Achievement Gap Committee
May 8,2009
Presenters:
Barbara Bearman, long time civil rights and desegregation activist, board member DFL Education Fund, former secretary Minneapolis NAACP;
Geneva Finn, attorney and research fellow at the Institute on Race and Poverty at the U of M Law School.
Baris Gumus-Dawes, research fellow at the Institute on Race and Poverty at the U of M, who focuses on racial change in schools and neighborhoods.
Jim Hilbert, one of the plaintiff attorneys for the NAACP (and parents) on the two desegregation lawsuits in the mid-90's, and currently executive director of the Center for Negotiation and Justice at William Mitchell College of Law.
Caty Royce, Midwest Director of the Fund for an OPEN Society, a national organization developing and implementing strategies to support integration of our nations' communities.
Barbara Bearman
Intro: We come to our work in the achievement gap by way of our work in either school desegregation, housing integration or social science research. I come by way of school desegregation. In the beginning of my involvement, we didn’t think in terms of the achievement gap. Our attention was on desegregating the Minneapolis Public Schools. We thought it was about social justice, constitutional integrity and the moral necessity to removing barriers to opportunity. We looked to the federal court for relief and got it in the early 1970s. In the late 1980s, the court released the district from its supervision and gave the state the responsibility to guide school integration.
WMEP: Another significant milestone happened in the early 1990s. The state legislature formed a committee to revise the desegregation rules. Matt Little and I represented the Minneapolis NAAACP on that committee. It recommended metropolitan desegregation and recognized the notion that an all white school was also a segregated school. The rule changes set in motion the formation of WMEP, the West Metro Education Program, and the beginnings of suburban-urban integration efforts.
Choice is Yours: The Minneapolis NAACP’s 1995 school adequacy lawsuit also provided impetus for cooperation of the Minneapolis district with its neighboring suburban school districts. The settlement of that suit is The Choice is Yours program.
Failure of state oversight: Since the state began to oversee school desegregation in the late 1980s, all too familiar unacceptable patterns have formed. Schools are more segregated, poverty more entrenched.
What next: (Last Fall Don asked us where we should go from here. That urging got some of us thinking long and hard, especially about the relationship between the achievement gap and segregation by race and poverty and how institutional arrangements are consciously and unconsciously rationalized.) We are suggesting a different take on the achievement gap. We are questioning how we analyze it, how we think about it, how we talk about it and ultimately what we are willing to do about it. We are suggesting that the achievement gap resides in a racialized opportunity gap. It is that gap that we must include in our examination.
Caty Royce
Intro: In the past year and a half, I have looked at where integration and the work of racial and economic justice is happening. I have become obsessed with attempting to combine the opportunity gap and the achievement gap. I notice the ease with which most adults can sit around and talk about the achievement gap, because we all care about children. But when you start to talk about other forms of inequality and residential patterns of segregation that are as embedded if not more embedded than school segregation patterns, it becomes much less easy to talk about it.
Defining community: Defining our communities is a critical part of this. Do we mean our block? Neighborhood? Metro area? I have been defining my community and acting in a way that the community is a metro community. The answers have to be metropolitan answers. This obsession has led me to talking about the achievement gap in structural ways, and trying to bring in that other silo of residential segregation.
Equalizing opportunities: What keeps us from getting to some answers is the gravity and the depth and complexity of those problems. The answer is not white kids and black kids sitting next to each other in a classroom. The answer is equalizing opportunity so that all kids have the same opportunity to succeed. And it’s not just about kids. These kids come from a family, and families also experience opportunity gaps. Twenty years ago it was an achievement gap for them, but they are grown. That opportunity gap has to be addressed at the same time as the achievement gap if we are going to get anywhere. Breaking down those residential patterns of segregation is a key.
Broadening the conversation: Finally, we get to the Fair Housing Act’s promise of balanced living patterns and Brown vs. Board’s promise of equal education. School Boards, superintendents and the school structure have to begin to interact in a structured, intentional way with community leadership. We have to do it much more intentionally with county government. It can’t be the MPS school board talking to Rybak. It should be the school board talking to the mayor of Bloomington and Eden Prairie. Where are the patterns of segregation and what are we doing to break them down?
