Minority Achievement in Loudoun County

January, 2004

In 1995, members of the Education Committee of the Loudoun Branch of the NAACP documented significant academic achievement deficits for Loudoun's minority students that included lower grades and test scores than their white classmates, a higher dropout rate, and lower enrollment in Honors or AP courses. Two years later, when little had changed, the Committee decided to call for education initiatives proven to make a difference in minority achievement. To help members better assess strategies that were truly successful, a survey of current research was undertaken. This report updates the 1997 report highlighting the crushing deficits of the disadvantaged, research-based reading programs, and efforts at school reform.

Response of the Loudoun County School Board and Staff

Since 1995, the school board and staff of Loudoun County have addressed the issue of minority achievement in a number of ways. Most important are the goals adopted by the school board in 1999, showing its commitment to raising achievement among Loudoun's minority youngsters. Staff inaugurated a pilot program of parent liaisons, now expanded to include all schools with significant minority populations. Diversity training for all administrators has been undertaken, and training for teachers is on-going. The general track has been eliminated and AP and Honors courses opened to any student wishing to participate. Early-back programs in several schools have increased student readiness. Literacy groups are being formed, and at Park View High School, the Fast/ForWord program is being piloted to help with disabled readers. The office of research is tracking data on specific minority populations, and teams are identifying students transitioning to middle school. Staff is also providing additional instruction to students at risk of failing the SOL tests, and piloting all-day kindergarten in two schools with significant minority populations.

It is important to point out that many minority students make excellent grades, enroll in honors and AP classes, and enter and graduate from college. Their parents are involved and supportive. At November's Excellence in Education Banquet, a significant number of minority students were represented. The annual college fair attests to the serious interest of the minority community in academic excellence. However, when one looks at the numbers, it is difficult to deny that satisfactory academic achievement in Loudoun County remains a serious issue for too many minority youngsters.

Overall, Loudoun's SOL scores are superior when compared to other Virginia localities; indeed, this year every school was designated as accredited. When disaggregated by ethnic group, especially in the early grades, problems remain. On the Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SATs) administered in 1999, the total scores of African-American and Hispanic students were 196 and 136 points below those of white students. By 2003, these differences were 134 points for African-Americans and 74 points for Hispanics, a significant improvement.

However, on the 1999 Standards of Learning third grade elementary reading test, 17% of white students failed to pass, but 45% of African-American and 57% of Hispanic students failed. In 2003, while only 9% of Loudoun's white third graders failed to pass the reading test, 30% of African-American and 21% of Hispanic students still failed to do so. In math, 12% of white students failed to pass the SOLs, while 27% of Hispanic and 36% of African-American students failed the 2003 test.

In searching for reasons Loudoun's minority scores remain below acceptable levels, particularly those for African-American youngsters, let us first revisit the 1997 report, as well as examine current research pointing to new directions.

In 1997, school reform was under way in almost every state. Today, efforts at reform are diminishing in number. While state fiscal restraints nationwide have called a halt to new programs of every sort, the success of reform initiatives is now being called into question. According to a study by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, real success occurs less than fifty percent of the time. "Some turnaround efforts have improved some schools," they say, "but success is not the norm. No particular intervention appears more successful than any other. Interventions are uneven in their implementation and always hard to sustain. It is nearly impossible to determine which interventions offer the most bang for the buck because they are attempted in very different situations."

Teachers Linda Christensen and Stan Karp, co-editors of Rethinking School Reform: Views from the Classroom, suggest that the "dual character" of American schools has greater relevance than any single reform initiative. Public schools, our most important democratic institution, offer children a ladder to the American dream. At the same time, they perpetuate the privileges of class and race existing in the larger society which can include tolerance of failure and disrespect for communities of color. Schools, suggest Christensen and Karp, reproduce the very inequality that American mythology professes they are designed to overcome. This dual

character of schooling -- its democratic promise and its institutional service to a society based on class, race, and gender privilege -- invariably generates contradictory impulses when it comes to reform.

True reform, they suggest, must be measured not by what the reformers say they are going to do, but by asking the question, "Who benefits, and who does not?" Karp and Christensen believe that, "Until we find the political will and vision to put social justice at the heart of the debate about public education, school reform will continue to be an exasperating tug of war with limited impact on the status quo."

