Wednesday, September 19, 2007

DC Area Schools' Success Obscures Lingering Racial SAT Gap

And linger it will

SAT scores at the Washington region's top high schools show an achievement gap between blacks and the rest of the student population -- a gap that is often masked by the overall performance of the schools. White students in the spring graduating class of Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda -- the top performer in Montgomery County -- averaged 1893 out of a possible 2400 points on the SAT. The 13 black students tested averaged 1578, more than 300 points lower.

At Yorktown, Arlington County's leader, white students averaged 1804 on the SAT; black students averaged 1470. Black students at Severna Park High, the top performer in Anne Arundel County, averaged 1336, while white students' average was 1646. Despite the gap, black students in the Class of 2007 scored well at some of the region's most prestigious high schools; at a few, black students topped the overall national average, 1511, on the best-known college entrance test. Solid scores on the SAT or the rival ACT are all but essential to students aspiring to competitive universities.

But none of the 47 regular high schools in Montgomery and Fairfax counties, the largest school systems in Maryland and Virginia, yielded a black student SAT average this year that met or beat the average for all students in those counties. The racial achievement gap at affluent schools goes mostly unnoticed by parents, who seldom look beyond the high overall SAT averages. But it vexes black parents, who make the same sacrifices as their neighbors to buy homes in high-performing school districts and have the same aspirations for their children.

"I wanted my children to be in the school where the most people were focused toward higher education," said Pam Spearman, whose son is a junior at Severna Park High. But Spearman said she and other black parents in the Annapolis area suburb have come to recognize "that our kids have issues at school because achievement is not necessarily expected of them by fellow students -- black and white."

Nationwide, white students averaged 1579 on the SAT in 2007; blacks averaged 1287. The gap, 292 points, has scarcely changed in the past 10 years: It has increased by two points each on the reading and math sections, which were joined last year by a new writing assessment. The disparity has endured for decades and is perhaps the classic example of the racial achievement gap in public education. Critics have cited it as evidence of subtle racial bias in standardized testing.

Across the country, black parents have formed groups and set up Web sites to tackle the achievement gap. There are blogs offering advice on how to navigate school systems. Parents hold group study sessions to help prepare their children for the rigor of college-prep classes. Last year, parents of black Severna Park students, who number about 80, formed a group called Falcon Flight. Through meetings with administrators, culturally motivated field trips and career-minded events, Spearman said, the parents hope to "help kids see the connection between their lives, their futures and their education." It's a connection most parents in affluent bedroom communities take for granted.

Teachers, parents and scholars cite several factors in the persistent gap separating blacks' and, to a lesser extent, Hispanics' scores from whites' and Asians' scores on the SAT. [But the elephant in the bedroom -- IQ -- must not be mentioned, of course] Black students tend to arrive at elite high schools inadequately prepared for the SAT, according to directors of the College Board, which administers the test. And even in affluent communities, they don't take as rigorous courses as their white and Asian classmates; the wealthiest black students are no more likely to take calculus in high school, for example, than the poorest whites and Asians, a deficiency that points to a historic lack of access to the classes.

"There are differences in preparation that will take years to erase," said Wayne Camara, the College Board's vice president for research. In Montgomery, for instance, 65 percent of all white 2006 graduates took at least one Advanced Placement exam. The corresponding figure for blacks: 27 percent.....

The disparity between blacks' and whites' SAT scores is larger now than it was 10 years ago [proving that the politically correct theories about what causes it and how to cope with it are WRONG] in Montgomery and Fairfax, although it has shrunk recently in Fairfax. The gap approaches 400 points in Montgomery and 300 points in Fairfax. Test participation, an equally prized goal, has risen in both counties over that time. In both counties, students of all races have scored above state and national averages for their racial categories.....

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There are some good reasons to skip university study

Study hard so that you can get into university: this is the message continually fed to students in years 11 and 12 at school. So let's see what people entering university have to look forward to. For starters, today's uni students must put up with higher fees. Those whose mum and dad can't foot the bill will most likely remain in the red for years to come. And don't forget the costs of commuting, textbooks and ever-increasing living expenses.

In a society obsessed with making money, this so-called "invaluable education" doesn't exactly put you ahead in the race. It's going to be three or four years, in some cases longer, before you finish your degree. With so many options available to young people today this can feel like a lifetime. Don't forget this is the MTV generation - brought up in a fast-paced world of convenience - with supposedly shorter attention spans and lower boredom thresholds.

