A Good-School, Bad-Grade Mystery
Educators Striving to Close Racial Gap in Affluent Ohio Suburb

By Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 23, 1998; Page A01

SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio – For many African American families, the wide lawns, winding streets and highly regarded schools of this gilded suburb are the hard-earned bounty of a difficult struggle to escape the hapless urban drama of nearby Cleveland.

“People get here and say, ‘Whew, we got out of Cleveland. We have it made now,' ” said Cheryl Johnson, a Shaker Heights resident who left the city nine years ago. “Once they're here, they assume everything is going to be all right.”

But many black residents here are being jolted from their middle-class serenity not by crime or eroding property values, but by the abysmal grades on their children's report cards. African Americans make up just over half of the Shaker Heights student population but account for 82 percent of those who fail at least one portion of the state's ninth-grade proficiency test and 84 percent of those who earn D's or F's in at least one major subject after fifth grade. In four recent high school graduating classes, blacks made up just 7 percent of the students in the top fifth of their class, while they constituted 90 percent of those in the bottom fifth.

A school system report documenting the racial achievement gap said that, in Shaker Heights, poor academic achievement among black students is “the norm.”

The 5,600-student Shaker Heights school system might seem a strange place to find such racial disparities in student achievement. Far from the urban blight commonly associated with underachieving black students, this suburban school system has a reputation for being one of the best in America. The vast majority of students, black and white, are at least from middle-class families. The schools spend nearly $10,000 a year to educate each child, a level of funding nearly 50 percent above the national average. Advanced courses are open to any student who chooses to enroll. High-achieving black students mentor struggling younger ones. And after-school, weekend and summer academies are available to bolster student achievement.

Still, Shaker Heights officials acknowledge that they are as baffled as their colleagues elsewhere by the persistent achievement gap between black and white students. It is a problem that cuts across American education, from impoverished school districts to the most wealthy, and it is evident in a range of educational measures. Nationwide, African American preschoolers score much lower than whites in vocabulary tests. And by the 12th grade, 48 percent of blacks score below the basic level on national reading assessments, compared with 19 percent of whites.

Locally, the Maryland Department of Education recently released a draft report on student achievement that concluded that minority students, most of whom are black, “have experienced failure in momentous disproportion.” The problem is an issue of particular concern in Prince George's County -- hailed as a black middle-class mecca, yet ranked as having the second-lowest achieving school system in Maryland, ahead of only Baltimore.

Other local school districts, too, are putting more emphasis on minority student achievement. Earlier this year, the Fairfax County School Board established a numerical target for boosting the SAT scores of nonwhite students.

Most troubling to educators is the growing consensus that the achievement gap now seems to largely defy the explanations that were once offered.

Some researchers say that wide income differences between blacks and whites, and school segregation -- once cited as crucial factors in the achievement disparity -- are now believed to play relatively small roles in the current gap. Family structure appears to be even less of a factor, research has shown. And even school spending is no longer seen as decisive, given that the once yawning disparity between the average amounts of money spent to educate black and white students has been all but eliminated in recent years. Also, most research has thoroughly discredited the notion that the gap reflects innate differences between the races.

Consequently, educators are placing new emphasis on more intangible factors that may hold the key to closing the gap: teachers, even black ones, who have higher expectations for white students and push them harder; parents who don't regularly cajole their children to work hard and take the most challenging classes; and black students who are sometimes ridiculed by their classmates for “acting white” if they struggle to do well at school.

“This is not a problem that schools alone can solve,” said Ronald F. Ferguson, a Harvard University researcher who is conducting a survey of student attitudes in Shaker Heights.

Some clues about how student attitudes vary by race have emerged in other surveys around the country. When asked who they are trying to please by working hard in school, white students are more likely to say their parents, while blacks tend to say their teachers.

Likewise, when asked to name the lowest grade that they could bring home without angering their parents, whites usually name a higher grade than blacks.

And, Ferguson noted, such findings do not always correlate with the family's economic class. For example, he said, Asian American students whose parents have not completed high school usually name a grade as high as those named by whites whose parents have completed graduate school.

The achievement gap has taken on new significance in recent years because, after nearly two decades of improvement through the 1970s and 1980s, progress has stopped. Coming at a time when the amount of school resources devoted to black and white students is reaching parity, many educators and sociologists are beginning to conclude that the key to continued progress may have more to do with what goes on outside the classroom than in it.

