By Mary Ann Zehr

Reprinted from Edweek.com

A study of both private and public schools in Hawaii has found that students of teachers who frequently infuse their lessons with Hawaiian culture-based strategies have higher educational aspirations than students of teachers who don’t.

In the study, 87.9 percent of students of teachers who used culture-based strategies said they expect to graduate from college compared with 73.5 percent of students whose teachers tended not to use such strategies.

Students of teachers using Hawaiian-focused approaches also were more likely to say that many people at school are like family, that they can trust people at their school, and that teachers at their school go out of their way to help them.

The study is based on interviews with 600 teachers, 2.969 students, and 2,264 parents at 62 participating schools, including regular public schools, charter schools, schools with Hawaiian-immersion programs, and the private Kamehameha Schools.

The study is a collaborative effort of the Kamehameha Schools, Hawaii education department, and Na Lei Na’auao, an alliance of Hawaiian-focused public charter schools. The study on student engagement is part of a larger research effort that also aims to answer the question of whether culturally relevant teaching practices have an impact on student achievement.

Phoenix

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed a bill targeting a school district’s ethnic studies program, hours after a report by United Nations human rights experts condemned the measure.

State schools chief Tom Horne, who has pushed the measure for years, said Tuesday that a Tucson school district program promotes “ethnic chauvinism” and racial resentment toward whites while segregating students by race.

“It’s just like the old South, and it’s long past time that we prohibited it,” Horne said.

The measure prohibits classes that advocate ethnic solidarity, that are designed primarily for students of a particular race or that promote resentment toward a certain ethnic group. It also prohibits classes that promote the overthrow of the U.S. government.

The Tucson Unified School District program offers specialized courses in African-American, Mexican-American and Native-American studies that focus on history and literature and include information about the influence of a particular ethnic group.

For example, in the Mexican-American Studies program, an American history course explores the role of Hispanics in the Vietnam War, and a literature course emphasizes Latino authors.

Horne said he believes the Mexican-American studies program teaches Latino students that they are oppressed by white people. Public schools should not be encouraging students to resent a particular race, he said.

Brewer’s signature on the bill comes less than a month after she signed the nation’s toughest crackdown on illegal immigration — a move that ignited international backlash amid charges the measure would encourage racial profiling of Hispanics.

A Republican running for attorney general, Horne has been trying to restrict the program ever since he learned that Hispanic civil rights activist Dolores Huerta in 2006 told students that “Republicans hate Latinos.”

District officials said the program doesn’t promote resentment, and they believe it would comply with the new law.

About 1,500 students at six high schools in the district are enrolled in the program. Elementary and middle school students also are exposed to the ethnic studies curriculum. The district is 56 percent Hispanic, with nearly 31,000 Latino students.

Sean Arce, director of the district’s Mexican-American Studies program, said last month that students perform better in school if they see in the curriculum people who look like them.

“It’s a highly engaging program that we have, and it’s unfortunate that the state Legislature would go so far as to censor these classes,” he said.

Six UN human rights experts released a statement earlier Tuesday expressing concern about the measure. All people have the right to learn about their own cultural and linguistic heritage, they said.

Brewer spokesman Paul Senseman didn’t directly address the UN criticism, but said Brewer supports the bill’s goal.

“The governor believes … public school students should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people,” Senseman said.

The law doesn’t prohibit classes that teach about the history of a particular ethnic group, as long as the course is open to all students and doesn’t promote ethnic solidarity or resentment.

Arce could not immediately be reached after Brewer signed the bill late Tuesday.

Associated Press Writer Jonathan J. Cooper wrote this report.

Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Founder's Hall on the Girard College campus in Philadelphia. The private boarding school that once excluded blacks and women is led now by Autumn Adkins, who describes herself simply as "a black girl from Richmond, Virginia."—Matt Rourke/AP

By The Associated Press

The private boarding school for underprivileged students now led by Autumn Adkins, who describes herself simply as “a black girl from Richmond, Virginia,” would have excluded her in years past.

The one-time white boys-only institution in Philadelphia did not admit its first black student until 1968 — and that was only after numerous legal challenges, months of protests, a visit from Martin Luther King Jr. and a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. Girls weren’t allowed until 1984.

Girard College — which first- through 12th-graders — has come a long way since being established by the richest man you never heard of. And as its newest president, the 37-year-old Adkins is determined to take it further, raising the school’s profile by giving its students “a true 21st-century education.”

