Viewpoint: Ability To Learn - Attitudes That Stigmatize Students Will Not Help Close Ann Arbor's Achievement Gap

VIEWPOINT

ABILITY TO LEARN

Attitudes that stigmatize students will not help close Ann Arbor's achievement gap

By REGINA HUNTER. SUSAN LEVER, PAT RYAN AND RUTH ZWEIFLER

STUDENT ADVOCACY CENTER

Attorney Gary Ratner in his forthcoming book, “The Legal Right to An Effective Education,” (Texas Law Review, June 1985) develops the argument that:

1. A significant number of schools that effectively educate all children - including poor and minority children, so long considered “unteachable,” - have now been identified.

2. There is general agreement in educational circles about the conditions that prevail in effective schools.

3. It is, therefore, now reasonable to expect that children from all backgrounds can be effectively educated within the context of the mainstream.

The key components of effective education are not dependent upon overcoming the effects of “economically poor homes” or counteracting the assumptions that “parents . . . cannot act as role models for their own children” as the “Students at Risk” report charges. Rather, successful schools avoid stigmatization and focus on strong instructional leadership and a teaching staff that believes a child’s ability to learn is independent of his or her background. Certainly, leaders of these schools do not equate “homes with cultural and ethnic values significantly different from the mainstream" with deficient homes, as the report implies.

The conventional temptation to “blame the victim” or the victim’s family for failure, long in general disrepute as an effective approach to dealing with complex human problems, is steadfastly resisted by these successful schools.

What about Ann Arbor? Unfortunately, despite the fact that our district’s poor and black children come from families whose aggregate stresses do not begin to compare in intensity to those of families in large urban centers where effective schools are succeeding, a significant gap in achievement between black and white students exists. Ann Arbor persists in delivering inadequate education to its poor and black children even with this community’s abundance of superior resources and the relatively small numbers and percent of total school population comprised of these children.

Our history is not impressive with respect to equity. But the present is even more disturbing.

As a part of the current effort to “improve” the high school program, the Graduation Requirements Implementation Committee, Sub-committee on Students at Risk (an all-white subcomittee) submitted its report to the Board of Education on May 22. The report identifies a list of 15 pejorative family and home attributes associated with students at risk. The list and its underlying assumptions can only be regarded as racist and elitist. Interestingly, it omits the single-parent family as an “at-risk” indicator. Negative connotations of that attribute have been vigorously challenged by middle-class, white feminists in recent years.

The report also uses descriptors of children couched in terms that assume pathology. The substance of the subcommittee list vividly recalls the attitudes expressed by the district about the plaintiff children during the King School suit and underscores the absolute consistency with which we in Ann Arbor continue to take the “blaming approach” in equity matters.

In its “Response to Request for Information,” submitted to Judge Charles Joiner, February 1978, the district placed the blame for the Green Road children’s failure to progress squarely on the children and their families. Nothing has changed. Ann Arbor’s black children continue to be educationally endangered.

Perhaps this board and administration can claim innocence of the events and attitudes which surfaced so regularly in the past. But you must accept responsibility for recognizing that the same things are happening today. Specifically, you must not allow planning for implementation of the proposed revisions in high school graduation requirements to proceed one step further until a thorough review of our present program is undertaken. That review needs to be comprehensive and include, not only content of the current instructional program and levels of participation in it by all of our students, but also, the attitudes and associated strategies for delivering that program. Without this kind of review and the restructuring resulting from it, disproportionate outcomes for students from a new high school or K-12 plan will be guaranteed.

Because the district’s assumptions and attitudes, as reflected in the subcommittee report, are so harmful for poor and minority students we recommend that the district:

1. Arrange for long-term, intensive help to implement programs that will assure equal opportunities for success for all children (e.g., Dr. Charles Moody, Program for Educational Opportunity-integration; Dr. Larry Lezotte, Michigan State University-Effective Schools: Dr. Vito Perrone, North Dakota Study Group-Assessment and Evaluation).

2. Monitor daily classes with significant percentages of poor and black students, for respectful engagement of all students in meaningful learning tasks until long-term corrective measures are in place. The Student Advocacy Center recommends the National Coalition of Advocates for Students Expectations Survey as a possible guide.

Failure to initiate such an intensive system-wide evaluation and restructuring program, the need for which is so clearly demonstrated by the Implementation Committee’s report, will make a sham of the reach for excellence. Current directions will not only perpetuate, but will actually increase, the damage we do to the students we place at risk.

The authors are participants of the non-profit Student Advocacy Center, Ruth Zweifler is director. This position paper was presented to the Ann Arbor Board of Education.