Here in Shaker Heights, school officials have been observing a racial gap in school achievement for decades. It has always been an alarming issue in this city, which is proud of its reputation as a national model of racial integration, and officials have attacked it with a varied arsenal of programs. Tutors work with small groups of kindergarten students identified as needing help to enhance their language skills. Regular sessions are offered to help students prepare for state proficiency tests. Art classes are designed for the expressed purpose of boosting students' self-esteem. Special high school classes are established for slow-learning students, and a high school counselor works with students who exhibit strong academic potential but have low grades.

All of this has produced limited results. Shaker Heights has some of the highest-achieving black students in the country, with nearly 90 percent of the system's graduates, black and white, going on to college. But if the school administration has within its control some of the solutions, it is also coming to realize that many of the answers lie elsewhere.

“I'm convinced that this is really a peer culture issue,” said James Paces, a Shaker Heights school administrator.

Many high-achieving black students in Shaker Heights say flatly that their black peers often don't do well in school simply because they don't work hard at it.

“For the most part, there is a large difference in the effort white students give and the effort given by black students,” said Tara Grove, a black student who is vice president of the high school's junior class, a member of a student race relations group and a member of the volleyball team. “To some people, school is not a priority… In Shaker, for many black students it is not a priority. Don't ask me where that mentality comes from.”

Grove said that relatively few of her black schoolmates are eager to raise their hands in class, and that they are generally less likely to complete homework assignments. Also, she said, few blacks choose to take high-level “honors” or advance-placement courses, opting for the comfort of classes attended by most of their friends.

High-achieving African American students also complain about being ridiculed by fellow black students who tease them if they expend a lot of effort to earn good grades.

Prodded by her parents, Aida Harris always worked hard in school, earning top grades and taking the toughest classes. But by the time she got to middle school, she found that her gung-ho attitude alienated her from many of her black friends.

“People constantly told me that I'm acting white, that I'm an Oreo,” she said. “I was constantly shunned by my black classmates.”

The harassment grew so intense that her grades dropped from A's and B's to C's and D's. She said that she became preoccupied with her racial identity and let her grades slip in hopes of getting back in the good graces of her friends.

At one point, she told her parents that she wanted to leave public school altogether. “It was traumatic, absolutely traumatic,” said her father, Reuben Harris Jr., an insurance agent and a founding member of a parents' group focused on raising black student achievement. “She was feeling ostracized and separated from her own people.”

Aida Harris eventually improved her grades, but only after extraordinary intervention by her father. He found time to sit in at her middle school every day, and now he is a regular presence at Shaker Heights High School, where his daughter is a sophomore.

“I had strong support from my parents, which made it possible for me to be independent,” Harris said. “Many [black] kids don't seem to have the same kind of support.”

Parents, students and staff said the reaction of Harris's black friends is not unusual in Shaker Heights, and that it has an effect on teachers and other staff who are sometimes lulled into underestimating black students. “I've heard a counselor say that black students shouldn't take honors classes because they wouldn't do well in them,” Reuben Harris said. “And it was a black counselor who said that.”

While Aida Harris has had to fight peer pressure to be a good student, her best friend, a white girl named Heather Schubeck, has found that her white classmates frequently put her on the spot to succeed.

“I was pressured by these white kids,” said Schubeck, a senior. “They were having fun, but they were all getting A's.”

John Ogbu, an anthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley, is among those who has found that student achievement often correlates with how the majority community perceives a minority group. He noted, for example, that Koreans tend to do poorly in Japanese schools where they are viewed as academically inferior. In the United States, meanwhile, they tend to do well, he said.

Moreover, he said, whites and immigrants are more likely to link academic achievement with real-life success. Blacks, given the history of discrimination against them, are less likely to see the connection.

“I believe a lot of African American students choose to fail,” said A. Jack Rumbaugh, the longtime principal of Shaker Heights High School. “That doesn't change our determination to help them succeed.”

In the face of such pressures, educators say it is crucial that parents be intimately involved in their children's class work. But in Shaker Heights, it is often white parents who are most active in parent-teacher organizations, available to be school volunteers and present at back-to-school nights. At a recent high school open house, several black parents said, 90 percent of the parents who showed up were white.

“Many people seem to feel that once they got to Shaker, to Nirvana, to heaven, they could just work hard to pay the bills and the school district will take care of the rest,” said Roslyn Mack, a black parent with two children in Shaker Heights schools. “But they are finding out that it takes a lot more than that.”

Achievement Gap

Despite the highly regarded schools in Shaker Heights, a middle-class Cleveland suburb, a gap in academic achievement persists between blacks and whites there.

Percentage of Shaker Heights eighth-graders passing state proficiency test, 1995-96

Shaker Heights Mean SAT scores, 1996

National Mean SAT scores, 1996

SOURCE: Shaker Heights City School District

© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company

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