Work on education gap lauded

From the Wisconsin State Journal, May 2, 2006

ANDY HALL ahall@madison.com

Madison made more progress than any urban area in the country in shrinking the racial achievement gap and managed to raise the performance levels of all racial groups over the past decade, two UW- Madison education experts said Monday in urging local leaders to continue current strategies despite tight budgets.

"I've seen districts around the United States, and it really is remarkable that the Madison School District is raising the achievement levels for all students, and at the same time they're closing the gaps," Julie Underwood, dean of the UW- Madison School of Education, said in an interview.

Underwood said she's heard of no other urban district that reduced the gap so significantly without letting the test scores of white students stagnate or slide closer to the levels of lower-achieving black, Hispanic or Southeast Asian students.

"The way that it's happened in Madison," she said, "is truly the best scenario. . . . We haven't done it at the expense of white students."

Among the most striking trends:

Disparities between the portions of white and minority students attaining the lowest ranking on the state Third Grade Reading Test have essentially been eliminated.

Increasing shares of students of all racial groups are scoring at the top levels - proficient and advanced - on the Third Grade Reading Test.

Graduation rates have improved significantly for students in every racial group.

Underwood commented after one of her colleagues, Adam Gamoran, director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, presented a review of efforts to attack the racial achievement gap to the Schools of Hope Leadership Team meeting at United Way of Dane County.

Gamoran told the 25- member team, comprised of community leaders from the school system, higher education, nonprofit agencies, business and government, that Madison's strategy parallels national research documenting the most effective approaches - one-to-one tutoring, particularly from certified teachers; smaller class sizes; and improved training of teachers.

"My conclusion is that the strategies the Madison school system has put in place to reduce the racial achievement gap have paid off very well and my hope is that the strategies will continue," said Gamoran, who as director of the education-research center oversees 60 research projects, most of which are federally funded. A sociologist who's worked at UW-Madison since 1984, Gamoran's research focuses on inequality in education and school reform.

In an interview, Gamoran said that Madison "bucked the national trend" by beginning to shrink the racial achievement during the late 1990s, while it was growing in most of America's urban school districts.

But he warned that those gains are in jeopardy as Wisconsin school districts, including Madison, increasingly resort to cuts and referendums to balance their budgets.

Art Rainwater, Madison schools superintendent, said Gamoran's analysis affirmed that the district and Schools of Hope, a civic journalism project of the Wisconsin State Journal and WISC-TV (Ch. 3) that grew into a community campaign to combat the racial achievement gap, are using the best known tactics - approaches that need to be preserved as the district makes future cuts.

"The things that we've done, which were the right things to do, positively affect not just our educationally neediest students," Rainwater said. "They help everybody."

John Matthews, executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., the teachers union, and Rainwater agree that the progress is fragile.

"The future of it is threatened if we don't have it adequately funded," Matthews said.

Leslie Ann Howard, United Way president, whose agency coordinates Schools of Hope, said Gamoran's analysis will help focus the community's efforts, which include about 1,000 trained volunteer tutors a year working with 2,000 struggling students on reading and math in grades kindergarten through eight.

The project's leaders have vowed to continue working until at least 2011 to fight gaps that persist at other grade levels despite the gains among third- graders.

"I think it's critical for the community to know that all kids benefited from the strategies that have been put in place the last 10 years - the highest achievers, the lowest achievers and everybody in between," Howard said.

"To be able to say it's helping everyone, I think is really astonishing."

Posted by at May 2, 2006 1:16 PM
Subscribe to this site via RSS/Atom: Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas