Academic gap: Progress this time? Seattle educators differ on schools' new try for equity

Finally, after 16 years of false starts, the Seattle Public Schools are on track to narrow the academic gap separating minority and white students.

That's the view of Wes Harris, a veteran teachers union official who served on district task forces on the problem in 1986, 1996 and 2002.

But to Roscoe Bass, a retired educator who was on the 1986 and 2002 committees, Seattle schools may be further than ever from ending racially disproportionate achievement and discipline.

As the school district begins to implement recommendations of its third "disproportionality" task force since Ronald Reagan was president, questions abound over whether the latest effort will be more productive than its predecessors.

Outcomes for minority students have improved little, if at all, as a result of the earlier campaigns. African-American students still are suspended or expelled twice as often as whites in Seattle high schools and three times as often in middle schools.

Nearly half of Latino students drop out of high school. Forty-eight percent of black ninth-graders, compared to 9 percent of whites, scored below the 25th percentile in reading on the Iowa Tests of Educational Development in 2001.

Native American and Latino children lag behind their white counterparts by virtually every academic measure. Some Asian-American groups have done better than whites, others not as well.

The contrasting views of Harris and Bass demonstrate the range of feelings among the 39 members of a committee tackling a problem that has, so far, proved as intractable here as in almost every other school district in the United States.

Their perspectives also point to differences within the African-American community that have less to do with the language of the current committee's terse report than with perceptions about district leadership. For Bass and Harris, it is a test of Superintendent Joseph Olchefske's commitment to equity and his ability to get results.

The two men base their starkly opposing conclusions on a common premise: The school district's ability to address the problem requires a solid commitment by the district's leadership, from the superintendent down to principals.

Seattle and Federal Way have launched the most visible campaigns in the state to deal with disparate achievement and discipline.

Millions spent so far Although the Seattle School District's first two task-force reports on racially disproportionate discipline and achievement did not solve the problem, they resulted in some action: • In keeping with recommendations of the first panel in 1986, the district assigned an administrator to monitor efforts and make recommendations (but later abolished the position), began publishing detailed annual records on the achievement gap, offered various forms of staff training, ended corporal punishment and curtailed suspension of elementary students. • In 1990, the School Board funded a $7.9 million, 10-point program advocated by the Black Community Coalition and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The centerpiece of the plan was creation of the African American Academy. • The School Board put additional dollars into multicultural curriculum, staff training and the CAMPI preschool and DISTAR elementary programs (although funding was later discontinued for both). • More recently, the district has allocated more dollars to schools with larger numbers of poor children and has tried, with limited success, to hire more teachers of color. Teachers generally have responded enthusiastically to a $2-million-plus-per-year Literacy Initiative designed to help teachers increase the achievement of minority students.

Federal Way Superintendent Tom Murphy last year hired a director of equity and achievement, commissioned a task force that reported on the issue last fall, and this month released a blueprint for "closing the gap."

When Seattle's current disproportionality action committee made its recommendations to the School Board in June, the report sounded remarkably similar to those of six and 16 years earlier.

The report called for a district administrator to monitor results, recruitment of an ethnically diverse work force, elimination of racial disparities in assigning students to special education and gifted programs, and training teachers to work with children of differing backgrounds.

The administration released a one-year action plan that includes such specific steps as hiring a second full-time recruiter, creating Future Teachers of Color groups in schools, and making race a focus of teacher training.

Olchefske calls staff development the centerpiece of the action plan. Tomorrow, teachers will participate in a day of "courageous conversations" about racial issues in the classroom.

Although Olchefske acknowledges there is "no recipe" for improving minority performance throughout a 100-school, 47,000-student urban district, he has set a target date of 2005 for ending racially disproportionate discipline and achievement (a goal that echoes the 1986 target of ending disproportionality by 1990).

The superintendent knows it is a big undertaking: "I think we're all learning how difficult and huge is the task we're taking on in eliminating the achievement gap. I certainly am not one that believes that one report, as good as it could be, solves the achievement gap. What we have to do is sustained and systemic, over a long period of time."

