Sunday, February 23, 2020


Mass.: Cambridge high school struggles with equal access to AP classes

They have tried all sorts of things to get black academic achievement up to white levels but nothing works.  When will they face the obvious fact that blacks on average just have lesser academic ability?  The decades of failure to close the gap is testimony to that

They also mistake cause and effect below.  They think that because blacks feel unequally treated, it must be the fault of racism.  In fact it is their lesser ability that causes blacks  to feel unequally treated.  When teachers assume that blacks will not do well they do so because that is generally true.



CAMBRIDGE - For decades, the high school in this famously diverse and progressive city has waged war on its achievement gap. Twenty years ago, officials at Cambridge Rindge and Latin tried eliminating the school’s "house” system that divided students into schools-within-schools, saying it segregated them by race; soon after, the school created heterogeneous classrooms that mixed together students with differing academic abilities. Three years ago, the school made another landmark change to stamp out racial segregation, mandating honors English and history courses for all freshmen.

But according to one key measure, none of the efforts have worked.

A Boston Globe analysis of state data found that when it comes to Advanced Placement test taking, Black students are more underrepresented in Cambridge than in any of the 13 other towns and cities bordering Boston. Last year, just 9 percent of the 433 students who took AP exams in Cambridge were Black — although Black students made up nearly 30 percent of the enrollment at the high school.

The stubborn persistence of the gap, in the face of repeated attempts to wipe it out, has contributed to recent racial tensions at the high school, where some Black students say they still feel like outsiders. And it sharply underscores the difficulty of this widespread problem: even a place as seemingly progressive and well-intentioned as Cambridge struggles mightily.

Naia Aubourg, a 2018 graduate of Rindge and Latin, said she and many of her Black classmates were funneled into lower-level courses beginning in middle school, and teachers and counselors at Rindge and Latin never explained AP to her. Now a sophomore in college, Aubourg said she had to take extra preparatory courses to catch up when she arrived on campus as a freshman. "The opportunities in high school were only there for people who knew how to access them,” she said.

It is a vexing, deeply painful problem for Cambridge, one that has long been detailed in reports and lamented at public meetings. School officials said a series of major changes in recent years should make AP classes more diverse in time. But they acknowledged that the problem has deep and complicated roots, and that there is no easy fix.

"We recognize that it’s not going to happen overnight, that it’s probably going to be a number of years . . . and there is frustration that the pace of change isn’t faster,” Superintendent Kenneth Salim said.

First created in the 1950s, Advanced Placement courses boomed in popularity in recent decades. Considered one of the most rigorous curricula in high schools, they are widely seen as critical college preparation. But Black and Latino participation has lagged, and the College Board — the New York nonprofit that oversees the program — has in recent years urged high schools to remove obstacles to enrollment and strive for AP classes that more closely resemble their student populations.

That effort remains a work in progress. Nationally, Black students are 15 percent of all public school students, but only 9 percent of AP exam takers, according to the College Board. In Massachusetts, 9 percent of students are Black, as are 6 percent of AP test takers. Latino students face a wider divide: 21 percent of all Massachusetts students, they represent only 10 percent of AP exam takers.

Even more troubling, perhaps, is the disparity in AP exam scores, state data show. In Cambridge, white students took 411 AP tests last year and 89 percent received scores of 3 or higher out of a top score of 5, which could qualify them for college credit. By contrast, of the 50 exams taken by Black students, only 48 percent received scores in the same range.

Educators, community members and students in Cambridge said several specific policies and practices have contributed to the AP gap. Those have included a lack of basic education about AP and cumbersome entrance requirements to some AP classes, such as prerequisite courses and teacher recommendations.

And then there’s the way students have been labeled and separated by their perceived abilities, a practice known as "tracking,” which, despite high-profile counter-initiatives, has flourished periodically at both the middle and high school levels in Cambridge.

Aubourg, 19, said her course was set in middle school, when many Black students were "tracked” into a path of lower expectations. Aubourg’s mother worked long, demanding hours when her daughter was in high school, and was unfamiliar with Advanced Placement. Aubourg was an upperclassman by the time she learned — via "word of mouth” — how to access the school’s menu of advanced offerings.

Elaina Wolfson, another 19-year-old graduate of Rindge, said early tracking permanently consigned too many Black and Latino students to a path that did not prepare them. "It’s so hard to push past that barrier,” she said.

