Denver, with its 42.9 percent Anglo enrollment, has a 9.9 percent dropout rate. Both were much higher than Cherry Creek's 2.4 percent, which is by far the best in the area. (Next best is Boulder's 6.7 percent.) On the other hand, Denver's 9.9 percent is almost equally far below the 16.8 percent rate in Denver, a system with only 19 percent minorities, or Westminster's 13.7 percent. Westminster's pupil membership is 23 percent minority. And there's one final indicator, to which teachers generally pay more attention than parents. A school district's pupil-teacher ratio. Even though pupil-teacher ratio has only a vague relationship to the actual class sizes a pupil will find in a school system, the ratios do say something about the comparative amounts of adult help a student can expect in various school districts. On this scale, Denver is far and away tops, or lowest in the ratio of pupils to teachers at 17. Next lowest, are Westminster at 18.2 pupils per teacher, and Commerce City at 18.3. In the middle of the rankings are Aurora and Cherry Creek, both at 20. Highest ratios belong to Jefferson County, at 20.8, Littleton at 21.3 and Northglenn-Thornton at 21.4. In sum, when speaking of Denver in comparison with the other school districts of the metropolitan area, as they say in that beer commercial, it is surprising, and the surprise is how good it is. Two final points about all this. Point one is, if you didn't know how good the Denver Public Schools are, one reason, aside from the stereotypes, is that their public relations operation is lousy. They do a better job of hiding their light under a bushel than any school system. I know. If you want to know how good they are, you gotta guess, you don't catch them telling you. Point two is, as Dr. Orfield says, they're running out of time. If they ever want to get Anglos with children to move into the city, desegregate housing and improve their racial balance, their tax base, and get them off those court ordered buses, they need to see that people, especially realtors, do know the kind of facts I've been passing along. If housing desegregation is ever to take place in Denver, someone, possibly realtors, is going to have to needle the Denver School Board into ending the secrecy about their quality. INTEGRATED EDUCATION January-February, 1976 will separate be more equal? gary orfield Once it became apparent, in the early 1950s, that the Supreme Court would seriously consider ordering school desegregation, there was a great rush in a number of states to make segregated schools more equal, at least in terms of some obvious, tangible features. Southern leaders reasoned if they were to defend separate but equal schools some of the most scandalous inequalities must be ended. After the 1954 decision the strategy continued. Local leaders hoped that more equal facilities would discourage the filing of law suits and help prevent blacks from transferring under court-ordered freedom of choice transfer plans. The result was an epidemic of handsome new red brick schools for black children and a closing of the enormous gap between salarics for white and black teachers. When faced with the imminent threat of integration, southerners showed willingness to take some steps towards equality. The southern lawyers came before the Supreme Court arguing that if only segregation remained untouched new bond issues and other actions would deal with some of the most severe inequalities. In South Carolina, for instance, the Governor and the legislature had authorized a new $75 million bond issue.' Even under the gun, however, the equalization moves were limited. The new buildings were often overcrowded from the beginning and offered a limited range of courses taught by poorly trained teachers. to one teacher. In my judgment it would be far wiser to spend the money that we might spend for busing, to reduce the pupil-teacher ratio. It should be eight to one or seven to one. . . .3 Perhaps, these comments suggest, minority group leaders could exchange the threat of busing for some hard cash or some additional programs in ghetto or barrio schools. During the past decade these possibilities have been explored in a number of ways, both in and out of the courts. The general record has been one of frustration. Yet the issue continues to arise in Congress as successive anti-busing measures are voted into law. The most important attack on tangible inequality came in the courts. After California state courts struck down the state's discriminatory system of school finance, litigation was launched in a number of states and many observers believed that the Supreme Court would find the entire system of statewide financing unconstitutional. The Supreme Court's 1973 decision in the Rodriguez case, however, rejected this whole line of argument, concluding that the Constitution could not require equal educational spending since education itself was "not among the rights afforded explicit protection under our Federal Constitution." Even in states where the drive went forward in the state legislatures or state courts it soon became evident that equalization would principally benefit low income rural districts, since cities usually spent more money than the state-wide average, though less than many suburbs. At any rate, as the Court pointed out in the Rodriguez decision, research had produced no substantial evidence that an increment of funds would make any difference in the success of central city students. Federal education aid would be another logical source of additional money for ghetto schools. Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was intended to focus federal funds on concentrations of poor children and was originally expected to account for a steadily rising percentage of school expenditures. Unfortunately, federal assistance during the past seven years has accounted for a declining fraction of rapidly growing educational costs. While President Nixon was fighting desegregation, he was also vetoing three of the first four education appropriation bills of his administration. In a dramatic election year speech calling for anti-busing legislation, President Nixon promised more money for ghetto schools. But when his message actually went to Congress, it turned out that the President was merely proposing to concentrate existing funds on fewer schools, providing no new money. The same pattern continued when President Ford sent up his first education budget. Senator Walter Mondale summarized the proposal in an address to the National Education Association: The budget... recommends an absolute cut of almost $600 million in federal aid to elementary and secondary education, which, if one accounts for inflation, is an effective cut of $959 million. The Ford budget virtually freezes funding for Title I, which is an effective cut of $200 million; rescinds the entire increase for bilingual and handicapped education; reduces emergency school aid Achievement test scores in Denver are and have been rising since at least 1978. They are higher now than they were before desegregation. To be sure, the standardized tests used were changed in 1976, so it's impossible to say precisely how much better the achievements of Denver students are now than they were then. But just so you'll get the flavor of the Denver school system's achievement, back in the dear, dead days of 1971, when the system was like 60 percent Anglo and 95 percent segregated, the citywide score in second grade on a standardized reading test was 42. In 1977, three years after desegregation, it was 49 and in 1980 it was 57. That's seven percentile points above the national norm. Seven points above the national norm isn't good enough for you? And somebody needs to stand up and say it's wrong. Back in the early days of the civil rights movement, blacks used to make a big point, in trying to educate Anglos like myself to the inner realities of racism, of the fact that whites too often stereotyped blacks-saying they all had rhythm, could sing beautifuly, or whatever. Dumb, said blacks to us naive Anglos, blacks don't all sing well, have rhythm, or anything else. Blacks are as mixed a bag as any other group of people. Well, nowadays there are stereotypes about cities too. And realtors who want to sell homes there, and school officials who want to keep their schools racially balanced, have to fight those stereotypes. The idea that urban school systems must inevitably be bad is a stereotype, true of some cities, not true of others. Denver is one where it is not true. Denver is in fact one of the very best big city school systems in the nation. In various respects, though not in all, certainly, it is better than many of its suburban neighbors, as we shall see. And I say that, not just from the viewpoint of a reporter viewing them from the outside. I have had three girls go through that system, in schools ranging from 20 to nearly 80 percent minority. They have all had good educations, with ups and downs of course, better some years and in some schools than in others. But this I must say, the girl who has had the best education was the last. She graduated last June from East High and benefited the most from the various improvements the school system has put in since it became desegregated. For it is a far better school system now than it was then it was segregated, don't let anyone tell you differently. For instance, my Mary spent a semester in the Denver Public Schools' Executive Intern Program, working with the top public relations executive at Columbia Savings. They had her doing everything, setting up and supervising various promotional contests, riding in a hot-air balloon, writing and typing press releases, escorting visitors around the place. And they had her doing it fast; she was startled at how fast she had to turn out the work. It was absolutely great experience, and something neither of her older sisters had a chance to do. The next semester, a couple of teachers at East High worked her to a frazzle in advanced placement courses-of which you'll hear more soon. It was tough, but she is surviving a high-pressure freshman year at Northwestern University now only because of what she learned in one of those classes, and because of the pressure they put on her last spring at East High. So much for a father's eye view of the Denver Public Schools; now for a more reportorial view. Some realtors maybe feel they have to advise people with school-age children to skip Denver and settle in some suburb like Aurora, perchance? Let me clue you in on a little secret. In the 1978-79 school year, Aurora tested grades 3, 5, 8 and 11; Denver tested grades 2, 5 and 11. They used different tested and therefore the results cannot be compared precisely. Nevertheless, the results can be used as a general indication of the relative academic standing of the two school districts. The citywide scores for Aurora were, for the grades it tested, 55, 53, 55 and 56, none, as high as Denver's lowest scores. I cite these little facts, by the by, not to put down Aurora, but simply to point out that Denver just might be better than many people think. Compare Denver, for another example, to Jefferson County, another big school system which, despite its size, manages to be very good. The three grades Jeffco tested in 1978-79 were the 3rd, 6th and 9th. The countywide scores for those grades were, respectively, 67, 70 and 68-just about 10 points higher than Denver in each grade. So Denver has got a