“I have been really putting a lot of energy around making school exciting,” Adkins said. “It needs to be engaging. I’ve said to several of my administrators, I don’t want teachers wasting kids’ time — they’re young. It’s just not fair.”

Stephen Girard, a French-born sea captain, amassed a fortune through shipping, trading and banking after coming to Philadelphia in 1776. He helped the U.S. finance the War of 1812 against Britain and, when he died in 1831, was likely the wealthiest man in America.

Girard College president Autumn Adkins smiles during her investiture ceremony in Philadelphia. —Matt Slocum/AP

Girard left about $6 million (approximately $146 million in today’s money) to the city of Philadelphia, mostly to build and endow a tuition-free school for poor, fatherless white boys. The “college” opened in 1848 and, until now, had been run exclusively by white men. Its first president was Benjamin Franklin’s great-grandson.

The school’s overseers were not looking to make history after the most recent president retired. But they were bowled over by Adkins’ enthusiasm, work ethic, rigorous standards and an impressive resume that includes degrees from the University of Virginia and Columbia University’s Teachers College.

“She is highly intelligent, she is highly driven, she is extremely communicative,” said Peter Shoemaker, chairman of the board of managers. “She has evolved a very clear vision for the school.”

Raised in an upper-middle class Virginia suburb, Adkins’ passion for education was inspired in part by teenage volunteer work in poor neighborhoods. She was struck by the narrow life experiences of the children there, and later wrote in a college application that she dreamed of starting a boarding school for underprivileged students.

Girard is the realization of that dream.

Following high-level posts at the elite Friends Seminary School in New York and Sidwell Friends School in Washington, Adkins arrived last summer at Girard’s 43-acre (17-hectare) campus.

The school looks like a slice of New England in rough North Philadelphia: Students in blue and burgundy blazers stroll grassy quads amid stone buildings, playing fields and a soaring chapel. The grandly columned Founder’s Hall — the original school building — was planned by Thomas Ustick Walter, who designed the dome of the U.S. Capitol.

Yet Girard’s imposing walls and entrance gate became symbols of segregation when trustees refused to admit African-American students. Local activists picketed for months outside the school in 1965; King visited that August, declaring “the walls of segregation would come tumbling down.” In 1968, they did.

Today, most of Girard’s 620 students are black and half are female; all come from low-income families headed by a single parent or guardian. Students are selected based on an assessment test, family interview and, if older than first grade, an academic transcript.

Adkins — the descendant of a slave — believes Stephen Girard would support diversity and that the restrictions in his will, which she has read, simply reflect the era in which he lived.

The new civil rights struggle, she says, is to make urban education competitive with its suburban peer.

To that end, Adkins plans to broaden the curriculum, modernize the facilities and increase teacher salaries. She also wants to better prepare students for life outside the walls; while nearly all Girard students are accepted to college, less than half get a degree in six years, school officials say.

The school’s $25 million annual budget comes almost entirely from the Girard estate’s securities, real estate and mining investments, which suffered during the recession. Financial records show the trust’s value dropped from $309 million in 2008 to $204 million last year, prompting Adkins to launch aggressive fundraising plans.

“I do have real concerns,” Adkins said. “Will we be able to educate as many children as we should be?”

The new president is a vibrant presence on campus, doling out hugs, handshakes and banter. She hosts small groups of students at the president’s house for “family” meals — a chance for Adkins to know them better, and to expose them to sit-down dinners they may not get at home.

“I’ve learned an enormous amount from the students,” Adkins said. “They’re interesting, they’re thoughtful, they’re inquisitive — they deserve the kind of education that complements that.”

Sophomore Olayinka Lawal said when she first saw a picture of Adkins last year, she was most struck by the new president being young and female. That Adkins is black was almost an afterthought, Lawal said, coming as it did the same year Barack Obama became the first African-American president.

“It just fit perfectly, it really did,” she said. “It was like, wow, what a mirror!”

Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

By Dakarai I. Aarons

Reprinted from Edweek.com

More than a half-century after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered schools desegregated, districts are still grappling with how best to create the kind of demographically diverse public schools that many experts believe improve outcomes for disadvantaged students.

