Don’t Use Test Scores to Scapegoat Latinos

Gov. Gray Davis’ educational initiatives to significantly improve the performances of California’s K-12 school population, while laudatory, may also contain the seeds of a new round of racial tensions. This would be ironic given Davis’ proclaimed end to wedge-issue politics.

Davis’ efforts to pressure school administrators, principals and teachers to show improvement, primarily by attaining better statewide test scores, may well result in the racial scapegoating of Latino students. It is a fact that Latino students on the whole achieve below-average scores on such tests. This can be attributed to a number of factors, including language differences, parental immigrant status, poor teaching and school conditions in barrio schools, low expectations of them and the fact that many Latino parents possess little education and hence find it difficult to assist their children in homework or to consult with teachers.

Yet how are teachers and principals of schools with large numbers of Latino students going to explain these low scores, especially when they are under the gun to improve these scores or risk losing their jobs? One possible scenario is to blame the Latino students and their parents for not working hard enough or not caring about educational achievement.

This scenario already seems to be occurring at one school in Santa Barbara. Recently at the La Cumbre Middle School, the principal posted test score data along the school’s main hallway comparing Latino and Anglo students. According to the principal, he posted the results of the 1998 Stanford Achievement Test in order to motivate Latino student achievement. While no individual test scores were revealed by name, it was clear that Latinos performed much lower than Anglos. Hence, while there was no individual identity involved, group identity was revealed. In effect, if you are a Latino student at La Cumbre Middle School, you have now been identified as a low achiever regardless of your personal scores or your day-to-day performance.

It may have been the principal’s sincere intent to spur Latino students along with this posting. But it also is possible that this is an effort by school administrators to get the pressures off their backs and to suggest that teachers and principals are doing their jobs as revealed in the higher test scores by the Anglo students, but that there’s little they can do with the Latino students.

What we get here is a school version of Proposition 187, which scapegoated undocumented immigrants.

This incident in Santa Barbara reminds me of a race classification controversy in Texas in the 1930s. Health officials in that state attempted to reclassify Mexican Americans from “white” to “nonwhite” in order to explain the high disease rates in cities such as El Paso and San Antonio, which have large Mexican American populations. By reclassifying Mexican Americans as “nonwhites,” these health officials could explain that the high disease rates were due to the Mexican Americans who, it could be argued, did not care about hygiene. Health officials could note that they were doing a good job given the low rates of disease among Anglos. With scapegoats in the Mexican American population, they could discount issues of poverty, discrimination and marginalization, which better explain poor health conditions in the barrios.

Fortunately, this attempt at reclassification was prevented by the opposition of Mexican American leaders who recognized the true intent of the health officials: to blame the victims.

This is what may be involved at the La Cumbre Middle School. At its worst, it is an attempt to scapegoat Latino students and their parents and to protect the job of the principal. At a minimum, it reveals poor judgment and leadership on the part of the principal.

This is a school issue that should be handled with greater sensitivity and with a minimum of public grandstanding. It would have been more appropriate and perhaps more effective for counselors to meet privately with individual students with low test scores to work out a plan to improve.

It may be that this incident in Santa Barbara is an isolated one. However, we as a concerned public and our public officials, including Davis, should be vigilant that such pressures on administrators and teachers to increase test scores don’t result in more race and ethnic divisions.