Harris is not disheartened that the gap was not narrowed after two earlier reports and a $7.9 million, 10-point plan adopted by the School Board in 1990.

He believes things are different this time. While the previous efforts were "all show and no go," Harris says, Olchefske has assembled a team committed to success for minority students.

That's a remarkably strong endorsement from the Seattle Education Association's associate director, who used to look out his office window at school district headquarters across the street and fume about an "evil empire" of bureaucrats who cared more about their own power than about the children they were supposed to serve.

Harris, 65, will retire next month from the union local where he has worked since 1979. Over the years, he's never forgotten the hope he drew from his experience as an elementary-school teacher in the Watts area of Los Angeles following the 1965 riots.

The black children of 112th Street Elementary excelled, thanks to a principal who encouraged the faculty to be on the lookout for gifted students, and teachers who collaborated with each other.

Harris didn't see significant progress in Seattle after the first disproportionality task force report in 1986. Despite his misgivings, he signed up nine years later for a panel convened by then-Superintendent William Kendrick — but quickly dropped out of the effort when he concluded it was the same old material warmed over.

Now he sees signs of success, thanks to the late Superintendent John Stanford and his successor, Olchefske.

"There are a lot of pieces falling together at the same time," Harris said, "and they are not what we call drive-by facilitation, where you do a session and then you're gone."

He credits Olchefske with instituting sustained, high-quality staff training, sending extra dollars to schools in poorer neighborhoods, requiring schools to write plans and goals for higher achievement by minority students, attracting financial support from private donors, and agreeing to keep the disproportionality committee alive.

Harris is also heartened by the hiring of district officials like Chief Academic Officer June Collins Rimmer and High Schools Director Sharon Wilkins, who are holding administrators accountable for student progress.

Bass, a teacher, principal and central administrator in the Seattle schools for 34 years, sees no reason for optimism.

Bass, 76, was in the audience when several other members of the disproportionality committee discussed their report with the School Board in June.

Committee member Henderson Quinn, an educational consultant, asked each board member to imagine walking at night in a strange neighborhood, then wandering into a pitch-black alley. Now imagine a hand reaching in to lead you to safety and light. That hand, Quinn said, is the hand of Olchefske.

How did Bass react? "I got nauseated. ... I wasn't there for no damn cheerleading."

To Bass, Olchefske has carried on a district tradition of sabotaging minority students. When Bass was principal of Garfield High School in the 1970s, the district bowed to pressure from the federal government and ordered the transfer of most minority staff members from the predominantly nonwhite school in order to racially balance the faculty.

Bass later objected to locating the selective Accelerated Progress Program at Garfield. With white students taking college-prep classes on the school's upper floors and blacks taking lower-level classes on the lower floors, he says, "We've sent a message that they are inferior."

Bass calls the disproportionality report "a joke. ... This will be another futile attempt to educate kids in an urban environment with a paternalistic attitude that's just sickening to me."

He sees paternalism in Olchefske's unilateral appointment of a principal at Dunlap Elementary, in creation of the corporate-supported New School at South Shore, and the impending displacement of South Lake High School to make way for The New School.

"He's very paternalistic. He knows what's good for me," Bass says. Students of color will be hurt, he contends, because the K-8 New School will attract students from established schools and thus reduce their funding.

There is no more unanimity, though, among African Americans and other minorities than there is among whites.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, after threatening last year to sue the Seattle schools over racial disparities in scholarship and discipline, later opted to work with the district. But the chairwoman of the organization's education committee, Phyllis Beaumonte, remains skeptical about the administration's commitment to erasing the achievement gap.

Urban League President James Kelly has worked closely with the school district, even while urging it to help minority students by creating more magnet programs and improving the overall quality of South End schools.

It remains to be seen whether the latest effort to eliminate disparities will succeed.

But at least some black educators, including Harris and Quinn, believe the school district may have gotten it right this time and will, in the words of a district slogan, finally "deliver on the dream."

Keith Ervin: 206-464-2105 or kervin@seattletimes.com.