Once again, a removal of race-based quotes results in a dip in "diversity":
...inside the accelerated classes at the Hennigan and other public schools in the city, the pipeline to exam schools is starting to look a lot less like Boston's public schools. Black and Hispanic students fill 44 percent of the 968 seats in the accelerated classes in the school district, though they make up more than three-quarters of Boston's students overall. White and Asian students now occupy 55 percent of the seats, though they are only 23 percent of the district.In particular, the number of black students, now at 239, in the classes has dropped by half since 1999, when the city stopped using racial quotas to assign students to the classes...
''It's not a true picture of what the city is," said Costa, who presides over a majority white and Asian fourth-grade accelerated class in a school that is 85 percent black and Hispanic. ''You can't tell me that all black children aren't capable of achieving like white children. I wouldn't buy that."
No one is saying they aren't capable of achieving. The standardized test score is simply telling you that they aren't achieving, at least not in the numbers Costa would like to see. For some reason, everyone wants to now put the accelerated program under a microscope, instead of asking two simple questions:
1. Does performance on the standardized entrance exam seem to be predictive of whether one will benefit from accelerated learning?
2. If so, then why are black and Hispanic students not scoring well on the exam?
If the test is actually not useful, then other methods should be used. But if the test seems to be useful, the problem is not necessarily with the program or the test. One part of the puzzle might be the attitude that black and Hispanic students can't be expected to do well on objective measures of achievement, and require special set-asides to ensure that they make it to accelerated classes.
Posted by kswygert at December 20, 2005 09:23 AM