Jim Hilbert
A revolving door issue: All of us have kind of wandered in the darkness for a little bit on this issue. There is a quote that I would like to share with you: “Minneapolis public schools are more racially identifiable and have a wider achievement gap than at any previous time in history.” The timing of this quote is particularly interesting. This quote could be from 1995, the year of the most recent desegregation lawsuit. It could be from 1972, the year of the first desegregation lawsuit. But this quote is from 2004. It is from the Minneapolis School District in a report to the state of Minnesota. Segregation continues to worsen, the achievement gap continues. It persists.
One-sided burden: The 1954 Brown v. Board decision was a 9-0 victory, which was a remarkable statement by the court on the harms of segregation. But we didn’t quite do de-segregation right. Even the Choice is Yours is an imperfect settlement. A major problem historically has been that we have desegregation efforts that put the burden predominantly on children of color.
Schools and housing: A major barrier to desegregation is how we overcome the problem of geography. Think about housing and education, both victimized by the same racial hierarchy, both serving the same legacy of a policy of white supremacy. Think about the segregated housing patterns we have and how those impact our educational segregation. We are trying to undo housing segregation with only one of the components: Schools.
Urgent issue: We have a mismatch between the urgency of this issue and the pace at which we proceed. This is a macro problem, a big problem that requires a macro solution. This achievement gap, this opportunity gap, we know what it is about. We have known for a long time. It is no longer possible to say, “That metropolitan wide stuff, that is too much. Connecting housing and education, that is too big, too ambitious.” It is possible for this coalition to build again the understanding of what segregation means, what it looks like, and what it does.
Next session: In a follow up presentation in June, we will explore metropolitan wide approaches to the problem.
Baris Gumus-Dawes
Poverty-achievement link: What was amazing to me attending these meetings is the inability to clearly establish the importance of poverty to academic achievement. Extensive research in sociology of education shows that school poverty is the greatest determinant of academic performance. As poverty increases, performance declines. It is true across the country. I looked at math performance among elementary school students in the Twin Cities metro. 70 Percent of performance results could be explained by school poverty. For reading, more than 82 percent of the results could be explained by school poverty. Our problem is having concentrated poverty in our schools. This is the cause of the achievement gap. There is no other factor that contributes more to low performance than poverty.
Beat-the-odds schools: People said in high-poverty schools you could still boost achievement. Yeah, you can raise the test scores of some students in some schools, but this is done with extraordinary efforts, and you will only manage to improve the lots of a small percentage of students in high-poverty schools. Instead of that, why don’t we just move the schools along this line to more middle-class schools? Instead of just helping some kids beat the odds, why don’t we try to enhance opportunities for all students who are attending high-poverty schools, if that is the source of our problem?
A racial component: We looked at all the elementary schools in the Twin Cities Metro by racial composition and aggregated them as predominantly white, predominantly segregated and non-white, and integrated schools. As you can see in this graph, the poverty rate in segregated non-white schools is eight and a half times the poverty rate in a predominantly white school. Given that most students of color attend segregated non-white schools, you can pretty much see where the burden falls. Even in integrated schools, the poverty rate is 2.5 times the poverty rate in predominantly white schools. Students of color are nearly six times as likely to attend a high-poverty school as a white student. Racial and economic segregation disproportionately hurts students of color.
Multiple impacts of high-poverty schools: Poverty impacts performance in a number of ways. Low test scores is the first thing. There are other opportunities that are systematically impacted by attending a high poverty school: higher drop-out rates, low college attendance rates, low earnings later in life and a greater risk of being poor as adults. This applies even to higher income students who attend high-poverty schools.
A lesser education: High-poverty schools have characteristics that undermine quality of education, such as less qualified and less experienced teachers, high teacher turnover, less challenging curriculum and less peer competition. This lowers the educational expectations of both the students and the teachers. You are creating a school structure that creates all these ills. It creates inferior outcomes. You can change these school structures by making them less poor.
