Top-Notch School Fails to Close ‘Achievement Gap’

Here in one of the best-educated corners of America, this city’s sole public high school suffers a split personality: One exhibits a steady stream of National Merit Scholars, the other an undercurrent of failure.

Viki Rasmussen is a product of one Berkeley High School. The confident 17-year-old took an array of college-level courses before graduating in the spring and leaving last week to attend Brown University. Viki is white.

LaShawna Candies is a product of the other Berkeley High. The 15-year-old, timid and self-doubting, returned last week to start her sophomore year. As a freshman she scored Fs in most subjects, and reads at a second-grade level. She may never be able to decipher a job application, let alone a college text. LaShawna is black.

Attending one of America’s most reputable urban high schools is just about all Viki and LaShawna have in common. The two girls came through the schoolhouse gate, just blocks from California’s flagship university, with vastly different backgrounds and skills. Rather than equalize their opportunities, though, Berkeley High may have succeeded only in maintaining--even widening--the academic chasm between them.

This despite the best of intentions.

Berkeley was one of the first high schools in the country to implement a plan to voluntarily desegregate, and its hallways teem with the children of liberal intellectuals. Yet the school has struggled, without much success, to close the so-called achievement gap separating white and Asian students from less well-prepared blacks and Latinos.

“In desegregating schools in 1968, we thought all we had to do was mix everybody up to assure equality,” said school board President Shirley Issel. “We were so naive. To achieve the dream of public education as the great equalizer, we have to work a lot harder than we thought.”

Thirty-four years later, Berkeley is a polarized campus where high-achieving children from the suburbs meet youths raised on urban streets. Officials say the four years they spend together is not enough to close a gulf caused not just by educational disparities, but also by economics and culture.

Viki and LaShawna are at opposite ends of that gap.

In her home at the foot of the affluent Berkeley Hills, the walls of Viki’s bedroom are a colorful landscape of maps with exotic locales that she wants to visit. The walls of LaShawna’s bedroom are empty; though her mother lives in Oakland, LaShawna stays with her mother’s boyfriend in a blue-collar area known as “the flatlands” so her residence will be within Berkeley boundaries.

Most days, Viki rode her mountain bike to school or drove her mother’s classic 1967 Cougar. Most days, LaShawna takes a city bus.

Though Viki had access to private tutors, LaShawna appeals to her 13-year-old stepsister for help with homework.

While Berkeley High has battled to narrow the gap between students such as Viki and LaShawna, experts say the problem is so intractable that even at this advantaged institution it has placed parents at odds, frustrated administrators and weakened the school’s academic accreditation.

The gulf has also caused tension among students--not only between whites and blacks but among African Americans themselves, who sometimes single out black high achievers as cultural sellouts.

Still, teenagers throughout the region flock to gain admission. A policy allowing transfers from nearby districts--including predominantly black Richmond and Oakland--has helped establish Berkeley among the nation’s most diverse high schools.

Many parents contend that the practice, while laudably egalitarian, has overloaded the school with minority students who can’t compete because their previous schools were so weak. Berkeley’s black student population is nearly triple the city’s 12% rate of African American residents: The school is 32% black, 37% white, 11% Latino, 9% Asian and 11% multiethnic.

School officials say an additional unknown number of outside students attend Berkeley illegally by supplying the district with false addresses to claim city residence. The school has begun an investigation to determine how many unsanctioned students are enrolled.

Many of Berkeley’s problems are shared by high schools nationwide.

Calling the achievement gap America’s “most important educational challenge,” a 1999 national study by the College Board, a student testing group, found just 17% of black and 24% of Latino high school seniors to be proficient in reading, and scoring even worse in math and science. Black and Latino seniors nationwide, on average, read at the same level as eighth-grade whites, other research shows.

Though experts say the problem is more socioeconomic than racial, they stress that educators can make a difference.

“While race is relevant to the achievement gap, some schools in high-minority areas have students scoring among the highest in their state,” said Jeanne Brennan, a spokeswoman for the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Education Trust. “If you’re black or Latino, you don’t have failure written into your DNA. Schools can help improve performance.”

Berkeley has tried hard to strengthen students who enter ill-equipped for its rigorous climate--experimenting with after-school tutoring, buddy systems and stricter attendance policies. In 1996, the school even entered into a partnership with nearby UC Berkeley to analyze its culture of education.

Researchers found a campus with polarized academic cultures; one in which many black transfer students felt lost in a competitive sink-or-swim atmosphere with few role models and little guidance; and another with ambitious white students whose parents and teachers made sure they got the advanced placement classes they needed to graduate to the finest colleges.

The resulting four-year Diversity Report, released in 2000, concluded that Berkeley’s 3,200 students suffered “apartheid-like segregation.” Though white Berkeley students scored in the top 15th percentile nationally, blacks scored in the bottom 40th.

Just 3% of black and Latino students are enrolled in advanced placement classes, compared with 33% of whites. Black students also experienced much higher dropout and discipline rates, the report found.