Veteran teachers VivianTroen and Katherine Boles agree that current proposals for educational reform are not promising. In Who's Teaching Your Children?, they address the deep, systemic problems in our public schools and point to transformations in the teaching profession itself as essential to long-lasting improvement.

One type of "reform," class size reduction, does deserve interest, however, not only because of its relative ease of implementation but because of its results with minority students. A 2003 study of 44 SAGE schools (Student Achievement Guarantee in Education) in Wisconsin evaluated schools involved under a statute requiring them to gradually reduce class size to fifteen in kindergarten through grade three. In addition, SAGE schools opened early, allowed children to remain until late in the day, and cooperated with community organizations providing recreational and social services. Schools provided a rigorous academic curriculum as well as staff development and accountability.

Children in SAGE schools achieved at higher levels than those in the comparison group even though more SAGE children qualified for free and reduced lunch. Test results in subsequent years indicate that "the statistically significant positive effects of SAGE, which occurred in first grade, were maintained ... classrooms with fewer students are more likely to have higher class average achievement scores and are more likely to contribute to closing the achievement gap between African-American and White students than classrooms with a higher number of students."

In the Educational Testing Service's October 2003 study, "Parsing the Achievement Gap," researchers point out that while there remain differences in outcomes in studies of class size, their evidence also indicates that lowering class size provides benefits that are "greater for minority and disadvantaged students than for other students." At the Capitol Hill briefing announcing the report, Ohio Republican Congressman John Boehner echoed Linda Christensen and Stan Karp. "Closing the achievement gap, many of us believe, is America's new civil right."

At first glance, given Loudoun's burgeoning enrollment and current fiscal problems, reduced class size would seem to be an improbable choice for the school board to make. However, as we will see below, the savings in special education enrollments alone may make such a choice not only good for minority achievement, but fiscally sound as well.

In our 1997 survey, the research on reading showed that, for minority youngsters, structured reading programs with explicit phonics had the highest rate of success. Today, the research supporting this position is even stronger than in 1997. In April 2000, the Congressionally mandated National Reading Panel released its report, the largest and most comprehensive study of reading ever undertaken. Over 115,000 studies were examined. The independent panel reported that "... effective reading instruction includes teaching children to break apart and manipulate the sounds in words (phonemic awareness), teaching them that these sounds are represented by letters of the alphabet which can then be blended together to form words (phonics), having them practice what they've learned by reading aloud with guidance and feedback (guided oral reading), and applying reading comprehension strategies to guide and improve reading comprehension." Members of the reading panel convened by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) were scientists, college professors, reading teachers, educational administrators and parents. Of particular interest are the panel's findings with regard to youngsters from low socioeconomic levels and those with academic difficulties.

The 2002 President's Commission on Excellence in Special Education points out that "...many children identified for special education -- up to 40% -- are there because they were not taught to read." In a paper from the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, Fairfax County School Board member Christian Braunlich cites a conclusion by Dr. Reid Lyon of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development indicating that "the number of children identified as poor readers and served through special education could be reduced by up to 70 percent through early identification and prevention programs with a heavy emphasis on phonics and decodable text." Braunlich also cites research showing that Los Angeles first-graders using the Open Court reading program showed improvement of 21 percentile points in reading over a period of two years.

Nationwide, the number of special education students has almost doubled over the past twenty-five years. In major Virginia school divisions, Braunlich points out, "Learning Disabled identification has risen six times faster than enrollment and, because of the low pupil-teacher ratios required (state staffing standards require one teacher per eight students), the runaway growth in LD identification is a key factor in the demand for new classroom space." It is also a factor in the increased number of instructional assistants and other personnel devoted to LD placements. In terms of dollars, beginning reading instruction which does not adequately address the needs of all students may cause significant increases in special education costs that approach the 40% cited in the 2002 Excellence in Special Education report. In Loudoun County, special education costs account for 12% of the school budget, not including transportation and psychological services.

Reading and the Brain

Research on the brain in the past decade shows that the act of reading involves multiple sites in the brain, that certain forms of dyslexia run in families, and that young brains are far more pliable than once believed. According to Yale University's Sally Shaywitz, M.D., "One of the most exciting applications of brain imaging is just coming into use: directly evaluating the effects of specific reading interventions on the neural systems for reading." New imaging techniques are enabling researchers to watch what happens in the brain while a child is performing a specific task.