The recent decision by a North Carolina district to move from a nationally recognized student-assignment policy that promoted socioeconomic diversity to one centered around community-based schools has alarmed advocates of greater integration in the schools.

Yet school district leaders elsewhere, including in San Francisco and Louisville, Ky., continue to work on crafting student-assignment plans that allow them to make demographic diversity a priority. They are doing so against a legal backdrop that changed dramatically three years ago, when the Supreme Court handed down a ruling that made it harder for school leaders to base student-assignment decisions explicitly on race.

In Wake County, N.C., the school board of the 140,000-student school system, which includes Raleigh, voted 5-4 last month to stop busing students for diversity purposes. The district’s move has fueled passionate arguments within the state and beyond. The head of the state’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, for example, vowed to take legal action if necessary to keep socioeconomic diversity a part of the assignment plan.

What Wake County’s new student-assignment plan will look like remains uncertain, however. The resolution approved by the board makes no direct mention of the word “diversity,” but said all children, regardless of their demographic background, can learn when given top instruction.

“The utilization of objective, data-driven decisions better supports these efforts than subjective classification and profiling of students,” the resolution reads in part.

The district’s current assignment plan is set to expire in 2012, and schools will continue to follow it in the interim. A new plan, based on redrawn attendance zones to be established by the board, will be developed over the next nine to 15 months.

Shift in Leadership

A 2007 decision by the Supreme Court made it more difficult for school districts to pursue their aims of maintaining racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity. That ruling in Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education bars districts from using race as the primary factor when assigning individual students to schools. (“Use of Race Uncertain for Schools,” July 18, 2007.)

While praised nationally by diversity advocates, Wake County’s student-assignment plan has been a source of frustration for many parents, who did not like the lack of certainty about where their children would attend school, said Ann Denlinger, the president of the Wake Education Partnership, a Raleigh-based nonprofit organization backed by business leaders who support the school system.

The current policy guarantees students can stay in a particular school for at least three years.

The county’s explosive growth—the district went from 64, 000 students in the 1990-91 school year to more than 140,000 this school year—has meant lots of shuffling of student assignments to accommodate the growth while avoiding the creation of schools with high densities of low-income students.

Changes to the policy, adopted in 2000, have come with the advent of a new board majority elected in October. The new board, led by Ronald Margiotta, once the board’s lone critic of the student-assignment policy, has moved quickly to put its own stamp on the district. Mr. Margiotta could not be reached for comment last week.

In public speeches, Mr. Margiotta has dismissed charges that he and other board members are racists who are working to separate poorer city students from their wealthier suburban peers. The present policy, he said, has been too disruptive and did not reflect the wishes of a majority of parents.

“We are giving the school system back to the families and taxpayers in this county,” he said in a video of a speech last month before the Northern Wake Republican Club, explaining the philosophy of the new board majority.

Amid the controversy, Wake County schools Superintendent Del Burns announced that he would retire in June, because he could not continue to work in “good conscience” for the system with the attendant changes. He was subsequently placed on administrative leave for the remainder of the school year.

Resegregation Concerns

According to a report by the Wake Education Partnership, the district would immediately have more than two dozen high-poverty, low-performing schools if the new student-assignment policy were to be solely based on the neighborhoods students live in. “In our opinion, Wake County shouldn’t make decisions that result in low-performing schools,” said Ms. Denlinger, a former superintendent of two North Carolina school systems. “We believe we have choices here.”

Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow with the Century Foundation, a Washington-based think tank, has similar concerns.

“There’s 40 years of research to suggest that probably the single most important thing you can do for a low-income student is give her the chance to go to an economically mixed school, instead of a high-poverty school,” he said. “In Wake County, low-income students are given access to middle-class peers who have big dreams and expect to go on to college, to high-quality teachers, and to parents who are actively involved in the schools,” said Mr. Kahlenberg, who has written extensively on school desegregation and recently visited Wake County.

While many opponents have said the board’s vote will automatically lead to resegregation of schools, Ms. Denlinger said the community process over the next year provides an opportunity for diversity proponents to have a say.

“We are a strong community and we can figure out how to grow at a rapid pace and assign these students to schools without uprooting students so many times and while maintaining balance,” she said.

Starting Over

In Jefferson County, Ky., the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision sent school officials back to the drawing board.

