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Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Santa Fe schools face divide

By Mark Oswald
Of the Journal
      In the middle of Santa Fe Public Schools Superintendent Bobbie Gutierrez's “state of the schools” address in November, she dropped in a couple of paragraphs of statistical information that struck me as remarkable, as I read a copy of her speech later.
       The subject Gutierrez was broaching by reciting a few numbers was that here in Santa Fe — where we're proud of our tricultural roots and celebrate diversity — we seem to be becoming increasingly segregated, at least when it comes to where we send our kids to school.
       That may not be big news to anyone who's been paying attention or even just passed by school playgrounds the past several years. But the degree to which Hispanic or Latino Santa Feans and their Anglo neighbors separate when it comes to education may be becoming acute.
       Hispanics, Gutierrez said, make up about 85 percent of students in the public schools; Anglos are only 12 percent. American Indian students represent about 3 percent.
       That's in a county — remember, the district boundaries extend well beyond the city limits — where 49 percent of the population is Hispanic, 45 percent is Anglo and 3 percent is Indian, the superintendent noted.
       The city of Santa Fe, where the big majority of the school district's population lives, is about 48 percent Hispanic, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates ahead of the next official count in 2010.
       So there seems to be a major disconnect between how we sort out among our various ethnic backgrounds as residents and citizens and how we think and act as parents of schoolchildren.
       Just how big a divide we've created is a bit fuzzy. School district officials cautioned that the 85 percent figure for the student population's Hispanic representation needs to be considered inexact — the student makeup shifts over the school year and depends on what day counts are made.
       Also, I was told that the percentages Gutierrez used didn't include the student bodies of the district's four charter schools. Including the charters, the roughly 13,600 students in the Santa Fe schools currently break down this way: 75 percent Hispanic, 20 percent Anglo, 2.6 percent Indian and the rest from other ethnic groups.
       Also to be noted: The district's school-age population is more heavily Hispanic than Santa Fe area's overall population. By how much is difficult to pin down.
       As someone who grew up in the South, the percentages that Gutierrez cited set off old alarms. I've seen this movie before, I thought, or at least one with a similar ending.
       Over the past several decades, Southern schools went from the legally imposed segregation of the Jim Crow era to hard-won integration and then, in many cases, back to de facto segregation, via “white flight” to private schools or suburban districts.
       Here in Santa Fe, are we headed for the same result, only without the violence, debate and self-examination that accompanied school battles elsewhere?
       (Full disclosure here — my son attended a public elementary school and, then, in what by many accounts is a classic Santa Fe move, switched to a private school — St. Michael's — for junior high and high school. More on that below).
       I wasn't the only one who took note of those percentages cited by the superintendent. School board member Martin Lujan says he's been talking about it. He used those disturbing words — “white flight,” unprovoked by this native Arkansan — and said Santa Fe may be “at a tipping point.”
       What's to be done? Lujan mentioned specialized magnet schools with “niche marketing,” more schools with the kindergarten-to-eighth grade format, closing the achievement gap between Anglos and Hispanics and improving the schools' overall performance by doing more to keep and retain bilingual teachers for the growing number of English-as-a-second-language students.
       Barbara Gudwin, one of Lujan's opponents in upcoming school board elections, said the ultimate solution is to make the public schools better, to the point where when a parent chooses between public or private education, quality isn't the issue — it might be religion or wanting an all-girls or all-boys school, but not quality.
        (My family's choice to leave public schools was based on a lot of things, reasons both positive and negative, after a great elementary experience. On the negative side was our inability to navigate the district's intradistrict transfer policies of the mid-1990s, that era's financial mess that had state government take over the district budget and prompted staff cuts at middle schools and, as part of a newspaper project, one extremely scary day sitting through middle school classes led by substitute teachers.)
       There are no easy solutions, but in progressive Santa Fe, where we're aggressively anti-war, pro-living wage and pro-organic, maybe the schools ought to get some of that heartfelt attention, too.
       Mark Oswald is the Journal Santa Fe editor.
       

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