Her research shows that poor readers may be of two kinds. "One, the classic dyslexic, is born with a glitch in his posterior {brain} reading systems. This group has higher verbal abilities and is able to compensate somewhat -- improving in accuracy but remaining slow readers. The second group seems to have developed into poor readers mainly, we speculate, as a result of experience. It may be the result of a combination of poor reading instruction in school and a disadvantaged language environment at home. In this group, the wiring for the posterior reading system may have been laid down early on but never activated appropriately; the system is there, but it is not functioning properly. Without effective intervention, individuals in this group remain poor readers, reading both inaccurately and slowly."

Shaywitz cites research-based programs now developed that, if widely used, "will substantially reduce the number of children needing special education in higher grades. In one Tallahassee, Florida, elementary school where such a program was implemented, the percentage of struggling readers dropped eightfold -- from 31.8 percent to 3.7 percent." One such program is Scientific Learning's FastForWord, now being piloted for older readers in Loudoun.

Reading and curriculum specialists must become attuned to this emerging body of scientific data. Within a very short time, reading methods based upon ideology or personnel preference will give way to instruction which takes into account the circuitry of the brain and how it functions. When this happens, children everywhere will benefit.

The 1997 survey opened with the groundbreaking work of Betty Hart and Todd Risley, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, describing their investigation into the daily lives of 1- and 2-year-old children from impoverished, working-class, and professional families. Verbal exchanges between the children and their caregivers were recorded in hour-long home observations over a period of 2-1/2 years. Staggering differences

were found in the amount of interaction between parents and their children, as well as in the rate at which the youngsters developed vocabulary.

Columbia University's Lois Bloom, in her foreword to Hart and Risley's book, found heartbreaking that, by age three, "... parents in less economically favored circumstances had said fewer different words in their cumulative monthly vocabularies than had the children in the most economically advantaged families in the same period of time."

The ETS 2003 report, cited above, identifies factors impacting a child's development and achievement, beginning with a higher percentage of low birthweight infants among African-American and Hispanic children, the prevalence of lead poisoning in their environments, and often throughout the nation, unmet nutritional needs. "Inequality," these researchers comment, "is like an unwanted guest who comes early and stays late."

As disheartening as these findings may seem, schools can bridge achievement gaps in learning, despite the belief of many educators that children from poor and disadvantaged homes cannot learn as others do. Differences in reading potential, for example, have been found not to be related to poverty, IQ, gender, handedness, dialect, or mental age. According to Researcher Marilyn Jager Adams, differences are related to learning and experience. Moreover, new research reported in November 2003 on the interaction among genes, environment and IQ by The University of Virginia's Eric Turkheimer shows that the influence of genes on intelligence is highly dependent on class. Among poor minority populations, environmental factors -- not genetic deficits -- explain most IQ differences.

Prior to Turkheimer's work, studies of the "heritability" of IQ had been conducted almost exclusively on middle class and wealthy families. We are all too familiar with the appalling generalities eugenics theorists put forward about these early findings, one leading to the Nazi Holocaust, and a second to "the notion that minorities' lower scores are evidence of genetic inferiority." As recently as 1994, a variation of this theory was put forward in The Bell Curve. Turkheimer's findings showed that the influence of genes on IQ was significantly lower in conditions of poverty, where environmental deficits overwhelm genetic potential. The importance of environmental influences on IQ was four times stronger in the poorest families than the higher status families.

"This says that above a certain level, where you have a wide array of opportunities, it doesn't get much better" by adding environmental enhancements, said Sandra Scarr, professor

emerita at Virginia and a pioneering researcher in behavioral genetics. "But below a certain level, additional opportunities can have big impacts."

Turkheimer's research strengthens the argument that, rather than turn Head Start over to the states or dismantle it, suggestions recently put forward at the national level, school systems must strengthen preschool programs and make them more widely available. As a number of exemplary programs have demonstrated (one in Loudoun at Meadowland Elementary), what happens in the classroom can help youngsters overcome educational deficits. To assume that such deficits resulting from economic disadvantage are fixed and unchanging is to ignore demonstrable evidence to the contrary. Issues of social justice compel us to better provide for the poorest youngsters in our communities. Moreover, the younger they are when intervention takes place, the more likely students will achieve on a high level and school systems will save dollars on special education costs. As a case in point, on last fall's K-PALS test, 100% of African-American kindergarten students in Arlington County's preschool Montessori programs met all benchmarks.

