Schools

Osborne: School District Documented Achievement Gap, Worked to Fix It

But information they prepared on the problem is now being used in a potential lawsuit against the district.

The South Orange Maplewood School District may face a lawsuit from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People alleging segregation, but much of the documentation being used to pursue the issue was produced by the district itself as the district worked to address and bridge the achievement gap.

Thomas Puryear of the NAACP of the Oranges and Maplewood told media on July 12 that he has found a great deal of documentation that segregation exists in the district at the high school level. Much of the documentation he cited has been produced by the district itself over the past few years in efforts to be transparent and work to overcome the "achievement gap"—the difference in test scores, AP placements and academic achievement between white and black students.

To address that gap, the district participated in the formation of the Task Force on Excellence and Equity in 2009—a coalition of educators, students, parents and community leaders tasked with presenting solutions to overcome the achievement gap.

Find out what's happening in South Orangewith free, real-time updates from Patch.

This spring, the Task Force unveiled its recommendations, which were endorsed by Superintendent of Schools Brian Osborne and approved by the Board of Education at its June 2010 meeting. The changes will include modifications to the 6th grade curriculum which shore up core curriculum classroom time, combining Levels 3 and 4 at the 7th grade level and more minor changes in earlier grades and at the high school level. The changes will go into effect in September.

Superintendent Osborne has called the district's efforts to de-level "modest."  And information available on the district website shows that the district has a long way to go in bridging the achievement gap.

Find out what's happening in South Orangewith free, real-time updates from Patch.

The State of the District report—which Puryear is sending to the central NAACP as documentation of segregation in the South Orange-Maplewood School District—shows that, at the high school level, 40.5% of white students were taking at least one Advanced Placement (AP) course as of June 2009, while only 9.9% of black students were enrolled in at least one AP course. At the same time, 30.6% of white students were taking at least one Level 5 (advanced) course compared to 5.5% of black students (and 10% of Hispanic students and 24.1% of Asian students).

The number is more dramatic when comparing the percentage of students in high school taking at least one AP course and one Level 5 course: 53.1% of white students, 12.3% of black students (and 27. 8% of Hispanic and 55.6% of Asian students).

The graduation rate from Columbia High for white and black students is virtually identical, though slightly higher for white students: 97.3% in 2009 for white students as compared to 95.2% for black students.

In the NJ ASK (Assessment of Skills and Knowledge) testing in 2009, 41.9% of white students at Columbia High were "advanced proficient" compared to 6.6% of black students in language arts. In math, 56.8% of white students tested advanced proficient compared to 8.8% of black students.

When the district measured the college success of students graduating from Columbia High in 2005, about half the white students who went on to college graduated by 2009 while less than 20% of black students pursuing college degrees from that class had completed a bachelors by 2009.

Overall, the SOMA district is about 47% white, 44% black, 5% Hispanic and 4% Asian, according to the 2009-10 State of the District report. At the high school level, the student body is more than 50% black: In June 2009, Columbia had 702 white students registered, 1,003 black students, 90 Hispanic students, 54 Asian students, 3 American-Indian and 4 students listed under "mixed race" for a total of 1,856.

The district also documented the gap at the middle school level. For example, district data show that at South Orange Middle School, in language arts, 63 percent of students in Level 4 classes are white. In Level 3, 68 percent of the students are black, while in Level 2—the lowest level—90% of students are black.

Due to efforts at transparency, all this information is available on the district's website, under "district information" in the State of the District report appendices. Patch has also attached the 2009/10 appendices here. You'll notice the high school AP numbers starting on page 18 and the NJ ASK information starting on page 28.

In a letter of introduction to the 2009/10 State of the District report, Board of Education President Mark Gleason extolled the accomplishments of the district but lamented, "At the same time, our schools continued to fail too many students." Gleason continued: "These students, mostly black, have not achieved proficiency on state assessments of learning that do not set the proficiency bar very high. While they are a small segment of the overall student population, they are far too large a number in light of our mission to educate every child. As we have for each of the 15 years I've lived here, we struggled with the achievement gap."

Gleason goes on to talk of the district's efforts to provide greater transparency with regard to the gap. Gleason noted in his letter, "Yet transparency doesn't necessarily mean clarity." Gleason pointed to the data in the appendices of the State of the District report, writing that the data do not "make clear how and why our many attempts to narrow this gap over the years have failed to make a dent."

Ultimately, Gleason did not vote for the Task Force's recommendations in June saying, "This looks like reform but it really isn't." However, Gleason said he did feel the superintendent was moving the district in the right direction.

At a forum in late May, Superintendent Osborne called the plan to "level-up" 7th grade "modest" and said that the "deleveling will create classes that reflect our district roughly." Osborne explained that that would mean classes that were 50-50 black and white or—more accurately—45-45-10 in terms of black, white and Latino/Asian/Indian/mixed race.

"People come here for the diversity and to celebrate that diversity and then we have these segregated classes," said Osborne. Still, he stressed, "the education element must be the driver."

In a letter to district parents sent on June 8, 2010, Osborne said of the efforts to de-level 7th grade, "All these efforts are beginning to improve student learning, and yet we have miles to go."


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