Two articles in the Metro section of today’s Washington Post about racial disparities in the schools of suburban Montgomery County, Maryland, nicely (if sadly) reveal problems in how certain racial issues are understood — both by parents, citizens, and educators and also by the journalists covering them.
“Parents Protest Magnet Makeup,” by WaPo reporter Nancy Trejos, concerns the complaint of a group of 70 black parents that
has asked the Montgomery County school board to suspend the middle school magnet application process on the grounds that too few black students are accepted into some of the specialized programs.
It is not clear from the article whether the parents believe that the qualifying test is unfair or that there is overt discrimination in the selection procedures. Nor is it clear if they are demanding proportional representation or simply more black students being admitted, and in fact the numbers presented in the article confuse rather than clarify the issue. In one school, for example, we are told that 5 of 82 black students who applied were admitted, compared to 62 of the 242 of the white students who applied.
The very next paragraph, however, states
that 80 percent of the approximately 2,100 black students who had taken the yearly test for the county’s elementary gifted and talented program had not gotten in, even as the county has become increasingly diverse. Of the 139,000 students enrolled in the school system this year, 22.1 percent are African American, 18.7 percent are Hispanic, 44.6 percent are white and 14.3 percent are Asian.
Of course if 80% didn’t get in, then 20% did, and that approximates the black proportion of students in the county schools. Thus the exact dimensions of the problem, if there is a problem, is not clear from the article, but from all the quoted statements by concerned school administrators it’s clear that they agree with the complaining parents.
Montgomery County school officials acknowledged yesterday that there are too few minority students in their magnet programs, which offer specialized classes. “These are very serious complaints and allegations, and it seems to me that they have some very good data that they have presented and the numbers are very disturbing,” said school board member Valerie Ervin (Silver Spring)
And they are taking steps to correct the problem.
Officials do not take race into consideration when selecting students, but the system has taken steps to boost the number of minority and low-income applicants….
To spread the word about the magnet programs, the county partnered with the local NAACP chapter to contact parents. This year, the school system offered workshops to parents, gave students practice booklets for the entrance exam and provided transportation to students on the day of the test.
The article does not say whether this aid was offered to all students are only to minority students.
Although the article does not clarify the exact dimensions of the alleged problem, it does succeed, inadvertently, in revealing the reporter’s bias. Note this comment again, with emphasis added this time:
80 percent of the approximately 2,100 black students who had taken the yearly test for the county’s elementary gifted and talented program had not gotten in, even as the county has become increasingly diverse.
The only increase one could reasonably expect to see as the county becomes more “diverse” is in the absolute number of minorities admitted to magnet programs, not an increase in the proportion of those taking the test who are admitted. (Unless the reporter believes that by definition minorities moving into the county recently have raised the collective IQ of the minorities in the county, much as Will Rogers said the migration of the Okies to California raised the IQ of both states.)
* * * * *
Just below the above article on p. B1 of the WaPo today appears another article about another racial disparity in Montgomery County, “Young Students Make Gains In Reading,” by reporter Ylan Q. Mui. The concern of the article, however, is contained in the subhead, “Minorities Still Lag in Montgomery.”
According to a graph accompanying the article (right column; click to enlarge), about 83% of white students and 80% of Asian students in the county are reading at or above grade level, compared to about 61% of the black students and 55% of the Hispanics. Presumably this information is relevant to the proportion of students admitted into magnet programs, although it was not mentioned in the article discussed above.
And again, the country is making efforts, some would say heroic efforts, to correct the disparities, primarily in the form of a corresponding disparity of expenditures. The county spends “$8,792 for kindergartners and $11,178 for elementary school students,” the Superintendent said, but in a swath of schools with lower scores it is spending an additional $60 million, just under an additional $2,000 per student. (At some point, I suspect, county residents may begin to ask how many of these students are “undocumented,” and demand more federal assistance.)
What struck me most about this article, however, especially reading it as I did in conjunction with the one discussed above, is the absence of any organized parent group demanding that the reading gap be closed, much less to suspend other expenditures until that is done. But maybe that’s just because it seems to me that the racial gap in reading scores is more serious than the alleged underrepresentation of minorities in magnet programs.
UPDATE [9 March]
The following is not about selection procedures for Montgomery County’s magnet program, but it is about the county’s Board of Education and so fits here, sort of.
Anyway, the board has instituted a very controversal experimental sex education programin six county schools, three high schools and three middle schools. I suspect the program’s content is not out of the mainstream for such programs, with instruction in such things as putting condoms on cucumbers, teaching the legitimacy of homosexual couples, and encouraging students to develop a “gender identity,” defined as “”a person’s internal sense of knowing whether he or she is male or female.”
What is rather striking, however, as pointed out on Townhall.com’s blog, is that when parents who oppose the program sent emails to the board of education to complain, their emails were blocked because of “inappropriate content” that “surpassed the threshold set in the Adult Content dictionary.”
