Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Friday, July 7, 2006
Ooops, we lost your SAT
A newspaper in Illinois reports 153 SAT answer sheets for kids from Naperville High School in suburban Chicago have apparently gone missing. School officials say ETS received the score sheets and only learned about the missing scores when parents started complaining about not receiving results.
ETS is not acknowledging having received the score sheets. But that’s not the point, a spokesman says:
“Ultimately what matters is that, unfortunately, the results are not there, which means we have to let these kids know they have to take it again.�
I wonder if ETS would have the same attitude, essentially saying it doesn’t matter how the score sheets got lost, if the school was clearly at fault?
But, really, ETS is sorry for whatever mistake may have happened “out there.” Again from the spokesman:
“Obviously we’re sorry for any error that’s out there that happened. We wanted to let the kids know as soon as possible what accommodations are being made.�
That’s so helpful! Because, you know, these things happen. ETS handles more than 2 million tests a year, so you know, a couple of boxes of score sheets are bound to get lost now and again. One more gem from the spokesman:
“Usually when you have so many administered, one or two boxes will have problems and we’ll try to track those down. But one or two is still unacceptable and we try to keep that to a minimum.�
Yes, by all means let’s keep the lost test sheets to a minimum. I mean, security is fairly important when to comes to the SAT, right?
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Testing
Reverse discrimination?
There’s a good question in the comments under my recent post that showed black kids graduate at a much higher rate than white kids in Dayton. “Elementaryhistoryteacher” asks, “what is the ratio of white teachers/adm. to black teachers/adm.?”
Others commenters have come out even more directly and suggested there is reverse discrimination going on in Dayton — that perhaps white students are ignored or worse. Commenter “None Yabiz” describes the experience as a white student at Colonel White High School in 2001 as so unpleasant that he or she opted for a GED instead.
But is there widespread reverse discrimination in the district? Are teachers and other students actively pushing white students out?
The answer to Elementaryhistoryteacher’s question seems to suggest it can’t be too widespread.
I was unable to quickly find a racial breakdown for teachers in the district today. But I found a story I wrote in 2002 that looked at teacher race. At that time I was surprised to discover that a strong majority (63 percent) of Dayton’s teachers are white (I would probably have guessed the breakdown would be closer to 50-50).
Even more interesting, though, was how little that breakdown had changed over the prior 25 years. I would have expected at least something of a swing toward more black teachers starting after court-ordered desegregation brought cross-town busing to Dayton. But in fact, the racial makeup of the district’s teachers was virtually unchanged from 1976, when it was 63.6 percent white.
If teacher race has been that steady for that long it’s probably not terribly different today. Does it seem likely then that there would be widespread discrimination against white students in a school district where nearly two-thirds of the teachers are white? I wouldn’t guess there would be.
What is likely is that white students, at schools where they are in extremely small numbers, feel the same sort of prejudices and stereotypes that any small, isolated minority group feels. It’s just far more common in the U.S. to see black, Hispanic or Asian kids in these situations.
Several months back I wrote about UD professor Ron Katsuyama’s studies of children, how they perceive race and when those perceptions evolve to stereotypes and prejudices. The study found far less prejudice and discrimination among kids in schools with high minority enrollments of 29 to 40 percent.
The problems were worst at schools with extremely low minority enrollments of less than 10 percent. This is a strong argument for truly integrated schools. When enough diverse kids mix together they tend to understand each other better and display less prejudice. Both the majority and the minority kids benefit from this understanding.
In Dayton, with a high school enrollment that is 80 percent black, integration is an enormous challenge. And currently more than three-quarters of the white high school kids go to either Stivers or Belmont high schools.
That means extremely small numbers at the other four major high schools. White enrollment is less than 10 percent at Patterson, Colonel White, Meadowdale and Dunbar high schools.
So perhaps the discomfort that students like None Yabiz feel is the unfortunate, but predictable, result of very unbalanced schools.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
