MAPLEWOOD/SOUTH ORANGE, NJ — To no one’s surprise at the Aug. 24 South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education meeting, Sage Consultant Thelma Ramsey outlined several disparities in the school district between black and white students.
Ramsey explained that there are many more white students in higher classes than black students, that black students are overwhelmingly suspended more than white students and that there are a lot more white district employees than there are black employees.
The district is working with Sage Consultants to obtain feedback from students, parents and staff, and has conducted a self-assessment of its current programs and courses to identify any potential barriers.
Back in October 2014, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Civil Rights Remedies of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA filed a complaint with the OCR, urging an investigation into the South Orange-Maplewood School District’s practices of tracking and school discipline. According to a release from the ACLU-NJ, the SOMSD practices of tracking — which groups students with similar achievement level in classes together — and its methods of discipline affect students differently based on race and disability status.
The district and the federal Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights entered into an agreement shortly after the complaints were filed, although the two entities had been in talks long before that. As part of the agreement, the district agreed to several criteria in an attempt to shrink the racial disparity in higher level courses. The school district has been corresponding with the OCR to report the its progress, and has agreed to provide training for relevant district and school site administrators and personnel.
According to Ramsey in her Aug. 24 presentation, 50 percent of the district’s students are white, 35 percent are black and 15 percent are other races; however, at Columbia High School, black students outnumber white students in every grade.
The first of Ramsey’s findings was that the staff does not mirror the schools’ racial composition. Among all district personnel, approximately 81 percent are white; only approximately 11 percent of staff is black. Studies have shown that it can be discouraging to students not to see teachers who look like them.
This issue has been brought up many times in the past, as has Ramsey’s second finding that there is a disparity between white and black students in high-level placement in math and language arts courses, beginning in the middle schools.
One of Ramsey’s greatest concerns was that the course descriptions are vague. She pointed out that, although the middle schools were de-leveled except for math, the new course titles are still levels, with the lowest level being general for children who need more help, then college preparatory, honors, advanced honors and Advanced Placement. Ramsey asked what exactly “college preparatory” means and what skills parents can expect their students to learn in such classes. She also pointed out that having an advanced honors class and an Advanced Placement class could be confusing, obfuscating for parents what the levels truly represent.
The report notes: “Although the placement does not explicitly state that middle school students are placed in ‘levels’ the practice of level placement is evident.”
That being said, Ramsey found a vast disparity in math course makeups at the middle schools. In the college-prep courses at Maplewood Middle School there are in the sixth grade 73 black and 40 white students; in the seventh grade, 68 black and 24 white students; and in the eighth grade, 61 black and 34 white students.
At South Orange Middle School there are in the sixth grade 50 black and 42 white students; in the seventh grade, 46 black and 24 white students; and in the eighth grade, 49 black students and nine white students.
These numbers are drastically turned around in the honors math courses. In all grades combined, MMS has 53 black students in honors math with 202 white students; SOMS has 61 black students in honors math with 202 white students.
The number of black students in higher-level courses continues to drop. In the seventh grade advanced honors courses, MMS has 45 white students and one black student, while SOMS has 63 white students and six black students. In the eighth grade geometry advanced math courses, MMS has 24 white students and three black students, while SOMS has 17 white students and three black students. In the eighth grade geometry honors math courses, there are six white students and two black students at each middle school.
Ramsey again pointed out that having geometry advanced classes and geometry honors classes is confusing.
After looking at the middle school course distribution, the report concluded that students are clearly being academically tracked beginning in sixth-grade, and that it is difficult for black students to move to higher levels, setting the groundwork for disparities in the high school.
At Columbia High School, there are 495 white students taking at least one AP course, whereas there are only 170 black students taking at least one AP course.
As in the middle schools, black students are more often placed in “college prep” classes while white students are in AP classes, with honors classes being fairly mixed, though there are still more white students in those.
BOE member Stephanie Lawson-Muhammad pointed out that black students in honors classes are only in the tracks that include AP classes, which are predominantly filled with white students.
“There appears to be within-school segregation. It is possible that a white student or black student could, in their core classes, not see a student of another race,” the report read. “It is possible that a white student in a college prep course may be the only white student within a class.”
As for discipline, Ramsey’s report found that of the 73 incidents of suspension at the high school last year, which concerned 52 students, most of those suspended were students of color, with 45 being black, five being white and two being other races.
First Vice President Madhu Pai pointed out 52 high schoolers being suspended is not a huge number, and represents only approximately 2.75 percent of the school population, but Ramsey countered that the problem is not the number of suspensions, but rather the racial makeup of those being suspended. Pai added that she would like to see data explaining why each of these children was suspended, and Ramsey agreed that they should also look into which teachers refer students for discipline and why.
According to Ramsey, all of the above data was collected from March through June through school visits to the middle and high schools, meetings with administrators and central office staff, meetings and surveys of school staff, two public community forums and from personnel records. All the data was manually compiled.
Ramsey did find that certain data was unavailable and she recommended that the school district create data teams at the middle schools and high school to collect and process information throughout the year.
Among other recommendations, Ramsey suggested that the district hold more informational workshops for parents about the different levels, allow students to sample various class levels, institute transition programs for students entering the middle and high schools and improve professional development for teachers.
While the BOE members indicated they appreciated Ramsey’s work, they seemed to have expected more, especially since they had already had access to many of these numbers following the ACLU complaint.
“We all know these numbers,” Pai told Ramsey. “The data you got doesn’t really help us figure out how to solve it. It doesn’t have the data we need to fix it.”
But Ramsey responded that this is only an initial step and that the district must compile data on the instruction in the classrooms to see what is causing black students to be held back.
Board member Beth Daugherty pointed to one factor that may be causing disparity in the core classes. She reasoned that although the middle schools were de-leveled except for the math classes, there is still an undercurrent of leveling due to scheduling, in effect.
“Because there is leveling there, it has an impact on classes which aren’t meant to be leveled, but by-and-large are,” Daugherty said.
Board member Elizabeth Baker and student representative to the board Nina Kambili both asked Ramsey about her assessment at the elementary school level. Ramsey replied that she will be looking at the elementary schools this coming year, as right now the only elementary school data she has is NJASK results.