Underscoring Turkheimer's work is a 2003 study funded in part by the Pew Charitable Trusts through the National Institute for Early Education Research. A Georgetown study examined children in public preschools in Oklahoma that had licensed teachers with 4-year degrees in early childhood education. Four-year-olds in the program gained significantly in language, cognitive and motor skills. "Children who attend high quality, universal preschool programs enjoy better skills when they enter school," this study concludes, results consistent with those in Arlington.

Other factors also influence children from disadvantaged backgrounds who do succeed in school. We are only beginning to understand the achievement motivation that makes a difference between high and low achievers who come from similar backgrounds. By asking students to explain their academic success, UCLA's Bernard Weiner finds they focus on innate ability or intelligence, effort, and external factors (luck, being teacher's pet, etc.).

Columbia's Carol Dweck and John Nicholls found that "children who view ability or intelligence as a quality that is unfixed and changeable are much more likely to tackle risky, challenging tasks and to rebound from failures by redoubling their efforts." In contrast, "those who see their ability as fixed tend to choose easy assignments over challenging ones and to be less resilient about failures." Sadly, Nicholls also showed that by fifth or sixth grade, student notions about intellectual ability are fixed. Parents' perception of their children's innate ability is critical. Children whose parents stress the benefits of effort and education in general achieve at higher levels than others.

Classroom structure also impacts a child's view of his abilities. Nicholls found that competitively organized classrooms cause students to place emphasis on how they are doing compared to their friends. "They tend to become focused on whether, rather than how, they can accomplish a task." In contrast, students in cooperatively run classrooms are more likely to focus on work for its own sake, and tend to "... view mistakes as necessary components of learning, and learning as a process that involves sustained effort."

The gap in achievement between white and minority students persists throughout the United States. The National Governor's Association calls this "... one of the most pressing education-policy challenges that states currently face."

• According to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, by the time minority students reach grade 12, they may be four years behind their peers. Skills of seventeen-year-old African-American and Hispanic students resemble those of thirteen-year-old white students.

• In every state, African-American and Hispanic students are more likely than whites to drop out of school. For those who graduate, college matriculation rates are below those of whites, and African-Americans and Hispanics are only half as likely as whites to complete the requirements for a college degree.

ETS researchers also learned that the percentage of Hispanic and African-American students who change schools frequently is double that for white students. As a consequence, 41% of the frequent school changers were below grade level in reading.

The recently formed Minority Student Achievement Network is dedicated to changing these bleak statistics and promoting higher achievement for minority students.

In February of 1999, fifteen school superintendents (one from Arlington, VA) formed a network to improve the achievement of students of color. That same year a Joyce Foundation grant to the College Board began assisting MSAN to develop a research agenda. Like Loudoun, all of the school systems represented have "strikingly similar and disturbing disaggregated achievement data." Funded by a number of prestigious organizations (the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, National Science Foundation, Chicago Annenberg Challenge, among others), the network shares information and procedures, engages in collaborative research, and

conducts training and professional development activities. They hold periodic meetings of students from network communities and meetings for district superintendents.

MSAN is currently undertaking two major research projects, one funded by the National Science Foundation that will "focus on two important stakeholders in the educational process--teachers and parents. A group of math leaders in six Network districts will document the mathematical concepts and skills that are most problematic for all students and develop instructional strategies to help students master those concepts and skills. Central to the work will be an exploration of the teacher attitudes, practices, and belief systems that are critical to

Students' success in mathematics." Interviews with African-American and Hispanic parents will also be conducted.

The second project will look at literacy interventions for early and adolescent readers. The key questions driving this project are, "What are we doing to ensure that all students learn to read in the primary grades? And what are we doing to help students who struggle with literacy issues catch up?"

