(Name-mce) ListServ Opinion: Bush has double standard on race in schools

[Anselmo Villanueva]

Opinion: Bush has double standard on race in schools

Two educators argue that the Bush administration's policy on using
racial groups to track school accountability under NCLB is
inconsistent with other policies the administration has pursued
regarding race.

The Christian Science Monitor  February 05, 2007

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0205/p09s01-coop.html

Bush's double standard on race in schools

The White House opposes considering race in school admissions, but
supports it for evaluating schools' performance.

By Alec Ian Gershberg and Darrick Hamilton

BROOKLYN, N.Y.

The Supreme Court is considering two school desegregation cases that
will probably result in limits on the use of race as a criterion for
admission to public elementary and high schools.

Not surprisingly, the Bush administration is supporting the
plaintiffs' arguments that the use of such racial criteria is
unconstitutional. It was no doubt delighted to hear Justice Anthony
Kennedy say during oral arguments that "characterizing each student by
reason of the color of his or her skin should only be, if ever
allowed, allowed as a last resort."

But Bush officials are being inconsistent. They don't apply that
standard to their own public education policies. It's time they
embraced the premise of their own student testing rules – race matters
– and support efforts to promote access and diversity in schools.

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, is remarkable because it deals
with racial issues in a manner at odds with nearly every other policy
advocated by the Bush administration – including its current argument
to the Supreme Court that school desegregation plans must be "race
neutral." NCLB requires that schools show adequate progress in each of
10 "subgroups" of students. These subgroups include nonracial
categories such as disabled, poor, and limited English proficient
students, as well as racial and ethnic categories such as blacks,
Hispanics, Asians, native Americans, and whites.

We applaud the intent behind such policies to support students who, as
a group, tend to have subpar academic performance. But the policy
rests on flawed assumptions about the use of such tests to determine
which students are being taught well. It also creates perverse
incentives potentially harmful to the groups the policy intends to
help and raises thorny philosophical issues about race.

Given the diversity of the way schools are organized, current research
casts strong doubts on the ability of such tests to consistently
evaluate a school's progress. Worse, testing tools get less reliable
when disaggregated by the subgroups of concern in NCLB. In particular,
small schools and schools with relatively small groups of different
kinds of students pose nearly intractable statistical problems.

For instance, Midwood High School in Brooklyn, N.Y., got flagged
because the scores of 33 disabled students (out of more than 3,700
total) did not improve. But statistically it is almost impossible to
determine that the school is not teaching these students well. Another
flaw in NCLB, pointed out by President Bush's brother, former Florida
Gov. Jeb Bush, is that it does not track individual students over
time. The difference in how schools are evaluated, using exactly the
same tests, can be quite dramatic. For example,  R.J. Longstreet
Elementary School in Daytona Beach, Fla., failed under NCLB for four
years, but got A's for five years in a row in Jeb Bush's program,
which does track individual students over time. So to a school that
George W. Bush gives an "F," Jeb Bush gives an "A"!

While we support policies aimed at addressing educational inequities,
we are concerned by the perverse incentives that stem from NCLB's
racialization of academic standards. At best, school staff must now
view all their students through an explicitly racial lens. At worst,
shrewd principals, understanding that their organizations' survival is
so dependent on the average test scores of certain students, have an
incentive to exclude these underperforming subgroups. Moreover, a
Supreme Court decision to end the use of race in admissions can aid in
this exclusion. Bush administration officials assert that NCLB does
not allow schools to "hide behind averages," meaning that overall
school improvement cannot come at the expense of smaller subgroups of
concern.

But how does that stance jibe with the other prominent policies the
Bush administration has pursued regarding race? In 2003, the
administration sided with the plaintiffs against the University of
Michigan in the Supreme Court precisely because their admissions
system paid particular attention to race. And the administration
recently used an obscure statement on energy policy to make clear that
race should not be a factor in government programs.

Yet NCLB is a tacit admission that race matters. How can the Bush
administration force primary and secondary schools to pay specific
attention to test scores of students of particular racial groups while
arguing that similar racial attention should be illegal for admission
to the same public schools being tested? Even conservative opponents
of affirmative action have called this approach "schizophrenic" and
unprincipled.

To make it principled, the administration must reconsider its
positions on affirmative action and school integration. And it must
stop urging the Supreme Court to ban a tool some local school
districts deem effective and desirable for providing access and
expanding student diversity.

Through NCLB, the Bush administration has promoted "characterizing
each student by reason of the color of his or her skin" for the
purposes of assessing school performance. This is an admission that
race matters in the public school arena. We agree. And race matters
not only when it's convenient for political aims.

• Alec Ian Gershberg teaches education policy and Darrick Hamilton
teaches economics, statistics, and race and public policy at The New
School's Milano Graduate School for Management and Urban Policy in New
York.

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