Stands Scotland where it Did?

WaPo gives more background to the racial tensions that have surfaced at Montgomery County’s Winston Churchill High School following a string of recent fights and letter sent home by the school’s principal describing them as “Black-on-Black violence.” Residents of Scotland, an historically African-American community in the school’s attendance area viewed the comment as a specific attack on them. In the more recent article, the principal says she made the comment to defend the school’s black students, who have recently raised their test scores.

But the school's African-American students are still not doing very well on state achievement tests. In the most recent assessment, in 2006, only 51% of the school’s black students (who make up 6% of its enrollment) tested proficient in reading—worse than the average for black students in Montgomery County or the state of Maryland as a whole, and a sharp contrast with the 95% of the school’s white students—well above state and county averages—who were proficient in reading. Gaps between Winston Churchill’s white and black students were similarly large in math, although the school’s black students performed marginally better than the state average in math. The racial tensions at Churchill accompany large achievement gaps.

These gaps exist in what is generally regarded as a high-performing, elite suburban school—according to Jay Mathews, one of America’s 100 best—underscoring why disaggregated accountability reporting, a la NCLB, is so important to advancing educational equity for poor and minority kids. Some of Winston Churchill’s students are learning much less than others, but you’ve gotta look past the averages to see what’s going on. Further, Winston Churchill's African-American and low-income students are barely matching or doing worse than their peers statewide even though they attend a racially- and economically-integrated (at least at the schoolwide level), high-resource, generally high-performing school. That’s not an indictment of efforts to advance racial and socio-economic integration, but it is a caution against expecting either to be a silver bullet for improving the achievement of disadvantaged and minority students.