Mo Gets Serious About Achievement Gap

The Guilford County Board of Education spent most of its Thursday, August 30 meeting talking about race, and nobody noticed.

That the school board was talking about race was a good thing. It did so not just because the school board picked that night to have one of its verbal donnybrooks over race, but because the administration of Guilford County School Superintendent Mo Green was taking the bull by the horns and doing something official, within Guilford County Schools, to address the "achievement gap" between black male students and white students.

Four years after Green was hired, and after he has had some success in getting some of Guilford County's worst schools off the federal and state lists of failures by improving test scores – Green on Thursday rolled out his achievement gap plan, and his own pilot program.

During the 2012-2013 school year, two sets of schools will make changes in an effort to produce a measurable closing of the achievement gap.

Six elementary schools will make a concerted effort to address literacy problems among young black male students. Statistics show that many black male students test as well in reading as white students through third grade, but after that, their reading scores drop off precipitously until, by eighth grade, there is a large reading proficiency gap between black males and white students.

The six schools in the reading program will be Allen Jay, Fairview, Irving Park, Montlieu, Peck and Sedgefield.

More controversially on the school board, at the same time three schools in the Guilford County Schools Western Region – Parkview Elementary, Ferndale Middle and High Point Central High schools – will test a plan to reduce the number of school days black male students lose to suspensions by attempting to reduce disproportionate levels of suspensions between black and white students.

Guilford County Schools administrators call the two sets of schools "literacy schools" and "discipline schools."

The "disproportionate punishment" argument is more controversial, and is based on the theory that black male students are punished at higher rates for the same offenses than students of other races and genders.

That is hard to prove, because you can't prove it merely by demonstrating that more black students are being disciplined. You also have to prove that they are not committing offenses at a higher rate.

The controversy stems from the fact that if black male students are committing verifiable offenses at higher rates than other students, they should be punished at higher rates.

Guilford County Schools statistics show that black males are being punished at higher rates. Some of the offenses for which they are being punished – fighting, attacks on teachers, possession of weapons, drug possession and the like – don't leave much room for the "implicit bias" theory on which the effort to reduce disproportionate punishment is based. If students commit those offenses, it doesn't matter what race or gender they are, and there's little room for the racism argument.

Green, as part of his strategic plan for the school system, has made reducing Rule 6 and Rule 8 punishments a goal. Those rules mostly require compliance with teachers, and leave some latitude for interpretation by teachers and principals.

Teachers, and even principals (although Guilford County school principals still say they are ordered not to talk to the media), have told The Rhino Times that, to be safe and protect their careers, they interpret that goal as prohibiting them from punishing black male students at all, except in the most obvious and egregious cases. According to teachers, that results in chaos in the classroom.

Guilford County Schools Chief Academic Officer Beth Folger kicked off the discussion by saying that less than half of black male students nationwide are reading at grade level.

She said, "I ask you, is there something wrong with the fish, or is it the lake?" In other words, is the problems with the black males students, or is it with the school systems.

Folger argued that the lake was "systemic racism" that extends beyond the school system – in which case Guilford County Schools has no hope of closing the achievement gap, as it has no control of the world outside the school system.

One thing the No Child Left Behind Act has accomplished is to force school systems to test the performance of all subgroups of students – each race, students whose native language is not English, poor students, students with disabilities and the like. The act forced school systems for acknowledge that it was sending some groups – primarily minority and poor students – out in the world unprepared for college, or even jobs that require fluent, critical reading and analysis, even if they don't require college degrees. That had been going on for decades, and school systems went to great lengths to hide the fact.

For Guilford County Schools to admit that the problem is the lake – the school system – is a surprising step, and despite Folger's aside, the school system seemed to be doing so.

Fixing the lake is another issue, and it will be interesting to watch the experiments in the two sets of schools. The school board has tried numerous reading programs with little success. But Green has had some success in turning around failing schools by giving them more resources and attention, and may be able to do improve reading at the six elementary schools using the same method.

Most of the fireworks at the school board meeting were set off by the disciplinary experiment, and not all the rhetoric surrounding in it is encouraging.

School board member Paul Daniels seized on the phrase, "culturally appropriate discipline," which seemed to imply that there would be different standards for different races.

Administrators responded that different cultures have different triggers – eye contact, how close people stand to each other, and that some incidents can be defused by understanding them before the incident escalates to something requiring punishment.

Guilford County Schools administrators are leaning heavily on a large-scale study of discipline in Texas schools, which they said showed that both white and black principals suspend black male students more often than other students for the same offenses.

School board member Amos Quick said he found the accusations of disparate punishment disturbing, and that it should be school board policy that any principal or teacher who punishes different races differently should be fired.

Considering that, despite years of assuming that there is disparate punishment in Guilford County, the school system hasn't been able to document it, much less identify who is doing it. And given the fact that such a policy would almost certainly guarantee that teachers or principals would stop punishing any students, that seems like a bad idea.

Quick jumping on the disparate-punishment bandwagon was unusual. He's usually an outspoken advocate of closing the achievement gap and getting the performance of schools with primarily black students equal to that of majority white schools.

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"It was the same when I was in high school, when my father was in high school and when my grandfather was in high school," he said. "Drive down South Elm-Eugene Street and you'll see what happens when we don't do what we should be doing."

Quick said he was talking about young men hanging out on street corners instead of moving ahead in life. "They've come right through our school systems," he said.

The test is Green's – and even he wouldn't predict the outcome.

"I actually don't now whether this is going to work," he said. "I'm going to put my cards on the table face up. I don't know."