What Doesn't Meet the Eye: Understanding and Addressing Racial Disparities in High-Achieving Suburban Schools, a paper by Harvard's Ron Ferguson, is available on MSAN's website. At the conclusion of the paper, Dr. Ferguson cites four implications for Policy and Practice:

• Assume no motivational differences. Even if minority students behave differently than whites or have lower achievement, do not assume that there are also differences in effort or motivation to succeed.

• Address specific skill deficits and provide the necessary compensatory instruction.

• Supply ample encouragement routinely. Dr. Ferguson found that individual teacher encouragement is highly motivational to minority students.

• Provide access to resources and learning experiences. This should include access to books, computers, and extracurricular opportunities for intellectual enrichment.

One MSAN participant, Superintendent Allan Alson of Evanston Township in Illinois, agrees with teachers Linda Christensen and Stan Karp that the achievement gap is a social justice issue. He also believes schools should focus not just on low-performing students of color, but on the significant number of youngsters performing at the middle level "who could and should be performing at the highest levels."

The nurturing of minority students with special needs and talents was also the focus of a news release in January, 2002, from The National Academies, Advisors to the Nation on Science, Engineering and Medicine. Because disproportionately low numbers of minority students are placed in gifted and talented programs, they call for "rigorous research on ways to identify talented students who excel in verbal, mathematical, or other skills."

They also express concern about the large numbers of minority students, especially males, diagnosed with the labels learning disabled, emotionally disturbed, and mildly, moderately, or severely mentally retarded. Here again, because reading difficulties and behavior problems are among the most common reasons students are selected for special education, they also call for states to implement universal screening and intervention strategies in those areas.

Teachers play a major role in special placement referrals. The National Academies also suggests that "teacher licensing and certification requirements call for training in effective intervention methods to assist students who fail to meet minimum academic standards or who substantially exceed them. Teachers also should be familiar with students' beliefs, values, and cultural practices that may affect classroom participation and success." This reflects the growing research base indicating that teacher quality may be more important to a child's success than any other single factor.

Students with exceptional deficits need double or triple the amount and quality of instruction they normally receive, according to Kati Haycock, Director of the Education Trust in Washington, D.C. She finds school systems responding -- extra funding for high-poverty schools, a wide range of assistance to low-achieving students and increasing instructional time devoted to literacy and mathematics. Haycock places special emphasis upon the quality of the classroom teacher. As she points out, even a decade ago, many educators believed that a child's income level and the education of his parents predicted how well he would perform in school. We now know that what happens in the classroom matters most of all.

• Results from a recent Boston study of the effects teachers have on learning ... show that in just one academic year, the top third of teachers produced as much as six times the learning growth as the bottom third of teachers. In fact, 10th graders taught by the least effective teachers made nearly no gains in reading and even lost ground in math.

• Research in Tennessee and Texas shows that these effects are cumulative and hold up regardless of race, class, or prior achievement levels. Some of the classrooms showing the greatest gains are filled with low-income students, some with well-to-do students. And the same is true with the small-gain classrooms. It's not the kids, after all: Something very different is going on with the teaching.

The National Governors Association also highlights the issue of teacher quality. In an achievement-gain study by the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System mathematics test, students taught for three consecutive years by the most effective teachers had gains of 83%; those taught by the least effective (bottom quintile of) teachers had average gains of 29%. Ron Ferguson of Harvard found that "every additional dollar spent on more qualified teachers resulted in greater achievement gains than any other educational expenditure." Experience makes a difference in teacher quality, as well. At least three to five years of classroom experience appears to make teachers more effective. Troen and Boles, in Who's Teaching Your Children? point to inadequate teacher preparation as a major reason for poor performance in the classroom.

One classic study from the Harvard Educational Review in 1978 is worthy of review, especially as it pointed, a quarter-century ago, to the difference a single teacher can make in the lifetime achievement of young children. Researchers Eigil Pedersen, Therese Faucher and William Eaton studied the education records of sixty former first-grade students at an inner-city school in a large northeastern city and then contacted them in adulthood. As youngsters, they had been taught by three first-grade teachers dubbed Miss A, Miss B and Miss C. Researchers found that there was not a single year in which the mean scores of Miss A's students were not higher than those of the other teachers. In their adult years, two-thirds of Miss A's former students achieved a level the researchers designated as "highest adult status" compared to less than half

that for the other teachers, and not one of Miss A's students was found listed in the "lowest

adult status." During their school years, many of these students were found by later teachers to have leadership ability and initiative, and the effect appeared to be cumulative.