Determined to improve the experience of Black students, Cambridge school officials have attacked their achievement gap anew in recent years. As part of a multiyear initiative known as "Leveling Up,” the district did away with tracking for English and social studies classes in the first two years of high school. Heterogeneous "honors for all” classes were phased in for freshmen in English two years ago, and then in social studies last year. Physics is taught in mixed-ability classrooms to all freshmen.

Next, the district tackled tracking in middle school math classes, ending its achievement-based grouping system for seventh graders last year and for eighth graders this year.

The approach also intensifies support for students: A summer "preview” class boosts confidence for nervous AP students; two new freshman guidance counselors help explain course options; and teachers use results from the PSAT - taken by sophomores and juniors - to help identify those with AP potential.

Leaders said they have tried to learn from past mistakes. Twenty years ago, when the Cambridge school district made a controversial switch to "achievement-blind” high school classes, teachers received little preparation, and struggled to teach to the wider range of skills in their classrooms. This time, Salim, the superintendent, said the school system spent a year preparing educators, re-working curriculum, and consulting outside experts before making changes. They also sent two deans to Evanston, Ill., to study the successful measures used at Evanston Township High School to bolster Black and Latino enrollment in AP.

"Historically, individual principals or administrators have had bold ideas, but they lacked the collective support of the district as a whole,” Salim wrote in an e-mail.

Yet Salim and Damon Smith, the high school’s principal, acknowledged that vestiges of the past remain, including some teachers who may still selectively steer students away from AP.

The overall percentage of AP students who are Black and Latino has not budged, three years into the school’s "leveling up” initiative. Yet there are signs that change is taking root. Two current sections of AP US history mirror the overall diversity at the high school, which is 43 percent Black and Hispanic and 38 percent white.

One afternoon last month, those AP classes were filled with attentive sophomores — the majority of them, students of color — who listened intently to a lesson spanning the Red Scare, the Ku Klux Klan, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and the Harlem Renaissance.

Nearly all the students in both AP classes said they had been encouraged by a teacher to enroll. Most said that in the beginning, they felt nervous and intimidated. But all are planning on taking more AP classes.

One student, Herani Hiruy, 15, said some of her other honors classes are mostly white. Often, she said, she stays silent in those classrooms, reluctant to join in discussions because she is Black.

"You can tell that other people notice you’re the only person of color,” she said, "and you feel like you’re representing a whole group.”

Some students, teachers, and community residents said programmatic changes alone will never erase the divide. Real transformation, they said, will require a hard, unflinching look at the racism that persists at Rindge and Latin.

Two years ago, members of the high school’s Black Student Union drew public attention to the everyday presence of racism at their school, detailing their experiences in a series of gut-wrenching videos. Members of the group described slights, insults, and microaggressions from teachers who stereotyped them or doubted their potential.

In one video, a student recounted the teacher who, assuming she might be on "welfare,” told her she could get a fee waiver to take an AP exam.

The videos sparked outrage, including on the part of some teachers who felt they had no way to respond or offer context. More upheaval followed, after a white Cambridge School Committee member uttered the n-word during a 2018 visit to a high school class to discuss why the school’s computers block some racial slurs but not others.

Tensions flared again in December, when a long-awaited report on the n-word incident cast blame for it on a Black teacher — the adviser to the Black Student Union — who had invited the committee member to the class. In response, the student union demanded policy changes to address racism and inequities at the school.

Current Black Student Union members did not respond to interview requests. But Aubourg, who helped reinvigorate the dormant organization when she was a student at Rindge, said it was painful and eye-opening to see how some people reacted to Black students’ stories of mistreatment.

"Cambridge is famous for panels, meetings, conversations, and they’ve been having them for 30 years,” she said. "But it’s a sugar-coated conversation. No one wants to go [into] the nitty-gritty of what’s going on.”

Aubourg believed she and her classmates of color were seen as less capable by some educators. And some students internalized that bias.

Rachel Williams-Giordano, an AP US history teacher at the high school, said she has encountered some Black students who fear ridicule for seeking more challenging coursework.