ways to go before it can catch up with Jeffco, right? Right on, mates. But if Denver, with its 44 percent Anglo enrollment, can match 95 percent Anglo Jeffco, under any circumstances, which school system would you say is doing the best job with what it has? Well, here's another little secret for you. Again using the 1978-79 scores, the top five elementary schools in Jefferson County in third grade reading were Ralston, crest and Stevens schools, Ralston with a percentile score of 82, the other two ith 81 and half a dozen schools tied at 77. In Denver, using second grade reading scores from the same year's tests, and the ime standardized test Jefferson County uses, the top five schools were Palmer at 2, Stevens at 88, Godsman at 84 and half a dozen schools tied at 76. Now you tell me, if you are looking for the very best schools to send your child to, here are you going to find them? Stevens School in Denver, incidentally, is an old Victorian relic sitting in the heart of polyglot Capitol Hill, on the edge of the Congress Park neighborhood. Some of the kids are quite affluent; some are quite poor, and they come in every skin color God ever invented. But as the scores attest, that is quite a school. Live parents, live kids, live city neighborhood. Let us turn now to one of the lesser known indicators of how much a school system really cares about getting the brightest of its students into college. Advanced Placement (AP) courses and tests. AP courses are college freshman-equivalent programs given to ambitious high school seniors (and sometimes juniors). They are available in such fields as American or English Literature, Foreign Languages and Literature, American and European History, Calculus, Chemistry and Physics. How a teacher teaches these courses is up to the teacher, but the pressure has to be more intense than the usual accelerated high school course because the payoff is the student's ability to pass the AP test at the end of the course. These tests are nationally standardized by the College Entrance Examination Board and devised by college professors. But if a student passes with one of the top three grades, 3, 4 or 5, he or she can be granted college credit and allowed to skip that freshman course in college, a significant saving of time for the student and money for his parents. (The most competitive colleges only accept grades of 4 or 5 for credit; many, if not most public colleges will accept grades of 3 or better.) So which school system in the metropolitan area has by far the most students in AP courses, has the highest percentage of students taking AP tests, gives the greatest number of tests and has the most students passing AP tests with grades of 3 or higher? Yeah, sure, it's that slummy big-city system, Denver. It had 7.8 percent of its high school juniors and seniors taking AP tests in 1979-80. That's 695 students, more by far than any other school district in the metro area. In 1980, Denver administered 1,137 tests, more than all the other 13 school districts in the Denver area put together. And Denver students passed 614 of those tests, 54 percent with a score of 3 or better. The only Denver area school district coming even close to Denver's record on AP courses and tests is-guess-no, not Jefferson County, not Cherry Creek, but Littleton. Littleton in the 1979-80 school year had 207 youngsters, 6.5 percent of its high school seniors and juniors, taking some 341 Advanced Placement tests. And Littleton students passed 262 of the tests, or 76.8 percent, about what you expect of an affluent, white school district. Jefferson County is down among the also-rans when it comes to Advanced Placement tests. They too are affluent and pretty white, at least compared to the 58 percent minority enrollment in Denver. But just to show you how things go, there is one high school in Denver that is still pretty segregated, full of low income minority students. On almost any academic indicator, its ratings are the lowest of any high school in Denver. And on AP tests, it is typically low, only about 1.4 percent of its students tried the AP tests in the spring of 1980. Pretty sorry, huh? Well, I don't want to put anybody down, but that 1.4 percent is the same percentage of students who took the AP tests in Jefferson County. What does that prove? Who knows? Perhaps it would at least suggest that, in the Denver area, you can't tell the best school districts without a lengthy scorecard. Now let us consider an indicator of how well a school system has fine-tuned its offerings to the needs of its students, dropout rates. Generally speaking, the presence of large numbers of minority and low income children is supposed to make it more difficult for a school district to hold down its dropout rate, to hold its youngsters in school. This is particularly true if the school district also has to cater to significant numbers of affluent, highly motivated children, which Denver does. So where does Denver rank among metropolitan area school districts on this indicator? Right in the middle, about 8th out of 14, according to 1979-80 figures of the Colorado Department of Education. That is, Jeffco, with its 93 percent Anglo enrollment, has an 8.9 percent annual dropout rate. [desegregation assistance] funding by $160 million, virtually eliminating it; and, in fact, eliminates all funds for drop-out prevention, nutrition, health, and ethnic heritage. It would cut $300 million from the school lunch program. Mondale concluded that Ford was attempting to cut the education budget twenty-five percent in dollars of constant value. There are many local variations, of course, on the national discussion of the relationship between the question of integration and that of more equal schools. In