How did Miss A do it?

"It was said of Miss A's teaching that 'it did not matter what background or abilities the beginning pupil had; there was no way that the pupil was not going to read by the end of grade one.'" She also made sure her students knew the importance of schooling and how one should persevere, and "gave extra hours to the children who were slow learners." These researchers concluded that an excellent first-grade teacher is not only able to help a student develop a positive academic self-concept, but may influence a child's social mobility, as well.

The quality of a child's early teachers has a profound influence on later achievement in school and, as today's studies are replicating, the effect is cumulative. It is now possible, as the Tennessee Value-Added project shows, to assess teacher quality and to determine outcomes in terms of student performance.

In the Wisconsin SAGE program, when teachers in higher-achieving and lower-achieving classrooms were compared, teaching style was found to be the major feature separating good from poor teachers. "The primary teaching method of the higher-achieving teachers is explicit instruction. The teachers give clear directions, explain concepts, model procedures, require practice, provide feedback, and scaffold [provide temporary support for] understanding."

In a 2003 study on the effectiveness of Direct Instruction that assessed Wisconsin first- and second-graders' responses to a variety of reading programs, researchers Randall Ryder, Jennifer Sekulski and Anna Silberg of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, concluded, " ... the findings of the present study as well as those conducted over the past 30 years suggest that treatment effects are often conditioned by a more generalized factor -- teacher effectiveness." Citing a 2001 study by Pressley, et al. in the journal Scientific Studies of Reading, they stated, The primary impact of the most effective teachers was the dramatic improvement of reading performance in the lower-achieving students. Perhaps a more striking finding in this study was the degree of sameness of instruction among the most effective teachers regardless of the state or school setting. These teachers taught skills explicitly, emphasized the importance of literature, engaged students in considerable reading and writing, structured learning tasks so they were appropriate for the ability of their students, and encouraged students to do reading tasks on their own as much as possible. These teachers were also adept at constructing a classroom atmosphere that was caring, providing positive reinforcement, and displaying excellent classroom management skills. Results of the present study {that of Randall, et al.} have demonstrated that teacher effectiveness may be a more salient factor in improving students' reading than instructional method.

However talented and experienced the teacher, researchers find distressing that scientific research on learning rarely finds its way into the classroom. Factions and interest groups more political than they are scientific frequently determine what is taught. Toronto researchers Paula and Keith Stanovich suggest that educators use quality control mechanisms in selecting best practices because teachers are "deluged with misinformation."

Misinformation can be costly when theories that appear sound and in which people desperately want to believe, find their way into practice. One example of this was "facilitated communication" for developmentally disabled children, especially those with autism. This theory, that nonverbal, disabled children possessed "undisclosed literacy consistent with normal intellectual functioning," was widely adopted throughout the United States. Adult "facilitators" supported the hand/arm of a disabled child, helping her use a keyboard to "communicate." Peer reviewed studies, however, showed that the typed output was "directed or systematically determined" by the facilitators, not by the children. In 1994, the American Psychological Association adopted a resolution stating that facilitated communication was an "unproved communicative procedure with no scientifically demonstrated support for its efficacy."

Anecdotal information is a second way misinformation morphs into practice. "I used this (theory/strategy/workbook) last year and a lot of my students improved." "Everybody knows about drill and kill. It doesn't work to drill kids on (phonics/times tables/states and capitals)." "My friend at (Emerick/Sterling/Harper Park)) said to forget about the (block scheduling/writing program/portfolio exam. It just doesn't work." We are all influenced by anecdotal information from a variety of sources -- friends, relatives and colleagues, book reviews, TV pundits -- but in choosing educational methods to bring up the achievement of our children, we must put our faith not in anecdote, but in outcomes.

A panel of the National Academy of Sciences convened on scientific inquiry in education recommends that the publication of findings in peer reviewed journals, replication, and a consensus within a particular research community (converging evidence) are three basic quality control mechanisms teachers and school systems ought to apply in selecting best practices.