The district’s student-assignment plan at the time classified all students as either black or nonblack. Black student enrollment was required to be no more than 50 percent and no less than 15 percent at most of the county’s schools, said Pat Todd, the 98,000-student district’s executive director for student assignment.

Under the new plan, the county, which includes Louisville, is divided into two regions. In Area A, the adults are less wealthy and have a lower educational attainment, while parents in the Area B are the opposite. Schools will enroll no more than 50 percent and no less than 15 percent of its students from the Area A.

To give parents as many options as possible, Ms. Todd said parents can choose from among four to six elementary schools. The plan began this year with elementary students and will continue to be phased in, reaching full implementation districtwide, including new boundaries, in the 2011-12 school year.

“We believe that when you put a student-assignment plan in place that is coupled with attention to curriculum that is rigorous and to monitoring student progress, that all children actually achieve at higher levels,” Ms. Todd said.

Implementation has not been without challenges. The district was sued by a group of parents this year, but was successful in defending the new policy.

“We know the best preparation for the workplace of the future is one where students do learn to work with people of other races, incomes, ethnicities, and social backgrounds,” Ms. Todd said. “We believe school is in part socialization for the community. Diverse schools support the kind of community and workplace where these children will spend their lives.”

In San Francisco, which has long used socioeconomic factors to assign students, the school board adopted a new policy last month that aims to make its student-assignment process less confusing for parents while maintaining a focus on diversity.

The policy, which will take effect this fall, will in part use a Census Tract Integration Preference, which assigns students a score based on the characteristics of the census area in which they live, including academic performance over time. The district is still working out the methodology of a plan to align with the board’s new policy.

The 55,000-student district’s present system, first used in the 2002-03 school year, asks parents for reams of information that sometimes has been hard to verify, said Orla O’Keeffe, a special assistant to the superintendent and the plan’s manager.

“The current student-assignment system was not meeting its objectives,” she said. “The number of schools that were racially isolated increased each year. It also wasn’t satisfying any of the parents.”

Richard Carranza, San Francisco’s deputy superintendent for instruction, innovation, and social justice, said keeping a focus on equity is a must.

“One of the consistent messages we heard from the community is that parents want good schools. They don’t really care where the good schools are as long as they are good,” he said. “It is imperative within our whole fabric of social justice and equity to make every school a good school.”

Mr. Kahlenberg said that in the years since the Supreme Court decision, more districts have moved to similar systems.

“School districts have figured out how to make individual high-poverty schools work. But no one has figured out how to make a system of high-poverty schools work,” he said. “So … many districts are trying to reduce the concentrations of poverty that are really at the heart of educational inequality.”

Groups pushing for robust Hispanic participation in the 2010 census are enlisting a new corps of foot-soldiers in their battle to reach that hard-to-count demographic: tech-savvy, smart-phone-toting young people.

The “Be Counted, Represent” campaign offers music downloads and a chance at concert tickets to cell phone users who share their e-mail addresses and phone numbers with organizers and forward information about the census to their friends.

Principal organizers Voto Latino and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund stress in their messages that undercounted areas risk losing funding for transit, infrastructure and other needs, as well as political representation.

They hope those messages promoting participation in the count will zip throughout the social networks of the young who can persuade reluctant parents to fill out and return their census forms.

“You’re looked at by many, many, many people as being powerful when it comes to money that they can line their pockets with,” actress Rosario Dawson, a Voto Latino co-founder, told teenagers gathered Wednesday in the library of a predominantly Latino high school. “When it’s money that can line your pockets, no one ever says anything. But we’re saying something.”

The Census Bureau estimates that nearly 3 percent of the country’s Hispanic population, or about 1 million people, were not counted in the 2000 census, compared to about 1 percent of the general population.

The campaign seeks to improve those numbers by offering a package of 25 music downloads curated for a young Hispanic audience to cell phone users who share their zip codes, e-mail addresses and cell phone numbers with the program’s organizers.

The downloads include songs by such artists as Pitbull, Mos Def and Morrissey. Users can get also get songs by taking census quizzes on a smart phone application that they download.

If they invite their friends to download the application, they’re entered into a raffle for tickets to a “secret concert” to be held in the Los Angeles area in April.

Anyone can participate, although the campaign is aimed at teens and 20-somethings.

Alejandro Fernandez, an 18-year-old high school senior who attended the announcement, said he planned to download the census application on his Web-enabled phone and would share it with friends who will spread the word to their parents.