A common metro pattern: We have studied the largest 100 metro areas in the nation. In every metro area, the opportunities are fairly unevenly distributed. There is some geographic structure to it. It is stratified by race and income. The Twin Cities is not immune.
Mapping project: We designed an index that evaluates access to opportunities in different municipalities in the metro area. We look at such things as the fiscal health of the place as measured by its tax base; its access to transportation and jobs; its quality of life as measured by its safety and the access of its residents to parks and green areas; and access of its residents to high quality schools. We created a composite index that captured all of these opportunities in a place, ranked all the municipalities in the region according to this index, and created a map. The urban and suburban core of the region include most of the places where opportunities are the lowest. Isanti and Anoka County are also low opportunity areas. High opportunity places are concentrated in the southwestern suburbs frequently referred to as the “fertile crescent”. More than three quarters of all African Americans live in the lowest opportunity neighborhoods, 66 percent of Hispanics, and 63 percent of Asians and 61 percent of Native Americans and 32 percent of whites are living in low opportunity neighborhoods.
Solutions: We cannot deal with the issue of the opportunity gap unless we are dealing with racial and economic segregation. A long-term solution should really involve the creation of effective middle-class schools on a regional scale.
The nature of segregation is changing: Two factors affect segregation: segregation within a school district and between school districts. Back in 1970, 4 percent of the segregation was due to segregation between school districts and 96 percent was segregation that existed within a school district. It made sense to deal with segregation within school district boundaries. In 2000, 84 percent of school segregation is between school district segregation. You can’t deal with the issue of segregation within one school district anymore. It isn’t going to work.
The Hopkins example: In the case of the Twin Cities, lots of school districts want to do the right thing. And when they try to do that, what happens? In 2006, Hopkins decided to close a small, racially isolated school because of budget problems. They had to change attendance boundaries. They came up with four scenarios. One would have been very integrated. They had hearings. White parents from an elementary school threatened to move their kids out of district if the board didn’t take the most integrated option off the table. The district not only dropped the option, they chose the most segregated option.
Resegregation: We looked at all the integrated schools in 1992. Just ten years later, 56 percent were already segregated. In the nation, it is a common thing. In the largest 25 metro areas, the resegregation rate was only 35 percent. The Twin Cities’ 56 percent is a very high rate. If you try to desegregate by yourself as a single school district, it will last 5 years, tops. It can only be stable if it is done at the regional level. The good news is that we have the beginnings of school district cooperation. We have three integration districts: the East Metro Integration District, the Northwest Suburban Integration District and the West Metro Education Program. They are not large enough. These collaborative integration districts have to cover the entire job market and housing market to be effective.
Chicken and egg: Most of the time people think if we only desegregate the neighborhood, the school would take care of itself. But new thinking shows that desegregating schools helps to desegregate neighborhoods. In the south, in metros with large scale school desegregation programs, neighborhoods did not resegregate. If parents know that whichever neighborhood they move they are going to send their kids to an effective middle-class school, no matter the color of students, then they don’t need to flee neighborhoods with people of color. Metro-wide school desegregation removes the fuel for white flight in neighborhoods.
School and neighborhood segregation are closely related; we need to tackle both issues simultaneously. We have existing housing and school choice programs in the Twin Cities. If we link these choice programs to each other, we can improve opportunities for students who attend high-poverty schools. For instance, we can issue special Section 8 Vouchers to the parents of students who already participate in The Choice is Yours Program. Rather than bussing these students from segregated non-white urban neighborhoods to middle-class schools in suburbs, we can enable them to live and attend school in these opportunity rich neighborhoods. By enabling the Choice is Yours students to live in the neighborhoods where they attend schools, we can reduce the need for bussing students across the metropolitan area. But clearly this would involve ensuring that affordable housing options are available to people in opportunity rich neighborhoods. If we successfully distribute affordable housing across the opportunity rich areas of the metropolitan area, then we can truly offer low-income students and students of color access to opportunity.
Geneva Finn
Not letting school districts off the hook: Every time we talk about housing, school districts immediately turn off their ears because somebody else is going to deal with the problems. You can’t. We don’t see that sort of commitment from the housing community and school districts are the ones dealing with children right now. On June 5, we will come back and talk about school districts with successful metrowide integration programs that worked, such as Raleigh North Carolina.