some cases, there have been explicit trades. The most famous of these came in the bitterly controversial deal between the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP and the local school board to settle the NAACP desegregation case out of court. The local chapter dropped the case in exchange for an agreement to appoint black administrators to key positions within the school bureaucracy. The arrangement was subsequently denounced by the national NAACP and the leadership of the local chapter removed." The deal, however, was implemented and it did reflect the frustrations of pursuing traditional strategies in a school system like Atlanta's which was rapidly becoming as overwhelmingly black as that of Washington, D.C. community control At another level, community organizers in New York and other large cities pressed in the late 1960s for a policy of "community control." Confronted with a long and bitter deadlock on desegregation, they proposed a substitute approach based on breaking up large school districts and turning over control of ghetto and barrio schools to local black and Latino leaders who would presumably be more responsive to the needs of minority children. The issue produced a terrible teachers strike in New York and eventual legislation which transferred a limited range of power to community school boards. The community control compromise has been a bitter disappointment in New York City. The people in the communities weren't very interested. About a seventh voted in the first elections and the turnout fell to less than a tenth by 1975. The United Federation of Teachers, the principal enemy of many community activists, decisively dominated the elections. In 1975, UFT-endorsed candidates won control of twenty-seven of the thirty-two local boards." Some of the local boards were being investigated for illegal patronage and corruption.10 One of the principal uses of local power was to preserve segregation in white areas. A movement intended to provide a major alternative path to reforming urban schools became an instrument for reinforcing the union's power and for a return of the old ward level politics and corruption that had plagued big city schools early in the twentieth century. It only reinforced segregationist tendencies. During the 1971-72 period, when broad metropolitan school desegregation seemed a real possibility, the issue of additional money for central cities arose again in some localities. One member of the Louisville school board reported that the state legislature granted the city additional funds as a quid pro quo for temporarily withdrawing the threat of a metropolitan law suit. Had the Supreme Court supported metropolitanism in the Detroit case, the issue might well have arisen in other areas. money and the busing bills Against this backdrop of attempts to forestall desegregation by transferring money or power to segregated systems, it is fascinating to examine Congressional treatment of the issue in its recent anti-busing debates. Each time, there has been some discussion of the possibility of providing additional funds to the schools that would remain segregated or be resegregated if the policy of limiting busing were enforced. Congress, however, has not provided money. The position of the president has been to fight for cutting back even the existing aid programs. The 1974 busing fight centered on the battle to extend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. As the House and Senate were writing into the bill various restrictions on desegregation, they were also debating allocation formulas and considering motions to provide additional funds for central city schools. The votes showed that Congress was not only moving toward entrenching racial separation but also toward intensifying educational inequalities. When the House passed the 1974 bill, the anti-busing strictures were accompanied by a new allocation formula which gave more money to the suburbs and the South, while cutting back funds to big cities like New York and Washington." Two Democrats from the Detroit suburbs, James O'Hara and William Ford, pressed for an amendment which would have taken an additional $4.4 million from Detroit and would have given $5.6 million more to two largely segregated suburban counties, both among the twenty richest in the nation.12 O'Hara and Ford had also been leaders of the anti-busing forces since the metropolitan issue first arose in Detroit. Fortunately, the House rejected their amendment. An effort to gain House support for a "compromise" bill restraining the courts but also permitting some desegregation and providing funds for ghetto school upgrading received no serious support. This approach, introduced by Rep. John Anderson (R-II.), leader of the House Republican Conference, received so few votes that its sponsors did not even ask for a roll call. The House was ready to vote for virtually any limitation on urban desegregation that could be drafted, but there was no interest in upgrading the schools that would be condemned to continued segregation. The dominant impulse, in fact, was to shift the money where the votes were, away from the declining and increasingly powerless older central cities. The bill then went to the Senate, which had traditionally defeated House anti-busing measures. In 1974, however, the Senate began to change, enacting. the first substantial limitation on civil rights enforcement authority since 1954. The Senate passed a complex and confusing compromise, after narrowly defeating efforts to directly curtail the courts. The compromise, its advocates claimed, ended HEW's authority to require system-wide urban desegregation and subjected the courts to a number of new procedural limitations.14 |