Some minority students eventually find their way and graduate with good grades. In fact, black students at Berkeley High score higher on standardized tests than their counterparts at other schools and achieve better rates for entering the state university system.

Using 1998-99 figures, officials say 55% of black seniors at Berkeley High had grades enabling them to enter the UC system, compared with 26.3% statewide. For Latinos, the Berkeley rate was 50%, compared with 22.1% statewide.

But that success pales when black students are compared with higher-achieving whites and Asians at Berkeley, officials say.

“Berkeley gets blamed for not solving a problem no other school has been able to solve either,” Issel said. “If there was a quick fix, the problem would become like acne: Nobody would have it anymore.”

A former Berkeley school board member, Pedro Noguera, was so discouraged by the two-tiered educational system that he left to teach at UC Berkeley. Now a professor at Harvard’s School of Education, he is a research consultant to 15 school districts struggling to bridge similar achievement gaps.

“How could a high school do so well by one group of students and do so poorly for another?” Noguera asked. “At Berkeley, white students get the majority of its energies. Everyone else must settle for what’s left over.”

While Noguera was on the school board in the early 1990s, he acknowledged, little attention was given to Berkeley’s minority students. Instead, the school focused on a revolving door of principals, each of whom brought a new agenda, he said.

The problem reached its height after the 1994 PBS documentary “School Colors,” which focused on racial tensions that resulted from Berkeley’s student achievement gap, prompting officials to take the issue more seriously. In 2000, the school was the subject of the book “Class Dismissed” by Meredith Maran, which also highlighted the achievement gap.

Despite Berkeley’s efforts, some minority parents say the school fails to aggressively challenge students of color and hold them to the same academic standards as others.

The best teachers flock to accelerated courses, leaving less experienced ones to cope with overcrowded mainstream classes dominated by minority students. And academic competition among strong students is so fierce that even progressive parents fear that any attention paid to underachievers comes at the expense of their own children.

“The parents of wealthy white students don’t want to focus on the failings of poor blacks,” Noguera said. “And they have a lot of political power on the school board.”

Minority parents also have accused the school of ignoring streetwise teaching alternatives.

Learning that half of Berkeley High’s 300 African American ninth-graders were failing English, math and history, a group called Parents of Children of African Descent devised a way to reach students of color over Christmas vacation in 2000.

Their program--nicknamed Rebound--took 50 freshmen who had failed at least two eighth-grade subjects and placed them in an academic boot camp. The classes featured small teacher-student ratios and parent volunteers to help with discipline. Though minority parents cited a higher student success rate, school administrators called Rebound too narrowly focused.

Citing its $175,000 cost, officials dropped the program after one year, angering parents. “They whine about black parents not getting involved with their kids, but when we develop a sensible plan, they ignore us,” said one group member, Irma Parker.

Issel, the school board president, responded: “To think that parents can dream up a working plan over Christmas is ridiculous. But they’re on the right track.”

Issel said that the achievement gap frustrates her liberal community because, if any public high school commands the intellectual resources to motivate low-achieving students, it should be Berkeley.

This fall, a task force will study yet another approach, a “small schools” alternative in which Berkeley students would be grouped into smaller classes with the same team of instructors over four years, seeking to establish a closer student-teacher bond.

Though no new teachers would be hired under the plan, Supt. Michele Lawrence said, instructors working in groups with the same students would be better organized.

But any real attempt to end the achievement gap should start long before students reach high school and should extend as far back as kindergarten, some officials said.

“It’s only when students hit high school that the rubber meets the road,” former Berkeley High Principal Frank Lynch said. “It’s hard to fix the damage in four years. And we can’t just pass them along, like they do in grade school.”

Because the school is so close to UC Berkeley, people expect better results from his students “as though kids get smarter through some kind of osmosis,” Lynch said.

“A high school principal has the toughest job in education. Multiply that a million times and you’ve got the job at Berkeley,” said Lynch, who left last year after 16 months to become superintendent of the Del Norte County School District, in the state’s far northwest corner. “You’re under a constant microscope.”

Berkeley High’s achievement gap reached crisis proportions in 1996 when the Western Assn. of Schools and Colleges--an independent academic board that rates 3,000 schools in California, Hawaii and the Pacific Islands for their educational standards--refused to give the school the normal six-year accreditation certificate. At one point, the association threatened to withdraw accreditation altogether.

But in May, a visiting review team noted the school’s commitment to reform and extended its certification another three years.

It cited a program in which qualified parents tutor struggling youths, a mentoring program for academically gifted minority students, and a seminar to coach at-risk incoming freshmen in negotiating Berkeley’s course work.

Though Berkeley officials have high hopes that the small schools concept can rally student performance, they know there is no single solution. They are conducting a nationwide search for a new principal and new leadership.

If Berkeley High could ever bridge its achievement gap, Lawrence said, schools throughout the country would take notice. “Berkeley is in such a fishbowl, any success we have solving this problem can influence an entire nation,” she said. “That alone allows us to hold out hope.”