Paula and Keith Stanovich warn against those who claim special expertise without providing evidence of peer review or replication. Knowledge considered "special" -- the province of the thought of an individual and immune from scrutiny and criticism by others -- can never have the status of scientific knowledge. Research-based conclusions, when published in a peer reviewed journal, become part of the public realm, available to all, in a way that claims of "special expertise" are not.

Troen and Boles, co-founders of the Learning/Teaching Collaborative, and initiators of one of the first professional development schools linking colleges and public schools, suggest that teachers, themselves, be involved in on-going research in their classrooms regarding outcomes and best practices. "When teachers conduct research into their own practice, their role expands: they become more than 'deliverers of knowledge.' They create knowledge by working on research in their classrooms and across schools and communities...Teacher research creates a model for problem identification, problem solving, and theory building, by using research data to improve student learning rather than relying on decision making based on 'seat-of-the-pants' reckoning."

It is especially important for parents of minority children to ascertain that the programs and practices of the school system not only have a solid research base, but that individual schools and teachers be held accountable for a child's progress. As Paula and Keith Stanovich caution, to maximize their child's potential, parents and others concerned for the welfare of minority youngsters must educate themselves about the research, be vigilant in overseeing a school's curriculum, and diligent in demanding the kinds of programs to which their youngsters are by law entitled.

Not only should programs and practices be sound, parents should insist that teachers have high expectations for minority youngsters. Minority students in Department of Defense (DoD) schools routinely perform at levels consistent with their white classmates; in these schools, reading and writing performance of African-American and Hispanic students is among the highest in the nation. Teachers in DoD schools routinely hold extraordinarily high expectations. Significantly, in a 1998 NAEP survey, 85% of African-American and 93% of Hispanic students in DoD's domestic schools found these high expectations very positive. Nationwide, these figures for African-American students were only 52%, those for Hispanics 53%.

One DoD teacher who had taught at a school whose students were predominantly African-American told her colleagues, "In my old district, if a student didn't pass a test, one might say, 'Okay, you tried.' Here they push the kids and don't allow them to settle for less. When they don't succeed, the teacher works harder to get the students to want to excel. The curriculum is not dummied down."

A landmark work on teacher expectation essential for minority parents to know about is that of Harvard professor Robert Rosenthal and San Francisco elementary principal Leonore Jacobson. In 1968, well before "learning disabled" and "gifted" were categories for which students were routinely tested in schools, they published Pygmalion in the Classroom, describing their experiment assessing the correlation between teachers' expectations and students' achievement. At the beginning of the school year, Rosenthal and Jacobson gave an intelligence test to all of the students at one elementary school. Randomly selecting 20% of the students, they told teachers that these youngsters showed "unusual potential for intellectual growth" and could, therefore, "be expected to 'bloom'" by the end of the year. At the close of the school year, all students were re-tested. The selected 20% did indeed show significant increases in their scores. The authors concluded, "the change in the teachers' expectations regarding the intellectual performance of these allegedly 'special' children had led to an actual change in the intellectual performance of these randomly selected children."

Interviewed in 1985, Dr. Rosenthal gave the following advice to parents of first-graders: "Do not let a teacher teach your child who doesn't think your child can learn."

The legacy of racism in this country undeniably contributes to the achievement gap. Stanford University psychologist Claude Steele found that negative stereotypes about students' intellectual abilities heavily impacts their test performance, exacerbating the poisonous power of low expectations. In working with students, Steele told one group that an upcoming test would measure their abilities; a second group was told the test would determine how they solved problems. African-American students, "... in each case did much worse when told that tests measured their abilities and much better, and at the same level as whites, when they were told the tests were lab studies." This stereotype threat, Steele asserts, "activates a racial stereotype and provokes self-doubt among test-takers." When asked to identify their race in a preliminary questionnaire, student performance on the test was also lowered; when not asked their race, African-Americans outperformed whites. A second study found that the number of high-achieving students dropped dramatically between fourth and sixth grades. Questioned in focus groups, students indicated that expectations for them were lower than for their white classmates. Honors students believed they had to "prove their honors status each year."

