006.
In Hillsborough, where black students are 23 percent of the enrollment, the teaching staff is 13 percent black.
Pinellas officials say they have improved recruiting methods but are fighting competition from other states. Like other districts, they face a reluctance by black college graduates to go into teaching because of the relatively low pay.
Members of a St. Petersburg group, Concerned Organizations for Quality Education for All Students, say the district isn't pushing hard enough to find black teachers.
"It's easy to say we can't find them," said Vyrle Davis, a former top school administrator who co-chairs the group. "Are we really looking?"
But matching black students with black teachers is "too simple a prescription," according to Harvard University public policy lecturer Ronald F. Ferguson, a noted researcher of the gap.
The competence and social class of teachers are just as important as their race, he said in a paper for the Brookings Institution. Ferguson, who is black, included a comment from a young black teacher named Paula, who admitted the bad behavior of some black students made her say things she regretted.
She said of fellow black teachers: "A lot of them aren't culturally sensitive to their own culture."
The lack of simple remedies is what makes the gap so numbingly complex.
Educators and political leaders like to blame poverty. Gov. Jeb Bush does it in speeches praising his education reform efforts. Top school administrators in Hillsborough and Pinellas do it routinely.
"Race is not the issue," Pinellas superintendent Howard Hinesley, who is white, said in a recent interview.
The same philosophy prevails in Hillsborough, where officials are focused on all low performers, not just black students.
"When you look at the real world, we do too much categorizing and segregating already," said Donnie Evans, Hillsborough's chief academic officer and the district's highest-ranking black administrator. "The real issue is performance."
Both districts are training teachers using the work of Ruby Payne, whose nationally recognized writings on diversity focus on the role of poverty.
When students from low-income homes fight in school, she says, it could be because fighting often is necessary to survive in poverty. Or it could be because students haven't developed the vocabulary or personal skills to resolve conflicts peaceably.
While Payne, who is white, does not emphasize race, she criticizes a common practice that affects black children in wildly disproportionate numbers.
Because poverty often leads to a disorganized home life, she says, children of poverty often come to school unable to systematically process information. Schools plow ahead without correcting this fundamental problem and students from poverty fall behind. Payne contends that schools mistake this as an IQ problem and send the children to special education classes.
"The truth is we can no longer pretend this arrangement works - no matter how hard we teach," she writes in her book, A Framework for Understanding Poverty. "We simply can't assign them all to special education."
Her theories do not explain why the gap exists even where poverty is not a factor.
Among the researchers and educators who have studied the problem most, the common wisdom is that the gap has many causes and thus many possible solutions.
Finding them is a matter of will, said Mary Brown, the Pinellas School Board member.
"No one really gets in there to solve the problem," she said. "My expectations are much higher, and some will say, "That's not possible.' I'm sorry. Yes it is."
- Times staff writer Melanie Ave and photographer Kinfay Moroti contributed to this report.
