Districts take aim at racial achievement gaps
White students in Milwaukee Public schools are four times less likely than their black peers to be suspended.
In the Madison schools, white students are twice as likely as black children to be enrolled in gifted and talented programs. And in Green Bay, they’re six times as likely to be in an AP class.
Those inequities, laid bare in a project by the public interest journalism nonprofit ProPublica, underscore what has long been known: that Wisconsin has some of the widest achievement and opportunity gaps between black and white students in the country.
Now, for the first time, the state’s largest districts — Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, Racine and Kenosha — are partnering in a new initiative they hope will narrow those gaps. The Wisconsin Urban Leadership Institute is a 10-month program aimed at helping principals recognize racial inequities in their schools and their own beliefs that may help perpetuate them.
“This is really about the principals learning about themselves,” said Alisia Moutry, a Milwaukee-based education consultant who worked with the districts and the NYC Leadership Academy to develop the curriculum. “It’s about having leaders have a serious, internal reflection about equity and how they themselves might be a barrier to students performing the way they should.”
The institute grew out of an effort by the nonprofit Wallace Foundation, the Council of Great City Schools and the National Urban League to strengthen school leadership under the 2015 Every Child Succeeds Act, the latest iteration of the 1965 federal law aimed at ensuring equal access to education.
Wisconsin is one of 10 states where they are focusing that work, in part because of the candor with which Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers has publicly addressed Wisconsin’s gaps in recent years, said Mary Dean Berringer, a Detroit-based consultant who helped assemble the Wisconsin team that included representatives of the five districts, the Urban League of Madison, Evers’ office and others.
“The challenge the team faced was what can we do that’s different,” she said. “What do we know they need to know that they just don’t get in their (principal) preparation programs?”
Their answer: a yearlong course to help principals — who will, in turn, help their staffs — really look at the systems and structures that create or exacerbate
inequities and their own implicit biases that support them.
The first class includes 28 principals from the five districts, which together represent about 20% of the public school students in the state. Over the next 10 months, they’ll embark on some very difficult conversations about race and the psychology of bias. They’ll get one-onone coaching and create capstone projects aimed at addressing an issue related to equity gaps.
Uncomfortable exchanges
Mary Rice-Boothe, chief access and equity officer for the NYC Leadership Academy, braced principals for what she warned could be some uncomfortable exchanges.
“We’ll do a lot of individual work here. What are my individual personal biases?” she told principals assembled for a daylong session. “How does that play into my work and interactions with students and families? But also, how does that lend itself to the institutional and structural pieces that are happening within our school districts?”
Principals were selected in part because they are already working on these issues. At Milwaukee’s Hartford Avenue School, for example, Principal Shannon Kilsdonk has been working with her teachers to recognize their own biases and strategies for countering them.
“Half the battle is becoming aware of it and making conscious decisions to try to combat it with a different approach,” said Kilsdonk, who, like most of her staff, is white and serving in a predominantly African-American school.
Subtle biases
Bias can manifest in many ways in schools: in the questions on standardized tests, in decisions about which students get recommended for Advanced Placement classes, tracked into certain career paths or referred for special ed services; and in the general lowering of expectations for children who live in poverty or in challenging family situations.
It’s often subtle, so much so the teachers themselves may not see it. They may, for example, judge a student’s intelligence by her grammar, or think nothing of a girl walking through a hallway but question a black boy about why he’s there, Kilsdonk said.
“I’ve seen this in any school I’ve gone to. A white or Hispanic student and almost always a female can walk down a hallway without a pass and not be asked,” she said. “But a black male is always going to be questioned: Where are you going? What are you doing? Do you have a pass?”
It’s also not just about white bias. Teachers of color, too, have to look at the ways they interact with students whose life experiences may differ from their own, said Latish Reed, equity specialist for Milwaukee Public Schools.
As part of their training, principals are being asked to examine everything they do through an “equity lens” and to develop culturally responsive teaching practices — curricula and strategies that reflect students’ own histories and experiences and help teachers meet the needs of students and families where they are.
Essential to that work is understanding the distinction between equity and equality, Reed said.
“When we think about the civil rights movement, it was about making sure people had equal access. Now, many years later,” she said, “we realize that just giving equal access is not necessarily meeting their needs.”