“They’ll be exposed to what the census is really about and not be scared,” he said.

Voto Latino also screened the first episode of a serial drama starring Dawson and Wilmer Valderrama, who plays a character who resists the census because he wants to stay off the U.S. government’s radar and (spoiler alert) is eventually revealed to be in the country illegally.

Organizers said the drama and smart phone campaigns ways to get through to an ethnic group that has been hard for census officials to reach because of indifference, language barriers and — for some — deportation fears.

“It is critically important, very simple and completely confidential to participate in the United States Census,” said MALDEF president Thomas A. Saenz said. “Unfortunately, too many in our community are not aware of those three important messages: importance, simplicity and confidentiality.”

Harry Pachon, a public policy professor at the University of Southern California’s Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, agreed that the extra efforts were needed to get through to the members of a community that is suspicious of the census and largely unaware of its relevance.

He said using the community’s abundance of wired youth was an especially canny strategy to drive up participation.

“Young people are sort of an intermediary between the all-English world and the all-Spanish world, so it makes a lot of sense to use the young people as transmitters of information,” he said.

—Damian Dovarganes/AP

Hacienda Heights, California

Bobby Fraker is taking a stand against what she perceives to be a sinister threat from across the Pacific, right here in her suburban Southern California community of tree-lined streets and stucco homes.

At a recent school-board meeting, Fraker and a dozen or more older, mostly white opponents of a Chinese government program that will fund a middle-school language class delivered fist-shaking denunciations.

“These children have young brains that are very malleable and they can be indoctrinated with things that America would not like,” Fraker, a diminutive woman with tight auburn curls, implored board members, who approved the plan in January.

Communities across the United States, from Smithfield, Rhode Island, to Medford, Oregon, have welcomed the so-called Confucius Classroom grants from the Chinese government, like the one proposed here for Cedarlane Middle School.

But Confucius is not going down smoothly in Hacienda Heights, a middle-class town east of downtown Los Angeles with a history of racial tensions between longtime residents and relatively recent Chinese newcomers. Ethnic Chinese comprise the majority of the school board.

The Cedarlane student body, meanwhile, is overwhelmingly Hispanic, with three out of every five students at the school qualifying for free or reduced-price meals, a poverty indicator, according to state data.

The dustup may portend trouble for China’s efforts to expand its cultural clout by bankrolling language programs in primary and secondary schools across the United States.

“I’m sure this will become a standard dispute,” said University of Southern California public policy professor Nicholas Cull, who tracks China’s efforts to shape its image abroad through programs like Confucius Classrooms. “People in America are very suspicious of ideas from the outside.”

Chen Zhunmin, who directs the Chinese consulate’s education office in Los Angeles, insisted the program has nothing to do with communism, as come of the local critics contend. He said Confucius Classroom and other programs were created to address misunderstandings about his country.

“I feel that the concerns of the neighbors are mainly caused by lack of understanding of Chinese history and culture,” he wrote in an e-mail.

There are 60 Confucius Classroom and university-level Confucius Institute programs in the U.S., according to the Web site of China’s language-teaching agency, the Hanban. Each is administered through a patchwork of educational organizations and universities that have deals with the agency.

The New York-based Asia Society plans to help set up another 80 Confucius Classrooms over the next two years. An additional 45 are separately planned in North Carolina alone.

The expansion into more communities could expose existing cultural and political fault lines, as it has in Hacienda Heights, a community that has undergone demographic change in recent decades.

In 1970, Hacienda Heights was less than 2 percent Asian and otherwise almost entirely white, according to state figures. By 2008, after decades of Chinese immigration into the region, Asians made up more than a third of the population, the same portion as the city’s non-Hispanic whites.

The new ethnic and racial makeup has provided a backdrop for a spate of community disputes.

Some neighbors opposed construction of a massive Buddhist temple complex on a city hillside in the late 1980s to serve the growing Asian community in the San Gabriel Valley. Opponents feared animals would be sacrificed on the site and temple-goers would disturb the peace by banging gongs.

Racial tensions played a role in a failed 2003 ballot campaign to have the unincorporated part of Los Angeles County recognized as a city, with opponents whispering that an incorporated Hacienda Heights would be dominated by Asian-Americans.

The dispute over the Confucius Classroom program appears to be another such clash.