It's no wonder students feel they're not getting places fast enough. Universities are going to insist this length of time is necessary in order to gather adequate levels of knowledge - it has nothing to do with profiting from annual fees.

The material being taught in these institutions shouldn't escape mention either. Students might pay more attention if they could see how the information they're being given is relevant to the direction they want to take. I know I had a ball meticulously studying the ins and outs of micro-economics for an exam, which was clearly necessary for a sport studies degree. That's not what I signed up for. I really should have read the fine print first. Perhaps some questioning directed at the body in charge of writing university curriculums is needed.

The good news is, if you can stick to your course long enough you'll make friends who can collect your lecture notes while you hang out at the nearest uni bar. When it comes down to it, the degree is the main incentive for those at uni. To receive that piece of paper which will get you a terse "very good" during your job interview with a company that was most likely established by someone who had no tertiary education. The bad news is, if it's a worthwhile job, your shiny new resume will get thrown into the pile with those of 15 university graduates who are all in the same position as you.

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Australia: Teacher failures spell student trouble

Who will teach the teachers?

Young teenagers could be forgiven for misspelling words such as subterranean and miscellaneous, but what about the nation's primary school teachers? A spelling test of about 40 Victorian teachers, conducted in April this year, provides no grounds for confidence. Not one of the teachers could correctly spell all 11 words, ranging in difficulty from substitute to adolescence. The test was set at the level expected of 14-year-olds but the average score among the 39 teachers was just seven correctly spelled words.

Five teachers correctly spelled 10 words, putting their level at 13 years and nine months. One teacher was unable to spell any of the words while two teachers got only two of the words correct. Overall, 22 teachers misspelled subterranean, 17 couldn't manage embarrassing or miscellaneous and 16 had trouble with adolescence.

The test was held during a two-day course conducted by teacher Denyse Ritchie, who has run programs for the past 11 years giving primary school teachers the basic literacy skills to teach reading. Ms Ritchie, executive director and co-author of THRASS (Teaching Handwriting Reading And Spelling Skills), used by thousands of schools around the nation, said the spelling results were typical of the standard she saw.

She said teachers trained over the past few decades had been influenced by the "whole language" method of teaching reading, in which the letter-sound relationship underpinning written language is only one strategy used to teach reading, and not necessarily the first. "Rather than teaching children the 26 sounds of the alphabet, they need to learn the 44 letter-sound combinations that comprise the English language." Ms Ritchie said teaching children the letter 'c' only as the sound in cat made it impossible for them to work out how to read words like chair, chef and face. With the sound 'f', students are taught that the letter f makes the sound but not that the letters 'ph' make the same sound.

Ms Ritchie said the biggest problem was that teachers were not taught how to break words into their composite sounds and so could not explain it to children. "Teachers are ignorant of the 44 sounds in English and all the spelling choices that make up those sounds; they have a very limited understanding of it. "You can learn to read without knowing phenomics (the sounds that make up words), but when you spell, you have to have a good phenomic understanding to help spell words like said. "Unless you're taught that 'ai' as well as 'e' can make an 'eh' sound in words like said and again, you will spell said as 'sed'. "But many teachers don't have that inherent knowledge,"

The teachers' phenomic knowledge was also tested. When asked to break words into the constituent sounds or phenomes - such as how many sounds in 'cat' (c-a-t) - the average score was 4.1 out of a possible 10 correct answers. When asked to identify the third sound in a word like scrunch (r), the average score was 4.5 out of 10 and the average mark for breaking words into syllables was also 4.5 out of 10.

Ms Ritchie said teachers commonly answered that the word scrunch comprised two sounds (scr-unch) when it actually has six sounds (s-cr-u-n-ch). "Teachers and students need to know that letters don't have a sound," she said. "They need to know that letters are only symbols that are used continually in different combinations to represent sounds."

In Britain, the Government has stipulated that from the beginning of this school year, reading will be taught using "first and fast" synthetic phonics, which teaches students the letter-sounds and how they are blended to form words. But the British teachers association persists in arguing that teaching reading using an intensive phonics approach is inferior to an "inclusive reading program" that has children predict words based on the context of the sentence or the type of word it is.

In a position paper on reading and phonics released by the English Teachers Association of NSW in July, it suggests a child reading the sentence "The car drove along the s..... at high speed" could guess it says street because the word starts with s. If the child said road, the paper says, the teacher will "have to weigh up whether to take the student back to the word" to read it correctly. "They may NOT because they recognise that meaning is most important, that we ALL make such mistakes EVERY time we read, and that this mistake shows that the child understands what they are reading," the paper says.

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