Network targets achievement disparities

Thursday, August 21, 2008 -

 Art Rainwater and Gloria Ladson-Billings
 
 Madeline Hafner
 

How can school districts be considered so “good” when certain segments of their student population regularly and consistently perform poorly? And what can these districts do to alleviate such disparities in achievement?

Nearly a decade ago, 15 U.S. school districts confronted by the first question — among them, the Madison Metropolitan School District — began coming together to seek answers to the second.  Since then, the Minority Student Achievement Network (MSAN) has grown into a national coalition of two dozen multiracial districts.

These districts, in well-established first-ring suburbs and small to mid-sized cities, range in enrollment from 3,000 to 30,000 students.  All share histories of high academic achievement, connections to major research universities, and resources that generally exceed neighboring cities.

Yet, all of these districts are troubled by disturbing disparities on an array of achievement measures between students of color and their white peers.

“This is the hardest nut to crack in education today,” says Art Rainwater, who recently retired as superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District.

Rainwater, the current president of the network’s Governing Board, credits MSAN for bringing together a variety of education professionals — each with “a very small piece of the puzzle” — to exchange ideas and focus collectively on the challenge of providing a quality education for all children.

Connected to research

Educators in the coalition’s member districts have begun to identify practices and strategies that show promise, but these still need to be rigorously tested, according to Madeline Hafner, MSAN’s executive director.

In 2007, MSAN moved from Evanston Township High School near Chicago to the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER) at UW-Madison to increase its research capacity. Being at WCER strengthens MSAN’s connections to researchers here and elsewhere, says Hafner (M.S. ’96 in special education; Ph.D. ’00 in educational administration).

“Our relationship with MSAN is a collaborative one,” says Adam Gamoran, WCER director.  “UW-Madison researchers offer evidence-based information about effective education policies and practices, and school district leaders provide a grounding in real-world problems and a sense of priorities about which questions most urgently need to be answered.”

According to Gamoran, WCER plans to pursue grants to fund new research on innovative approaches in the MSAN districts.

Gloria Ladson-Billings, the Kellner Family Professor in Urban Education in UW-Madison’s Department of Curriculum and Instruction, is among the leading education scholars working with MSAN. Ladson-Billings, who serves on MSAN’s Research Advisory Board, is widely recognized for her work examining the practices of teachers who are successful with African American students and for articulating and advocating the concept of culturally relevant teaching.

“MSAN has worked hard to wed research and practice, and MSAN districts want to make school improvement based on the latest research,” she says. “And it’s one of the few entities that demands the active and regular participation of the district superintendent — not a surrogate — in order to be a member.”

Collectively, the superintendents of the member districts serve as MSAN’s Governing Board, which oversees the organization.  Also playing a significant role in carrying out the organization’s work is the Research Practitioners Council (RPC), consisting of the research and testing coordinator and the assistant superintendent or curriculum director from each district.

MSAN’s research and development efforts focus on four areas: mathematics, literacy (particularly adolescent literacy), teacher-student relationships, and conversations about race.

Serious about race

“MSAN has taken race seriously as a contributing factor to school achievement,” Ladson-Billings says.

“Race is on the table automatically, it is discussed up front, not banished to a side conversation someplace else,” Hafner says.

In the organization’s Statement of Purpose, MSAN members acknowledge that the “causes of achievement gaps are complex and include school, community, home and societal factors.” But they explicitly point out that disparities are not due to racial differences in innate ability and that “racism within schools continues to be a significant barrier to student achievement.”

MSAN’s core beliefs include:

• Eliminating the gap is not only the right thing to do, but it is essential to ensure the future of our democracy.
• Because achievement is not innately determined, children will achieve when they are effectively taught how to learn.
• All children come to school with a variety of individual strengths; our responsibility is to discover and build upon these strengths.
• Schools that concentrate on how their practices affect students will be more productive that those that blame students, families or poverty for underachievement.
• Schools should be considered excellent only when students of all racial and ethnic groups are achieving at high levels.

“No one in this room believes that the achievement gap is natural or unalterable,” said Hafner, at the opening of MSAN’s 2008 annual conference, held in June in Madison.

Like Rainwater, she emphasized the importance of networking: “The gift of this conference is the people next to you.”

In her keynote at the conference, Ladson-Billings took issue with the term “achievement gap,” which implies that the problem lies with the students themselves.  Instead, she characterized the issue as an “education debt” owed by society for centuries of educational neglect and denial.

What we call the “achievement gap” actually reflects significant disparities in resources for education, access to health care, and accumulated personal wealth among districts that serve mostly white students and those that serve more students of color, she says.

“To isolate the achievement gap in light of all these other gaps is wrong-headed and disingenuous,” she says.

Ladson-Billings challenged the embedded thinking about the “cultural deficits” of poor, minority children. She emphasized that poor families do value education and these parents care deeply about getting their children schooled. Effective educators might need to be more thoughtful and creative in facilitating the involvement of these parents.

She also criticized what she called the “you poor dear” syndrome of allowing sympathy — in essence, giving “permission to fail” — to substitute for the teaching that all children need.

Ladson-Billings, whose remarks drew a standing ovation, said that everyone shared a responsibility for “paying down this mountain of debt.”

Voice for students

In addition to holding annual meetings for educators, MSAN hosts an annual youth conference — with this year’s gathering set for September in Madison.

At the youth conference, teams of students from MSAN districts join in team-building and networking activities, discuss the barriers faced by students of color, and share ideas for ways to help improve their schools’ effectiveness in educating African American and Latino students.  The conference also includes a college/career fair, open mics and other social activities.

Offering opportunities for youth demonstrates MSAN’s “commitment that students need to be listened to, that they know better,” Hafner says.

The students show deep concern for addressing issues that affect them and their peers, she says. “It’s about the future, and they take it seriously.”

Youth teams often collect data regarding issues of inequity in their schools and develop action plans to remedy them. Some have made presentations to their school boards and organized regional events. For example, students in Green Bay — an MSAN district — put together the Northeast Wisconsin High School Diversity Leadership Conference, while others in four MSAN districts in New England developed a regional youth summit.

Bringing all these parties together to focus on the issues at hand represents a major accomplishment, Hafner says, but significant challenges remain.

“We have a lot of work to do,” she says.

-- by Kerry G. Hill

(This article is taken from the fall 2008 issue of Campus Connections.)

Comments or Problems: webmanager@education.wisc.edu.
Site designed/maintained by External Relations Office

© Copyright 2006 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System