“China already owns and changed most of the shopping centers in Hacienda Heights,” resident Sharon Pluth wrote in a letter to the town’s closest newspaper, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. “Do we really want them to change our kids’ minds, too?”

Under the deal with the Hanban, the Hacienda La Puente Unified School District is receiving $30,000 a year for language and culture programs at Cedarlane school, along with some 1,000 textbooks, CDs and other educational materials.

The city originally planned to accept an offer to have the Chinese government place a teaching assistant in Cedarlane and pay his or her salary, an overture that stoked strong resistance.

An editorial by the Tribune called the plan “tantamount to asking Hugo Chavez to send his cadres to teach little American kids economics.”

School board member Norman Hsu said it wasn’t worth pushing the issue, since, without California credentials, the teacher would not have been permitted to operate as a full-fledged instructor anyway.

“Why do we need to pour oil in the fire?” he said.

Hsu said the district accepted the Chinese government’s offer because it knew that money for a needed expansion of its language program at Cedarlane would not be forthcoming from the cash-strapped state government.

But opponents, who have been attending school board meetings with signs bearing such slogans as “America, Not Confucius,” say they’ll keep pushing the district to abandon the program completely.

They also say they’ll seek to unseat the four members of the five-person board that voted in January to accept the Hanban’s offer.

Teresa Macias, one of those who voiced concerns at a recent board meeting, insisted her objections were not rooted in race.

Like other critics, Macias said she has no children in the school system, but feels the need to protect the community’s youth from communist propaganda that could be hidden in textbook passages unreadable to non-Chinese speakers.

She said she’s also concerned about the program’s identification with Confucius and his 2,500-year-old philosophy.

“When you Google it, it comes up as a religion,” she said. “It just seems wrong on so many levels.”

Chen, from the Chinese consulate, dismissed that concern.

“It is a well-known fact that Confucius is basically a philosopher and educator, not a religious figure,” he wrote.

Cecile Cowan, whose daughter is about to attend Cedarlane, understands critics’ concerns, but plans to review the Confucius teaching materials with an open mind. She’d like her daughter to learn an important skill.

“I believe the whole idea behind it was sort of bringing our cultures together and exposing children to languages,” she said. “It only adds to their intelligence and their marketability as they get older.”

Jane Shults, a Cedarlane history teacher, supports the program on her campus because she can use the free texts to teach about ancient China, as mandated by the state.

“The community has changed. It could be that it’s a way of protesting that,” she said. “It’s jingoistic, it’s xenophobic, it’s not overly rational and it’s really shades of McCarthyism all over again.”

Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Posted on EdWeek
By Ian Quillen

Washington

Male students who are members of minority groups continue to face overwhelming obstacles to pursuing their academic aspirations, according to a report from the College Board. The result, it says, is a little-talked-about “third America” that is predominantly male, largely incapable of contributing to society, and often destined to be incarcerated.

Members of Congress and educators warned of the consequences of failing to address those obstacles at a Capitol Hill forum last week, held in conjunction with the release of “The Educational Crisis Facing Young Men of Color.”

The report includes testimony from more than 60 scholars, practitioners, and activists convened by the New York City-based sponsor of the sat college-admissions test at four seminars called “dialogue days.” Each day was devoted to experiences of a particular group: African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, and American Indians.

The report emphasizes that the nation is approaching a point in the future—estimated to be 2050—when minorities will constitute a collective majority. While its findings about the educational plight of minority males aren’t particularly surprising, commentators said, the moment in history makes them particularly troubling.

SEE ALSO

For more on educating boys, visit the related Education Week blog, “Why Boys Fail.”

“It’s gotten to the point where we’re talking about, almost, a permanent underclass in this country, and that is a very, very dangerous development,” said U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, which partnered with the Asian Pacific American and black caucuses to sponsor the Jan. 26 briefing. “And it comes at a time … when the hues and the tones and the colors of this nation’s face are changing. That population merits more attention now because of that demographic shift that is happening across this nation.”

The College Board report says the crisis it explores has been overlooked by much of society, but is shared by male students across minority backgrounds. Its common themes include a lack of male role models, a search for respect outside of education, the sense of a failing education system, poverty, language barriers, community pressures, and a loss of cultural memory.

