Minorities Hurt by New Standards, Educator Says

Recent efforts to raise standards and improve the quality of public education have exacerbated the dropout problem and caused minority youngsters to slip farther behind, the president of the nation’s largest teachers organization charged Friday.

National Education Assn. President Mary Futrell, in Los Angeles for the NEA national convention that runs through next week, made the charge during a news conference to release the findings of a yearlong study on the quality of minority education.

“Since the beginning of the education reform movement in 1983, we have seen a flurry of education reports. Yet none of them has spoken specifically to the learning needs of minority youngsters” who face greater obstacles to success in school, she said.

Higher Standards Harmful

“As we have raised standards,” she said, minority children have suffered because “we don’t have adequate support systems (for them) in place.”

When a national blue-ribbon panel unleashed a stinging critique of public education in 1983 that spurred the current movement for higher standards, the national dropout rate was 25%, Futrell said. Over the last four years, many states have stiffened high school graduation requirements, emphasized a core curriculum and lengthened the school day. An unfortunate consequence, Futrell said, is that the dropout figure has risen to 29%.

She cited the Education Commission of the States, a nonprofit group that advises states on educational policies, as the source of the dropout figures.

U.S. Disputes NEA Claim

Aside from those statistics, however, Futrell had little hard evidence to support the link between low minority achievement levels and the reform movement.

U.S. Education Secretary William J. Bennett, in a written statement issued from Washington, disputed the NEA claim, saying that recent education reforms have brought improvements “particul1634888825students.” Bennett offered a different set of statistics in support of his claim, including figures indicating that SAT scores for college-bound black and Latino students have risen an average of 15 points since 1982.

Futrell characterized the NEA report, titled “. . . And Justice for All,” as an “anecdotal portrayal” of the conditions minority students face in public schools throughout the country.

15 Cities Studied

The group sent study teams into schools in 15 major cities and found that black, Latino, Asian and American Indian youngsters tend to be in schools that are poorly equipped and overcrowded. Because of language barriers, the report said, minority students often are mistakenly placed in special education programs.

The report also faulted schools for expecting less of minority students than of white students, even though this seemed inconsistent with its claim that the stricter standards resulting from the education reform movement were responsible for the poor academic performance of many minority youths.

“What we heard and saw was a tendency to dummy-down the curriculum . . . and a lowering of educational expectations,” said Pearl Mack, a fourth-grade teacher from Harvey, Ill., who headed the study committee on black students.

Underachievers Neglected

Conversely, teachers and principals tended to stereotype Asian students as a “model minority” composed exclusively of high achievers, a practice that has led to a neglect of Asian youngsters who do have learning problems, the report said. The NEA team found many Asian youngsters who were not performing at the highest levels, who belonged to gangs, and whose identity struggles had led to “dropouts, suicide and in some cases homicide,” said Robert F. Chase, a Connecticut junior high school teacher who headed the Asian study group.

Among the many recommendations contained in the NEA report were beefing up bilingual education programs, increasing federal funding of education, and training and recruiting more minority teachers.