Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for February 15, 2009 MIDDLE-SCHOOL "AP CLASSES"

As a former high school teacher, I can readily empathize with my active colleagues when I read articles like the one below...the norm rather than the exception.

One ignorant, STOOOOOPID sentence screams out...

"Everybody, I think, in the country recognizes the worst schools in the nation are high schools," he said. "So the idea we're going to solve problems by making middle schools more like high schools just sounds awfully foolish to me."

Higher learning: More middle-schoolers leapfrog into advance classes -- but are minorities being left behind?

By Denise-Marie Balona,BR. Sentinel Staff Writer

For decades, high-school students have taken community-college courses to dress up their resumes and prepare for college.

Now, competitive middle-schoolers in Florida are flocking to sign up for high-school classes.

For parents and students, it's a great chance to get ahead. And school districts have something else to brag about: seventh- and eighth-graders completing courses such as Algebra II Honors and biology that had been reserved primarily for ninth- and 10th-graders.

But the nation's foremost scholars in middle-school education are worried the fast-growing trend is leaving minority children behind. They also question whether the practice is legal because, nationwide, it has tended to result in students being segregated by race.

In Florida, high-school-level classes at middle schools are filled mostly with white kids. That's the case even at some schools where most of the kids are black or Hispanic, according to an Orlando Sentinel analysis of public records from the Florida Department of Education and school districts.

The trend has sparked a lively debate nationwide between those who say middle-school students aren't ready to be treated like high-school students and those arguing that the brightest children shouldn't be held back because minorities aren't signing up for certain courses.

Some disparities in Central Florida this school year include:

*At Lee Middle School in Orlando, 93 percent of the kids who take high-school geometry and 77 percent who take Earth-Space science are white. Meanwhile, 29 percent of all Lee students are white.

*At Maitland Middle, about 10 percent of the kids taking high-school-level Algebra I Honors and Earth-Space science are minorities. But almost 40 percent of the school's total enrollment are minorities.

*There are no black children in any of the geometry classes at four Seminole County middle schools. One-fifth of the students at Milwee Middle are black, yet none of the 50 kids taking geometry is black. At Millennium Middle, 24 percent of students are black. Four of the 58 students -- 7 percent -- registered for geometry there are.

Though officials at the federal Office of Civil Rights wouldn't speculate about whether local schools have broken any rules, some of the country's leading scholars say it could be just a matter of time before such disparities trigger an investigation.

Orange County officials said they monitor the diversity of their advanced classes and want their racial makeup to mirror the student body as a whole. But many minorities aren't choosing the high-school classes -- a situation that should change as more kids learn about the program, said Dianne Lovett, the school district's senior director for advanced studies.

"I know that teachers will be recruiting students and encouraging them to step out and take a challenge that they might not think they have the capability of doing," Lovett said.

William Burrell Sr., a black community activist in Pine Hills, was "shocked, but not surprised" by the disparities.

"You're setting one group up to win potentially, and you're setting one group up to fail," he said.

While numerous studies show white kids often perform better in school, research suggests that test scores and grades are only part of the reason white children make up the majority of advanced courses.

Parents play role

Kevin G. Welner, a professor at University of Colorado at Boulder, said parent education is among the biggest deciding factors. The children of college-educated parents tend to look for tougher classes. Their parents are more likely to make sure their kids are doing work that will best prepare them for high school and college.

That means a lot of minority kids, whose parents are less likely to have gone to college and be involved, stay in the lower-level courses, said Welner, who just finished a paper on the subject. Often, black and Hispanic children remain in the lower classes in middle school and into high school. As a result, a larger proportion drop out or forgo college.

"Unless you believe that African-American and Latino kids are somehow, as a group, academically inferior to white kids," Welner said, "then you have to believe there are a lot of kids in those lower-track classes who have the potential for tremendous academic success."

Officials in Seminole County, known statewide for its students' high test scores, are proud that thousands of middle-school students are earning high-school credit.

There, some campuses even offer "pre-IB" classes -- designed to get 12-, 13- and 14-year-olds ready for the rigor of the prestigious International Baccalaureate program offered in high school.

Seminole School Superintendent Bill Vogel said the high-school-level work is a reason his middle schools rank high on the state's annual report card. Last school year, Seminole had almost as many middle-schoolers taking high-school courses as Lake, Osceola and Polk counties combined.

"We don't want to hold any students back," Vogel said. "If they're ready, we will provide the curriculum."

Seeking challenges

Orlando-area parents Tammy Weaver and Melinda King, whose children attend Walker Middle and are white, said they want their kids to be challenged. That's why Weaver's daughter is taking Algebra I Honors as a seventh-grader and King's son plans to take at least one high-school class next year.

"I'd rather her be challenged at a higher level than her get bored with a class and not do the work," said Weaver, who heads Walker Middle's Parent Teacher Student Association.

Tara Romanoff's son, a biracial eighth-grader in Montverde, is taking high-school classes, too. She thinks more black and Hispanic children might opt for the tougher classes if the classes were as diverse as they are at East Ridge Middle in Lake County.

Though most students who do high-school work at East Ridge Middle are white, a higher percentage of minorities take those classes compared with some other schools in the region.

Still, scholars say offering different levels of math, science and other subjects goes against the very premise of a middle school, which was designed to be more nurturing than a high school. Children are grouped in "teams" that travel to the same classes, said Paul George, a professor emeritus at the University of Florida who helped lead the national push for middle schools in the 1970s.

Various child-advocacy groups, including the National Association of School Psychologists, oppose separating middle-school kids by ability -- what educators call academic "tracking."

In some districts -- including those in Georgia, Texas and Massachusetts -- the practice led to action by federal civil-rights agencies. In New Bedford, Mass., the government forced officials to limit tracking in several junior highs. Doing so helped improve scores for some minorities on the state exam, said Fred Fuentes, New Bedford's assistant superintendent for equity and diversity.

George said middle schools should resist the urge to be like high schools, which were modeled after universities.

"Everybody, I think, in the country recognizes the worst schools in the nation are high schools," he said. "So the idea we're going to solve problems by making middle schools more like high schools just sounds awfully foolish to me."