Student attitudes were found in a widely publicized study to impact academic achievement, the authors concluding that minority students don't "work hard in school because of the perception that academic achievement means 'acting white.'" A second study in Shaker Heights, Ohio, found less evidence of this. Conducted by Ronald Ferguson of the Kennedy School of Public Affairs at Harvard, the study found that although students did not complete homework as often as whites, they spent as much time doing it. African-American students in this group did not report more than their white classmates that friends thought them "not cool" for being high achievers. A fear of being isolated -- the only minority in an honors class, for example -- is one reason researchers believe minority youngsters are reluctant to enroll. The school system in Fort Wayne, Indiana, eliminated low-level classes like consumer math so all students partake of the academic curriculum. Even so, the superintendent in Fort Wayne found that for many minority students, "earning a C or D is acceptable, since they will graduate with such grades. We still have a difficult time convincing students that grades make a difference," he says.

If student attitudes of minorities in Loudoun are similar, it is imperative that teachers and parents address this issue, because students who are convinced that good grades make a difference have a better chance of attending college. U.S. Department of Education research shows that "the quality and intensity of the secondary school curriculum is the strongest predictor of college degree completion for low-income and minority youth." The National Governors Association recommends that intervention begin before high school, that secondary courses be more rigorous, and that financial support be provided to low-income and minority students who need help with college expenses.

It must also be pointed out that parents are a child's first and most important teacher. The ETS report emphases that proper prenatal care, an adequate diet, reading to young children, limiting their amount of television exposure, being available for one's child and participating in his education from the start can make lifelong differences in achievement. Many teachers would also add that these parental contributions make a difference in student attitudes toward learning, perseverance, and the school, as well.

• Write your congressmen and urge them to continue and strengthen Head Start, not hand over this vital program to the states. Urge them, as well, to require licensed, certified teachers with early childhood degrees in all Head Start/public preschool classes.

• Publicize the importance of proper prenatal care and adequate nutrition, reading to young children, limiting TV watching, and becoming a parent participant in a child's learning. Seek the help of the school system in developing parent education programs addressing the fourteen points in the ETS Study. Arlington County recommends a comprehensive preschool initiative be undertaken to include prenatal counseling, infant stimulation programs, parent education, playgroups, and school readiness. This is an admirable example to follow.

• Assess the present reading program to make certain it conforms to the findings of the National Reading Panel; ask to see the research findings on the program's outcomes with minority students. Ask for a copy of the program on phonemic awareness used by K-3 teachers. Examine textbooks, teacher workbooks and test scores. Study the research results on reading remediation programs like Reading Recovery. Insist on pilot programs using reading programs shown to be highly successful with minority students, and those based on brain research -- especially FastForWord for first-grade students struggling with reading. Urge staff to make certain that reading specialists become familiar with the latest research having to do with the brain and reading, and that they establish a program of continuing education in this area. Have a committee member subscribe to web sites like brainbuzz.com that alert readers to new findings of benefit to children in school.

• Call for volunteers, as well, to survey Education Week (free on line) and other publications to keep up with the latest research and best practices nationwide. Design, sustain, and update a database of information on educational research for minorities that can be tapped when necessary. Become familiar with the school system's educational library and its considerable resources.

• Call for a study of first-grade teacher competence. Who are Loudoun's most competent first-grade teachers? What do they do that less competent teachers should be doing? How have teachers at Meadowland Elementary achieved their exemplary SOL pass rate, and why are teachers in other schools not doing the same things? Point to the example of Tennessee's use of superior teachers to bring up achievement and test scores.

• Call for immediate assessment of kindergarten and first grade students exhibiting academic difficulties. Far too often, children with significant deficits are allowed to fail at reading before their status is determined or their needs met.

• When policies and practices are put in place to "bring up achievement," ask to see the peer-reviewed, replicated research showing that they really do work.

• Urge Loudoun to join the Minority Student Achievement Network so that new research will become immediately available to staff and teachers.

• Actively encourage participation of Hispanic parents, and make materials on minority achievement available to them in Spanish. Have volunteer translators at meetings.

• Insist on social justice for minority children. Ask the tough questions. For example, how quickly would alternative reading programs be piloted if the thirty percent of Loudoun third graders failing the SOL reading tests were white, instead of being African-American?

• Most importantly, be vigilant in pursuit of excellence for your children, especially in the quality of their teachers and the school curriculum. Parents are a child's primary advocates. Make sure your children receive the education to which the law entitles them.

Loudoun Branch NAACP

Education Committee

January, 2004