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	The ‘cultural luck’ of learning MANY OF THE most prominent researchers of the black-white achievement gap are right here in Massachusetts, at places like Harvard University and Boston College. But their prescription for solving the problem — putting more resources into schools that primarily serve black students over those that primarily enroll white students — has no influence over public policy in the state. Instead, politicians listen to those willing to tell them that black students’ problems lie not in their schools but in their homes, or more specifically, their parents. "Some children come to school more disadvantaged than others," says Abigail Thernstrom, one of the country’s leading conservative voices on racial policy, and a member of the Massachusetts Board of Education. White children learn better, according to Thernstrom, because they are "culturally luckier" than blacks. And Governor Mitt Romney, without mentioning race specifically, infamously placed the blame for student failings in towns like Brockton, Cambridge, and Fall River on the families of these students, when he advocated mandatory "parent training" in those areas as part of his new Legacy of Learning initiative. Meanwhile, two more board members — chair James Peyser and Charles D. Baker — come from the conservative Pioneer Institute, which advocates "school choice in all forms" as the key to improving public education. Even the board’s lone African-American member, Henry Thomas of the Springfield Urban League, says of the achievement gap: "I don’t think it’s that difficult to solve. It’s just a question of will." Whose will? Parents, church leaders, community groups, and the students themselves, Thomas says. "The focus should be not so much on the educational gap as on the preparation gap — the amount of time that they are spending on educational-related activities as opposed to recreation and television." This perception that the problem lies in the homes and not the schools has helped justify cuts that hurt black students disproportionately, according to Tim Collins, president of the Springfield Education Association. These include the elimination of funding for class-size reduction, and a 79 percent budget cut for early-literacy programs. The FY ’04 budget also reduced a $50 million budget item for after-school and summer remediation programming to $10 million, and specified that the money can be used to help only 11th- and 12th-grade students who have failed the MCAS test. This killed off a Boston Public Schools program that had been providing remediation to more than 8000 kids each year at the third-, sixth-, and ninth-grade levels. The program had been successfully lowering drop-out rates, increasing grade promotion, and improving academic achievement. "We’re sort of baffled," says Maureen Harris, assistant director for curriculum and instruction for the Boston Public Schools. "Everybody pretty much bought into this as the right strategy to use." That money will apparently be spent instead on a new scholarship program, announced by Romney last month, that would reward top MCAS scorers with in-state tuition and $2000 grants. Given the size of the racial gap, "it has a vastly racial effect," says Gary Orfield, co-director of Harvard University’s Civil Rights Project. In fact, if the scholarships had been in effect for the class of 2003, only 61 black students would have qualified for the $2000 checks, out of more than 6700 recipients — less than one percent in a state where seven percent of graduating students are black. — DSB

THE JOHN P. HOLLAND Elementary School, in Dorchester, fits most people’s notion of what an urban school looks like. It is old and unwelcoming; the outside projects little warmth. There are few windows, little playground space, a lot of asphalt and rock, and a fair amount of litter and graffiti. But at 3:30 on a weekday afternoon, 18 of the classrooms are colorful and cheery. There you can see small groups of children eager to learn and anxious to please their teachers, and they’re all participating in an after-school program.

Jeremy, two days shy of seven years old, is one of two black students in Ciara O’Connell’s room, along with four Vietnamese first-graders. He has a ton of pent-up energy from a long day trapped inside the school walls. "It’s helping," says Jeremy’s mother, Ingrid Gokool, of the after-school program. Gokool and her husband, both from Trinidad, run an Indian restaurant. "I can tell by the way he’s identifying his letters and numbers — he’s always pointing at signs now and shouting, ‘Mommy, it’s the number 16 bus.’" To be sure, this is just one story about one student, but Jeremy’s experience bears out the research showing that black students in particular do better with direct contact with teachers than with self-direction or peer collaboration.

Indeed, small class sizes are a key to closing the racial achievement gap. For example, an extensive study in Tennessee, starting in 1985 and tracking students for 10 years, showed that white students placed in small classes in early grades performed slightly better on math and literacy tests than did white students in regular-size classes. But minority (primarily African-American) students in the study performed much better in small classes. The advantage for the black students was up to six times greater than for the white students.

"If you get children in grades K through three into classrooms of 15 or fewer, the achievement gap closes," says Tim Collins, president of the Springfield Education Association. "When kids in early grades get that individualized attention, they learn how to read. The rest of their educational careers, they are reading to learn."