“We have studied it exhaustively, the challenges facing black males and males of color in general, but we’ve been unable to execute a plan that changes the results,” said Sidney Ribeau, the president of Howard University, a historically black institution in Washington. “That’s what I think we need to be doing, and I think the College Board by convening individuals here has taken a very important step.”

Declining Educational Levels

The report notes that the U.S. Census Bureau projects that more than half the nation’s children will be members of minorities by 2023, and that members of minority groups are expected to make up 54 percent of the nation’s population by 2050.

Noting that only 26 percent of blacks, 18 percent of Hispanics, and 26 percent of American Indians complete postsecondary degrees—with the percentages even lower among men—the report warns that “the overall educational level of the overall American workforce will probably decline” into the foreseeable future.

“Sometimes we need to sort of revisit our own experiences and say, what was it that exempted us from that and helped me be here today?” said U.S. Rep Mike Honda, D-Calif., the chairman of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. “Looking at the exceptions and those kinds of things, maybe we ought to pay attention to that. And I think [President Barack Obama] has something to say about that, too.”

The report points to programs it says have helped create such exceptions, including the Harlem Children’s Zone, which couples child and family services in that New York City neighborhood.

Roy Jones, the project manager of the Call Me mister program at Clemson University, in Clemson, S.C., sat in on a panel discussion and detailed his program, which recruits high school males from underprivileged communities to study education and return to teach at underprivileged schools.

Educators hoped the findings from the College Board report and their discussion would be a step toward fighting a crisis they say is largely overlooked for a variety of reasons. Those include a presumption that the educational process is tilted in favor of all males, or that issues facing each minority group are independent of each other. They also include, said several panelists, inadequate data for student achievement broken down along race and gender lines.

“Not only are we having trouble finding gender differences, or gender and race differences, and getting that information together,” said Luis Ponjuan, an assistant professor at the University of Florida, “but we even have trouble finding more specific information regarding subgroups within the ethnic groups.”

Then there’s the perception that not all minority groups face disadvantages. For example, said Robert Teranishi, an associate professor of higher education at New York University, Asian-American students could be categorized as a “model minority” because of their academic achievement.

“That’s inaccurate, misleading, and damaging,” Mr. Teranishi said, pointing to studies that find Asian-American students have high rates of academic dissatisfaction and depression, as well as the huge swath of ethnic variety within the term “Asian.”

“If there’s any conclusion that can be drawn about the population,” he said, “it’s that they’re an incredibly heterogeneous group, and there’s really no single narrative that can capture their range of educational experiences.”

Published in Print: February 3, 2010, as Report Examines Obstacles for Minority Male Students

By Ian Quillen

Male students who are members of minority groups continue to face overwhelming obstacles to pursuing their academic aspirations, according to a report from the College Board. The result, it says, is a little-talked-about “third America” that is predominantly male, largely incapable of contributing to society, and often destined to be incarcerated.

Members of Congress and educators warned of the consequences of failing to address those obstacles at a Capitol Hill forum last week, held in conjunction with the release of “The Educational Crisis Facing Young Men of Color.”

The report includes testimony from more than 60 scholars, practitioners, and activists convened by the New York City-based sponsor of the sat college-admissions test at four seminars called “dialogue days.” Each day was devoted to experiences of a particular group: African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, and American Indians.

The report emphasizes that the nation is approaching a point in the future—estimated to be 2050—when minorities will constitute a collective majority. While its findings about the educational plight of minority males aren’t particularly surprising, commentators said, the moment in history makes them particularly troubling.

“It’s gotten to the point where we’re talking about, almost, a permanent underclass in this country, and that is a very, very dangerous development,” said U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, which partnered with the Asian Pacific American and black caucuses to sponsor the Jan. 26 briefing. “And it comes at a time … when the hues and the tones and the colors of this nation’s face are changing. That population merits more attention now because of that demographic shift that is happening across this nation.”

The College Board report says the crisis it explores has been overlooked by much of society, but is shared by male students across minority backgrounds. Its common themes include a lack of male role models, a search for respect outside of education, the sense of a failing education system, poverty, language barriers, community pressures, and a loss of cultural memory.

“We have studied it exhaustively, the challenges facing black males and males of color in general, but we’ve been unable to execute a plan that changes the results,” said Sidney Ribeau, the president of Howard University, a historically black institution in Washington. “That’s what I think we need to be doing, and I think the College Board by convening individuals here has taken a very important step.”

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