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Sunday, January 18, 2009

Diversity Unseen in Public Schools

By Mark Oswald
Of the Journal
          In the middle of Santa Fe Public Schools superintendent Bobbie Gutierrez's "state of the schools" address in late November, she dropped in a couple of paragraphs of statistical information that struck me as a 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 tri-cultural roots and celebrate diversity — we seem to be becoming increasingly segregated, at least when it comes to where we choose to send our kids to school.
        That may not be big news to anyone who's been paying attention or even just passed by schoolyard 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, Superintendent Gutierrez said, make up about 85 percent of the student population in the public schools; "white non-Hispanics" are only 12 percent of the total. 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 resides, is about 48 percent Hispanic, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates ahead of the next official count in 2010.
        And the National Center for Education Statistics, using Census Bureau information, estimates that there are almost exactly as many Hispanics or Latinos as non-Hispanics within the school district boundaries.
        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 school children.
        Just how big a divide we've created is a bit fuzzy. School district officials cautioned last week that the 85 percent figure for the student population's Hispanic representation needs to considered non-exact — the student make-up shifts over the school year and depending 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 (and careful readers will note that her numbers get to 100 percent with no room for the smattering of other ethnic groups with children in the Santa Fe schools).
        Including the charters, the roughly 13,600 students in the Santa Fe schools currently break down this way, according to data the district supplied last week: 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 the Santa Fe area's overall population. By how much is difficult to pin down.
        The best source I came across was at the National Center for Education Statistics, but the numbers are old. In the 2000 Census, among the total population under 18 in the district, Hispanics or Latinos made up 64 percent. It will interesting to see what the 2010 Census finds.
        As someone who grew up in the South, the percentages that Gutierrez cited set off some 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 end result, only without the uproar and violence, debate and self-examination that accompanied the school battles in Dixie and in some non-Southern cities like Boston?
        (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. Mike'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," expansion of the number of schools with the kindergarten-to-eighth-grade format, closing the achievement gap between Anglos and Hispanics (which Gutierrez called "unacceptable" in her speech) 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 next month's 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. "If we improve the quality of learning, this going to get to be a nonissue," she said.
        (My family's choice to leave the public schools was based on a lot of things, reasons both positive and negative, after a great elementary school 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 local middle school classes led by substitute teachers.)
        Maybe segregation is too strong a word for what's happening, especially given the split in birth rates and age categories among our various selves and the demographic changes caused by immigration from south of the border. Another theory is that we're becoming two Santa Fes — one young and Hispanic with lots of kids, another old and Anglo with small families. In any case, the trend toward a mono-ethnic school population appears to be there.
        Santa Feans of all stripes have long supported the school district in ways short of sending their kids to public schools. Voters routinely approve the bond issues the schools need to keep facilities up to date and will in all likelihood (and should) do so again on Feb. 3, when $160 million in bonds are on the ballot.
        And the Santa Fe schools have some brilliant, successful kids and great teachers. But the big problems are obvious — an unacceptable dropout rate and performance indicators that the school board was told recently match those of Gadsden, a poor district near the Mexican border.
        There are no easy solutions, but in progressive Santa Fe, where we're aggressively anti-war, anti-Bush, pro-living wage and pro-organic, maybe the schools ought to get some of that heartfelt attention, too.
       

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