The New Tribune’s editorial board recently told voters that Dexter Gordon and Karen Vialle are extraordinary candidates for the Tacoma School Board (editorial, 7-25). Subsequent discussion in these pages focused on the achievement gap, the disparate outcomes in education across the color line. Voters should have the facts.
What do the data show?
Black students are about 23 percent of Tacoma K-12 students. For all schools, they compose about 14 percent and 15 percent of honors language and math classes, respectively, and about 30 percent and 29 percent of language and math intervention classes.
Put differently, black students are about one third less likely than average to be in honors classes and one third more likely to be in intervention classes. There are significant disparities for other groups, as well. (See the Thelma Jackson report on the school district’s website: www.tacoma.k12. wa.us.)
While these categories show pronounced disparities, the more important picture is what happens in regular classes. There are required classes in which a majority of black students fail. The Tacoma school system has a data system that could enable the district to identify these students early in the term and target resources to get them back on track. The district has been encouraged to do so for several years, but has not acted. This is a problem of leadership, one of many, at the board level.
The official graduation rates are a fiction. The one study that looked at individual transcripts of each student found that Tacoma graduates less than 50 percent of students who enter the ninth grade, not the 70-plus percent reported by the district and on the Superintendent of Public Instruction’s website (www. k12.wa.us).
Perhaps, with optimistic assumptions, that 50 percent can be bumped up to about 63 percent by including students who later get a degree elsewhere or by other means – but that counts the kid who gets his GED letter while sitting in a prison cell – hardly a success story. For more details, see the University of Washington study, “How Many Students Really Graduate from High School? The Process of High School Attrition,” by Charles Hirschman and Nikolas Pharris-Ciurej.
We do not know precisely the differential graduation rates of black and white students, because we do not sufficiently investigate the disparity. If we compare progress toward accumulating credits toward graduation, we find that many black students fall far behind by the end of the ninth grade.
These students do not show up at the door of advanced placement and other honors classes at our high schools. The problems develop before that point. All members of the Tacoma School Board should understand this and recognize that success stories around the country can be reproduced in Tacoma.
This is not a one-issue election. Race is one of several pressing issues – standards, curriculum, family involvement and more – and the top candidates understand that all students need to be served. Excellence has to include everyone.
Right now the shortest route to improving our schools lies in this election. Tacoma, vote!
Sid Olufs is a professor of political science at Pacific Lutheran University, and belongs to a group that pays attention to Tacoma public schools.
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