"It’s not that the classes are too hard,’’ said Williams-Giordano, who is Black. "It’s that it’s not socially accepted among some of the students of color . . . It’s like, 'You’re trying to be white’ or 'You’re nerdy.’ ‘’

Caroline Hunter, a former teacher and administrator who worked at Rindge and Latin for 34 years, was a member of the "Concerned Black Staff” who produced a 1980s report exposing a racial divide in student achievement. She is stunned that the same problems persist today.

"The question,” she said, "is why is Cambridge still dealing with this tale of two cities?’’

SOURCE 






Parents Ask Court to Stop Schools From Helping Children Make Gender Transitions

A group of Wisconsin parents is asking a state court to halt a public school district’s policy that they say instructs teachers to assist and encourage children in adopting transgender identities without notifying—and possibly while deceiving—parents.

The lawsuit is being brought by 14 parents, representing eight families, who allege the Madison Metropolitan School District’s policy violates constitutionally protected parental rights.

The lawsuit, filed in Dane County Circuit Court, includes an affidavit from Dr. Stephen B. Levine, a distinguished life fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, in which he asserts that gender transitions for minors expose vulnerable children to dangerous, lifelong physical, social, and mental health risks.

“For a child to live radically different identities at home and at school, and to conceal what he or she perceives to be his or her true identity from parents, is psychologically unhealthy in itself, and could readily lead to additional psychological problems,” Levine writes in the affidavit. “Extended secrecy and a ‘double life’ concealed from the parents is rarely the path to psychological health. For this reason at least, schools should not support deceit of parents.”

Levine’s affidavit continues:

 Most children are both legally and developmentally incapable of giving informed consent to such a life-altering intervention. And parents, of course, cannot give informed consent if the fact of their child’s wish to assume a transgender identity is concealed from them.

The 14 parents are represented by lawyers with Alliance Defending Freedom and the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, both nonprofit, public interest legal organizations.

“This is a life-altering decision that educators have no business making,” Roger Brooks, ADF senior counsel, said. “As Dr. Levine explains based on decades of experience and extensive scientific literature, putting children on a pathway to puberty-blockers and cross-sex hormones can have devastating effects across a lifetime. That should serve as a wake-up call to parents and all Americans: When schools cast aside biological reality in favor of gender-identity ideology, it’s children who are hurt the most.”

The legal motion formally requests the court to impose a temporary injunction against the school district’s policy.

The school district hadn’t been served with the lawsuit as of late Wednesday, said Tim LeMonds, public information officer for Madison Metropolitan School District. LeMonds said the district wouldn’t comment without reviewing the claims.

The school district “prioritizes working in collaboration with families to support our students and it is always our preferred method of support,” LeMonds said in a formal statement, adding:

MMSD must also prioritize the safety and well-being of every individual student who walks through its doors each day. It is with this focus [that] the district stands by its guidance document on transgender and non-binary students, and recognizes its tremendous responsibility to uphold the right of every child to be educated in a safe, all-inclusive, and nondiscriminatory learning environment.

The lawsuit calls for school officials to be transparent and honest when dealing with parents, and to meet standards of informed consent.

The 50-page affidavit from Levine says that multiple studies show that among children who experience gender dysphoria or transgender identification but do not socially transition, 80% to 98% “desisted,” or became comfortable with their biological sex, by young adulthood, according to Alliance Defending Freedom.

The affidavit also says that among boys “who engaged in a partial or complete social transition before puberty,” according to other data, fewer than 20% had desisted when surveyed at age 15 or older.

“It is profoundly unethical to reinforce a male child in his belief that he is not a boy (or a female child in her belief that she is not a girl), and it is particularly unethical to intervene in the normal physical development of a child to ‘affirm’ a ‘gender identity’ that is at odds with bodily sex,” Ryan T. Anderson, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in an email, adding:

To do any of this without parental involvement not only harms children but violates parental authority. Childhood and adolescence are difficult enough as it is. Adults should not corrupt the social ecology in which children develop a mature understanding of themselves as boys or girls on the pathway to becoming men or women.

SOURCE 






Campus Food Insecurity Matters

Food insecurity among American college students is a significant problem. While outdated stereotypes of higher education presume that undergraduates live on campus, receive stipends from their parents, and gorge themselves in campus dining halls, the facts suggest the opposite.

Only 15.6 percent of today’s students reside on a college campus, at least half receive little or no financial support from their parents when it comes to paying for college, many work several jobs (in addition to studying full time), and few can afford to purchase meal plans that cover the standard 21 meals a week. Instead, most of today’s students face sizable unmet financial need that dwarfs their available resources and contributes to a shortage of funds for basic necessities, including food and even housing.