UPDATE II [9 March 11:40 AM EST]
A couple of commenters below raised the good point that giving the percentage of successful blacks applicants to magnet programs, standing alone, did not say much, and I indicated I would attempt to gather some more information, which follows here.
With permission, I am reproducing below the response I received from an old email acquaintance, John Hoven, a math authority who said that I could identify him as someone who “spent 10 years fruitlessly working for school reform as co-president of the Gifted and Talented Association of Montgomery County, Maryland.”
Being identified gifted is purely informational in Montgomery County. By policy, every gifted program in the regular classroom is open to any student who wants it. The magnets are selective, but the regular classroom gifted programs are not. So the statement you quote is misleading. The 80 percent of black students who were not identified gifted were not excluded from anything. And the scores on the 2nd grade Raven have nothing whatever to do with the selection process for the middle school magnets.
The purpose [of the 2nd-grade global screening for giftedness is purely] to identify bright children who might otherwise be overlooked — e.g., because they are quiet, disruptive, African-American, etc. Nearly 40% of students are now identified gifted (up from about 25% a decade ago). Those who are identified may be encouraged to participate in accelerated math groups or the William & Mary Reading/Language Arts program — but these groups are mainly based on reading and math abilities observed in the classroom, and they are open to any child on request. Montgomery County Public Schools does very little for gifted children in the regular classroom.
The Raven test scores from that global screening are also used as part of the selection process for the Centers for the Highly Gifted in grades 4-5. The cut-off scores are much higher for that selection, and there is also a series of more achievement-oriented screening tests. About 3% of the total student body are selected for these Center programs. I don’t know how many apply. I think selectivity is better measured as a percent of the total student body, rather than as a percent of the total who choose to apply.
The middle school magnets, and the two highly selective high school programs (the Blair math-science magnet and the Richard Montgomery International Baccalaureate program) also accept a total of about 3% of the student body. Again, I don’t know how many apply. The news story reports that 5 blacks and 62 whites were accepted into the Takoma Park Middle School Magnet. There are about 2500 blacks and 5000 whites per grade countywide, so that implies [to the extent that year at Takoma Park was representative — jsr] that 0.2% of blacks were admitted, and 1.2% of whites. That is a huge disparity, but it is evidence of the racial achievement gap, not evidence of discrimination. To show discrimination, one would need to show that blacks are held to a higher standard than whites. In other words, the blacks who are admitted into the magnets should generally achieve at higher levels than the whites. I haven’t heard any indication, anecdotal or otherwise, that that is true.
Several Montgomery County high schools also offer an IB program for their own students. The Richard Montgomery IB program is different because they select their students from the entire county.
“Of course if 80% didn’t get in, then 20% did, and that approximates the black proportion of students in the county schools.”
This is a meaningless comparison. It would be relevant if 20% of blacks who took the test got in and 20% of non-black students got in also, but the two percentage figures you’re looking at have nothing to do with each other.
Imagine there are two Native American students in the district. They both take the gifted test and they both pass. That means that 100% of Native American students who take the test pass it, but Native Americans make up only a fraction of 1% of the student population. What does that tell us? Absolutely nothing.
Actually, even if you could show that pass rates were similar for black and non-black students, it still wouldn’t prove much unless black and non-black students are approximately equally likely to take the test.
Umm . . . John, Xavier’s quite right; the fraction of students in they system who are black and the fraction of black students who apply to a particular magnet school and are then admitted have absolutely nothing to do with one another. You might want to amend this one.
Xavier/Michelle – I’ve said a number of times that math is not my strong suit (or a suit at all, for that matter), and I may well have stated my point awkwardly (or the point I thought I was making may be wrong), but it still seems to me to be relevant that 20% of the black students who took the test were admitted into the magnet program.
It’s true that in order to evaluate this result one would need to know what percentage of the non-black test takers were admitted, and the article doesn’t say. But that comparison — the comparative acceptance rates of test takers from different groups — seems to me to be the relevant one if one is trying to determined the presence of discrimination, not what percentage of each group took the test. (Unless, of course, one is arguing that blacks were discouraged from taking the test, but the opposite seems to be the case.)
I’m trying to find out and may have more to say later, but for now it’s worth pointing out again that the article does give the results for one school, presumably because the acceptance rates were so different: 5 of 82 blacks compared to 62 of 242 whites. That 25% (approx.) acceptance rate for whites at that school may or may not be representative of anything — the 5 of 82 certainly isn’t if that 20% rate is accurate — but it’s interesting and the only number at hand at the moment. Stay tuned.
The question should be why are blacks failing to compete for spots in GT and magnet programs. Could it be because the black students read less, watch television more, visit fewer museums, attend fewer plays, play more sports and maybe never see an adult reading a newspaper?
Once again, maybe it is because even through Montgomery County is diverse in color that does not mean that the education level among the white, blacks, hispanic, and asian americans is the same. Want to bet the the white parents have a much higher level of education that the black parents?