Q&A
Q: How does the suspension gap relate to the achievement gap?
A: We got suspension data from MDE and ran it a year ago. One of the interesting things we found, the racial disparities in suspensions were largest in our most segregated school systems. If you are a black student attending a high poverty school system, you are more likely to be suspended that if you were in a low poverty school.
Q: I have listened with a sense of frustration. I think the issue of diversifying neighborhoods—I don’t understand why folks haven’t rallied around it. With the 1971 … school finance reform and fiscal disparities, we eliminated the financial reasons for communities not having diverse housing stock. It didn’t happen.
A: It has to. Getting at that is absolutely essential. Now is the time to talk about it. What we did in the past, OK let’s deconcentrate and desegregate by knocking down affordable housing. It is going to happen again, demolishing what we’ve got. We can’t do it at the expense of the folks who have already been burdened by this, who live in the core. We need to work with them to redefine the parameters and fix this thing.
Q: Let me disagree. A great strength of the city is a sense of neighborhood. I was involved in north Minneapolis. There is no connection between schools and that neighborhood. It should be a strong connection. That has broken down in our city.
A: I respectfully disagree that we are disagreeing. What I am saying is that is true. We have to get at that. It is a complex web of social relationships that cross race. We aren’t good at that. We have to get good at that. We have to get proficient at cross-cultural relationships.
Comment: (T Williams) Among the challenges we have in MPS, our neighborhoods are segregated. If we go back to neighborhood schools, we will have segregated schools. If we went the other way, we don’t have enough white students to fully desegregate. It has to be regional. Housing is an important component of that. We have a Metropolitan Council that is prohibited from dealing with educational issues and a School Board Association that doesn’t want them involved. The Met Council doesn’t want to get involved; they feel like they have more than they can handle on their plate. They are pushing housing for suburban communities. If they build affordable and low-income housing it is gong to be concentrated in certain areas of the city. Much later, the school district has to address the issue of where schools are located. We have to decide what we want out schools to look like years out.
Comment: I work in what used to be Bryant Junior High, now its Sabathani. Green Central used to be the neighborhood high school. All the social cohesion was closed, torn down or reallocated. Schools are a key piece of bringing communities together. The third issue is the quality of the schools themselves. The public schools are seriously broken. The prospect of desegregating schools to bring children into this system is scary to me.
Comment: We tend to talk about MPS schools in terms of failure. They are not that bad. I think that sometimes we forget that. White students in Minneapolis outperform their counterparts statewide. The Hispanic students outperform their counterparts statewide. Black students do not. One reason we think that is happening is that black students in Minneapolis are in very high poverty schools. There are lots of things you can do with teachers. It only changes your test scores so much.
Q: Is there an opportunity for another lawsuit?
A: Hilbert: As a side note, in 1995 when we filed the desegregation case in Minneapolis we didn’t sue the school board. We sued the state. It is a legal point. The constitution of the state of Minnesota prohibits a lot of things. In one instance, it says the state has an affirmative obligation. It is education. You have to provide adequate education. Our lawsuit in 1995 was built on that. We also had a housing component. We sued the Met Council. We said you are not doing enough. We ran into a federal judge who had a peculiar view of various legal issues.
We are back now because the issue is ripe. Since the 2000 settlement we have gone downhill. The School Board’s report is perfect evidence of that. We still have the same lawsuit. We could sue the state again for an inadequate education. What will make this different and what we will talk about next time is how do we build upon successful examples. There are certainly national models. Part of what this operation is about is getting back to what has worked in the past, more a grass roots focus and neighborhood-level organizing.
Comment: Bearman: I think middle class people have the advantage of living among many communities. We are not locked into a geographical community. We can be active in that geographical community. But people can send their kids to private schools, or to WEMEP schools, they are making decisions to put their kids in schools out of their geographic neighborhood. I think we need to have a sociological discussion about how people live and what advantages and opportunities middle class folks have, as opposed to people who are economically stressed. That would be a good discussion to have.
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