The new economics of college are well-documented, if not yet fully understood. Rising tuition and a failing financial aid system, a labor market characterized by high employment rates but low wages, and a volatile economy that stresses the shrinking middle-class—these are but some of the major problems. As colleges and universities face growing financial pressures from state budget cuts and fierce competition, they turn to food service to make a profit, raising prices on already-strapped students.

Food insecurity among college students is a problem that Americans have overlooked and ignored for a long time. This fact, plus a culturally held belief and norm that ramen is a college rite of passage, make it difficult for some to understand college food insecurity. But the data are clear. When the questions are asked of today’s students, the results strongly indicate that they have difficulty purchasing adequate food for balanced meals—the definition of food insecurity according to the United States Department of Agriculture.

Research teams from multiple fields (including but not limited to sociology, economics, public health, nutrition, and social work) have assessed campus food insecurity at more than 500 colleges and universities around the country, including the University of California, California State University, City University of New York, the community colleges of California, Maricopa (AZ), Dallas, Chicago, Oregon, New Jersey, and Washington, and many more.   Taken as a whole, the research strongly suggests that food insecurity impacts at least one in three undergraduate college students. Moreover, this research has been published in both peer-reviewed journal articles, including two systematic reviews, and publicly vetted and widely distributed online reports, including a recent one covering more than 330,000 students at more than 400 colleges.

Evidence also shows that when college students experience food insecurity their health also takes a toll. Food insecurity among college students is related to higher weight status/BMI despite the notion that skipping meals results in weight loss. This is because when students skip meals to cope with not having the money to afford food, they compensate by choosing inexpensive calorie-dense foods, which contributes to weight gain. Other factors that take a toll are overall health, mental health and stress, and academic performance.

Students who are food insecure are overwhelmingly working, and working extensively, but are far less able to concentrate on their education and perform well in school. We know this both from quantitative studies and from interviews, across all levels of schooling.

Importantly, rates of food insecurity appear to be much higher among college students compared to the general population—and this makes sense because the new economics of college put students in double jeopardy. They have less time to work, and less access to work, compared to other low-income people. They face more expenses, often having to put their limited resources toward housing instead of food. And while college students are eligible for financial aid, they are far less eligible for other supports including SNAP and subsidized housing.

It is efficient and effective to take campus food insecurity seriously.
Some people assume that financial aid makes up for all of that. But the purchasing power of financial aid has declined precipitously; it hardly offsets the consequences of the systemic exclusion of students for other income supports. Students who cannot complete the financial aid application do not get that support. This includes students who are part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program or who are DREAMers, those who are unable to obtain the required information from their parents, and those who have fled domestic violence situations without all of their paperwork.

The financial aid formula also makes mistakes or treats students differently based on their parents’ age and time to retirement. Students who are considered dependent on their parents are assumed to benefit from financial support that they may not actually receive—leaving them without financial aid or other help. For example, many LGBTQ+ students become food insecure because it is wrongly assumed that they are supported by parents from whom they are estranged.

There are many academic, financial, and health reasons to address campus food insecurity. There is nothing to gain on both ends when a student sleeps through class due to insufficient nutrition. Grades suffer when a student thinks more about how they will get their next meal rather than focusing on academics, and when this happens, no one profits. A small investment in a campus-based meal program could boost grades and allow students to maintain their financial support. It is efficient and effective to take campus food insecurity seriously.

We recommend beginning by expanding students’ utilization of the SNAP program. The GAO’s recent report confirmed that college student eligibility for SNAP far outstrips take-up at this point, and that is money left on the table that could be used to boost college attainment. Colleges should revisit their business models for campus dining services and ensure they do not put profit over retention. If government subsidies prove an efficient way to lower campus meal prices, then an expansion of the National School Lunch Program to higher education may make economic sense. The recent passage of hunger-free campus legislation by several states, along with several pending bills in Congress, allows for evaluation of that possibility.

Addressing campus food insecurity does not turn colleges into social services agencies; rather, it makes them more effective at their job—education. Addressing food insecurity does not make students dependent on the government; rather, it increases the odds that they will achieve financial independence.  That should be a goal we can all agree on.

SOURCE 

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