Report examines achievement gap

Local school leaders will review a report Thursday on the status of minority achievement in area classrooms, but the results could create more questions than answers.

Members of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Board of Education will discuss the 2003-04 District Report Card on African-American and Latino Student Progress.

The 74-page report shows improvements and areas of concern; it is based on test results and academic performance of the district’s black and Latino students.

Diane Villwock, the district’s director of testing and program evaluation, said end-of-course testing in Algebra I and instruction for students in kindergarten through second grade are areas of concern.

“I think we’ve got to figure out what we’re not doing and what we’re not doing well,” she said.

Among the areas of improvement are a rise in end-of-grade reading test scores for black third graders and an increase in the number of Latino and black high school seniors who planned to attend a four-year college after graduation.

The district continued closing gaps between black and white students, including a 7 percentage point reduction in the mean gap in reading for third through eighth grades.

“We are making headway on the gap,” Villwock said. “I have no reason to think we can’t eliminate it.”

The document also featured a comparison of the end-of-grade and end-of-course results from the city schools and Wake, Forsyth, Durham, Orange, Guilford and Charlotte-Mecklenburg school systems.

Those results show that the district’s minority students topped the results in six of 12 categories.

Local black third- and eighth-graders outperformed their counterparts in all six other districts on end-of-grade math testing.

But the district’s students did not do as well in other areas.

Local fifth-grade Latino students were at the bottom of the rankings on end-of-grade reading tests, with a 71 percent proficiency.

Latino high school students who took the end-of-course test for geometry also did poorly, ranking only above students from Charlotte-Mecklenburg in the report.

Tina Siragusa, executive director of El Centro Latino, said closing the gap between minorities and whites is a community effort. “There needs to be more support.”

SAT results are another area in which black and Latino students underperform in comparison to white students. The report shows that Latinos score 139 points lower than white students on their SATs — well above the state gap of 83.

The gap between SAT results for black and white students in city schools is 285, with white students achieving the higher mean. The state gap in that category is 200.

But Villwock said SAT scores are not the best measure of student performance because students are not required to take the test.

School board members will discuss the report during a work session Thursday night. “The board is not being asked to make a decision,” said Chairwoman Lisa Stuckey. “We are just receiving the information.”

Stuckey said members will focus attention on correcting problems at their annual retreat next month.

Members of the community can share their opinions with board members after the session, which starts at 7 p.m. at Phillips Middle School, at 606 N. Estes Drive.

Contact the Ciy Editor at citydesk@unc.edu