A Good-School, Bad-Grade Mystery Educators Striving to Close Racial Gap in Affluent Ohio Suburb \doc\web\98\08\racegap.txt From: "Albert Himoe" To: Subject: RE: Bad Grade Mystery Date: Fri, 23 Oct 1998 22:19:28 -0700 > Mystery? Mystery? What Mystery? > > A Good-School, Bad-Grade Mystery > Educators Striving to Close Racial Gap in Affluent Ohio Suburb It is really incredible that a racial gap is still treated as a "mystery". Very similar findings were recently reported for our town, where an "equity audit" of the school district was released on Oct. 6, 1998. There was approximately a 1 SD black-white gap in reading, math scores and in GPA. Surprise, surprise! The report claims: "School districts like Urbana have succeeded very well with the top 30% of their students, but have not fared well with the middle and lower achieving students." As far as I can tell, there is absolutely no evidence to support this statement in the body of the report. [I have the 69 page Executive Summary, I am attempting to get the 200+ page full report.] The following paragraph from the SUMMARY STATEMENT tells you all you need to know concerning the mindset [and level of sophistication] of the report's authors: "For the purpose of this audit we have set as a reasonable level of acceptability a range of +/-15% of the relevant 'pool' of students. This range was applied to the to the 1997-98 district ethnic/racial breakdown: White 62.3%, Black 27.6%, Asian 7.9%, Hispanic 1.9%, and Native American 0.2%. When this range is exceeded either by under representation or over representation we will find that situation in most cases as significant. For example, the range of acceptability for Blacks would be from 12.1% to 43.1%. Ideally, representation should approximate each group's distribution." Numbers outside this range are considered to be "inequities". The SUMMARY STATEMENT concludes: "The district must correct and eradicate iniquities because it is the right thing to do. When that vision becomes reality, then the tale of two schools will conclude in triumph." The concept of a "tale of two schools" in introduced on page 1, but vanishes entirely after page 2 of the report. I am preparing a commentary on this report to distribute to the Superintendent, School Board and the media. Albert Himoe Urbana, IL --- This is a message from the Upstream mailing list. Visit the Upstream Website at http://cycad.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/ Visit the Upstream Mailing List archives at http://cycad.com/upstream-list-archive