Achievement Gap

The growing number of black and Hispanic students in the Anne Arundel County schools are not achieving on a par with their white peers - and a group of local educators, parents and clergy has spent the past year looking for a way to close that gap instead of watching it increase. The group's 36 pages of findings released Friday, called the Minority Student Achievement Report, call for more multicultural training for teachers, less reliance on standardized tests, which can be culturally biased, more support for students as they move from grade to grade, greater recruitment of minority teachers and more community support for learning.

Turmoil and controversy marked the past school year in Howard County, but stability and optimism seem to be guiding the school system this academic year. "It's been a very good year so far as measured by people's attitude and spirits," said Superintendent Sydney L. Cousin. "I've said this over and over again, it's a good place to live, work and educate your kids." Last year's controversies overshadowed the academic achievements of the county's 48,000 students. But the focus on the school system's two goals - raising student performance and providing a nurturing environment that values diversity and commonality - has been renewed under the leadership of Cousin, who took over last year.

Baltimore County school board members say they're tired of talking about the wide achievement gap between black and white students. They want to do something to narrow it. "We've moved terribly slowly," said Sanford V. Teplitzky, the senior member of the board. "I'm really tired of reading the same reports we've been reading for years. "We need to set it as a priority and that means placing dollars toward it, placing resources toward it, meaning human and others." What will be done is unclear.

WASHINGTON - Most public school students would be tested a lot more often under legislation Congress is expected to pass soon, but there is no guarantee that those who do poorly would score much better in the future, education experts say. Congress is poised this week to pass key elements of President Bush's education plan, potentially the most sweeping change in federal schools policy in more than three decades. Essentially, the measure would tie federal aid to schools to their performance on new mandatory tests for students in grades three through eight.

IT'S ONE of the most pressing crises in Baltimore County's public schools: African-American students achieve at levels far below those of their white counterparts, and the gap is unlikely to narrow soon. The results from the last round of the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program tests starkly demonstrate the width of this chasm. In reading, writing and mathematics, the percentage of black third-grade students doing satisfactory work is about half that of white students. In science and social studies, the distance between the two is even greater -- half of white students are performing to the standard compared with only one-fifth of black students.

City schools CEO Andrés Alonso has vowed to begin new initiatives to combat student truancy after the city's performance on state tests showed an average achievement gap of 25 percentage points between elementary and middle school students who are repeatedly absent and those who attend regularly. The superintendent said he would focus on student attendance, even if it means deploying central office staff to knock on the doors of students who are chronically absent — which means they miss more than 20 days of school a year.

THERE ARE a lot of negatives about the No Child Left Behind Act, the federal measure that has the schools of America scrambling. It has unrealistic rules, regulations and timetables. It's a huge financial burden for states and school districts. Even its title is negative. Why didn't they call it the "Every Child Progressing Act"? But then you think about its purpose. That's what Kati Haycock does. She's the director and chief spokeswoman for the Education Trust, a Washington-based organization devoted to closing the disparities in American education that do, indeed, leave millions of children - mostly poor and minority - behind.

Howard County's scores on the new Maryland School Assessment tests, released Friday, show that while its students continue to outperform nearly all others in the state, the achievement gap among ethnic and racial subgroups persists. For example, at the third-grade level, 85.7 percent of white children were proficient or advanced in reading -- the passing measure -- while 58.9 percent of black pupils and 50.7 percent of Hispanic children achieved that level. And 20.3 percent of special education third-graders read at the required level, which supports the state's claim that Howard is not making adequate progress with special-education students.

CAMDEN, N.J. - When it comes to the teachers in their classrooms, the students in this impoverished city have to settle for less than the best. A lot less. Barely more than half of Camden's math and reading teachers are considered "highly qualified" in their subjects, a standard that nearly all teachers in surrounding suburbs meet. But what the school system can boast of is its heavy investment in the Compass Learning labs, $8 million worth of computers and software intended to boost students' scores on math and reading tests.