To bring about such a welcome outcome, however, involves more than allocating equal funding, for this is one instance where equal resources do not provide equal results: if majority-black schools have the same student-teacher ratios as majority-white schools, the white students will end up doing better. Resources must be assigned disproportionately to even the gap — a difficult thing to convince most educators to do, never mind the politicians who distribute funds to our public schools (see "The ‘Cultural Luck’ of Learning," page 18).

Indeed, simply comparing where the money is spent in predominantly black and predominantly white schools shows that trying to address the racial gap by funding schools equally on a per-pupil basis simply doesn’t work. For one thing, black families — of all income levels — tend to live in urban areas, particularly in Massachusetts. Teacher salaries are much higher in urban areas — an average of $62,731 in Boston, where a third of the state’s black schoolchildren live, compared with the statewide average teacher’s salary of $48,649. As a result, while the ratio of full-time equivalent teachers to total student enrollment is about the same in Needham and Boston, Needham spends just $2730 in teacher salary per student, while Boston spends $3918. Moreover, a higher percentage of black students have special health and counseling needs. That’s true for a variety of reasons, of which poverty is but one. The vastly higher rates of low birth weight, asthma, and other health problems among African-Americans contribute to the disproportionate need for funding. "We really do need a nurse in every school, and a health clinic in many schools" in Springfield, says Collins.

Understanding how this affects school funding requires a look at Massachusetts’s foundation-budget process. The state first calculates the property-tax base in a community, and from that makes an assumption about how much local revenue the town can put toward education. The state then looks at the number of students in that district, and calculates how much it should cost to educate them all for the coming year; this is called the foundation budget. Subtract expected local revenue from the foundation budget, and you have the amount the state pitches in through supplemental Chapter 70 funding.

But this process treats all district populations in the same way, even when they are obviously different. For example, all districts are assumed to spend $60 per student on health-care workers’ salaries, when in fact Boston spends about $240 per student, while Belmont, for example, spends just $71. A similar problem occurs with special education. The state gives districts a per-pupil amount based on the fixed figure of 3.5 percent of a district’s overall enrollment. But 19 percent of Boston’s students are in special education, compared to 15 percent statewide. At the Holland School, for example, 22 percent of the students require services related to special education. At the Burbank, in Belmont, the figure is 11 percent; at Broadmeadow, in Needham, it is eight. Boston also spends $4500 more per special-ed student than the state average.

Since these needs take up far more of the budget than the state factors in, Boston’s schools must take that money out of other areas. In 2001 (the last year for which figures are available), Boston spent less of its budget, compared with the state average, on teaching, support staff, expanded programs, extracurricular programs, and maintenance.

This problem occurs not only within the state, but within districts, according to a study two years ago by the Center for Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. It found that within districts themselves, individual schools tend to receive equal dollar amounts, even though the ones with poor or minority populations had additional costs. This means that the same money, but more resources, tend to go to whiter, wealthier schools within districts. The study’s authors wrote that this disparity is "hard-wired into district policy" throughout the country.

THIS IS EXACTLY the fear that fuels minority opposition to Flaherty’s push for neighborhood schooling. Once they’ve been resegregated, will black students in Roxbury and Mattapan be forgotten, while the white students in West Roxbury and South Boston thrive? It feels to many like a form of white flight.

Christopher Jencks, sitting in a Harvard Square café and looking every bit the mild-mannered, middle-aged, white, suburban Harvard professor he is, shares their concern. The white majority, he says, always defeats efforts to help black students. They will never allow their representatives to spend state money disproportionately on black students, nor will they allow their towns to do the same. "If they redirected the resources, parents would move into the next district," he says.

Jencks is pessimistic about the public’s will to change — which is especially frustrating to him now, as academics like his Kennedy School colleague Roland Fryer are finally unlocking the mysteries of the problem. Jencks has worked on the gap since the 1960s, and for the first 30 years, he says, "I was disturbed to find that we knew hardly anything more, and the fundamental questions had not been raised at all."

Now, while the exact strategies for success may be unclear, at least we know where to focus our efforts: on the underfunding of primarily black schools, and the prejudice of low expectations from teachers at the earliest grade levels. Until we do that, don’t expect black parents to believe that good intentions are behind talk of neighborhood schools, or any other effort to teach their children.

David S. Bernstein can be reached at dbernstein[a]phx.com