Gwinnett Schools Using Race Based Education Goals

Most parents probably don’t know that for some time Gwinnett Public Schools have been setting different standards for students based almost exclusively on race.

And if you believe that tests accurately measure a student’s grasp of the material, you would have to conclude that for Gwinnett County it seems to be acceptable that African American children learn less about math than Asian students do.  I understand their problem, so please don’t send me hate mail.  I just have a hard time agreeing with their solution.

Georgia has developed standard tests in each discipline - English, Math, Science, etc.  The goal is to have our public school students all passing these tests at the end of the year.  Georgia (and here is where the problem starts) tracks student performance on these tests by race.  Based on the data they have accumulated they have established certain baselines as to how well a given race is expected to perform on their standard tests.  For instance, they have discovered that only 41.2% of “Black” students (their classification, not mine) are expected to pass the same math test that 82.4% of “Asian / Pacific Islander” can pass. They call these numbers the Georgia Reference Value.  Gwinnett County has taken these baseline scores and set performance goals for the next 5 years.  And this is where it gets interesting.

The school system is trying to improve the education students receive,  so when a particular race is below their target they set a 5 year plan to improve performance.  But the tragic side of this is that when a given race at a school is already above their performance there are no stated goals to improve - and, in fact, the target number of students passing the tests may actually decrease.  As mentioned above, the Georgia Reference Value for Black students in mathematics (41.2%) is exactly half that of Asian students.  At Meadowcreek High School, 52.2% of African American students are already passing the test.  So what does Gwinnett County do?  They set a goal for percent of black kids passing the test at 50% - which is below current achievement levels.

At the same school the percent of Asian students passing the math test is only 78.7%.  Because this is below the Georgia Reference value of 82.4% Meadowcreek will focus on raising the Asian passing rate by 4 points to get them to 82.4%.  To see the targets for your particular High School, click HERE.

So because of these targets a teacher at Meadowcreek may have to tell an African American mom that they just can't spend any more time helping her child move their “F” student to a “D” until after they have helped a few more Asian kids.  That is sad.  I know some teachers, and I am certain none of them will want to tell one group of parents that their kids are doing fine but they need to focus instead on improving the scores of another group - a group that is already testing almost twice as high as their child.  Talk about leaving kids behind...

Even if you don't live in Gwinnett county this philosophy is being presented at places all over the country.  In 2012 Florida and Virginia adopted the same type of ‘standards’ statewide [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/12/echoing-virginia-florida-_n_1959151.html].  But do we really want to motivate our schools to accept different standards based on race?  I would prefer we identify poor performing students, regardless of nationality, and find out how to help them learn.  Breaking them down by race certainly doesn’t seem to help.  Maybe more time on math and less time on ‘Conflict Resolution’ would be a good first step.