One way to fix the achievement gap between black and
white children in Springfield schools might be to reintroduce a little bit
of segregation to the classroom, say three prominent area educators. The three men — Jim Forstall, Gordon Smith, and
Allan Woodson — are proposing that District 186 offer special
instruction just for black boys, who typically perform the worst on state
standardized tests. Last week, they went over their plan for a
“school within a school” with district superintendent Diane
Rutledge. According to Carol Votsmier, communications director for the
district, the idea is still under consideration, though several legal
challenges must be addressed. Under the plan, two sixth-grade classes would operate
out of the Matheny building, across the street from Washington Middle
School on East Jackson Street. The proposal calls for a rigorous
college-preparatory program with longer days, longer school years, and an
emphasis on confidence-building. Modeled loosely after Knowledge Is Power Program
charter middle schools and a Jesuit-run “Nativity school” in
St. Louis, at which low-income middle-school-age boys are prepped for
entrance into top Catholic high schools, the program would still have to
fall in line with federal No Child Left Behind standards. Before any of that can happen, the proposal has to
pass legal muster or be altered so that it does. Federal law prohibits sex
discrimination under what’s commonly referred to as Title IX. Separating students by race, though, is likely to be
more problematic, Votsmier says. The district is under a consent decree to
desegregate its schools, and, if the educators’ proposal moves
forward, it could be interpreted as a direct violation of a federal court
order. However, if history is any indicator, the men are
betting that, once the data are analyzed, fifth-grade African-American
boys, who would feed the program, will perform disproportionately poorly on
the most recent Illinois Standardized Achievement Test than their white
counterparts, further justifying the need for a new approach. “The facts are indisputable, and so it’s a
choice: You can sit there and do nothing and see the decline continue or
step up and do something,” says Woodson, a lifelong Springfield
resident and former alderman and mayoral candidate. How diligently district officials work to get this
project, or some form of it, off the ground, the men agree, will prove how
committed the district is to closing the achievement gap, which the
district’s own strategic plan identifies as a priority. “These are relatively simple things to do if you
really consider yourself to be a leader,” Forstall says.
“We’re looking for some leadership from educators on this
matter and not from attorneys or from businesspeople.”
At best, the proposal might appear to some as a
sophisticated form of tracking; at worst, critics may argue, it’s a
slippery slope toward the resegregation of Springfield schools. However, the men do not believe that their proposal
amounts to a rolling back of progress made since the 1954 landmark ruling Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka. Integrating schools, they say, has helped socialize generations
of Americans in a way that might not have otherwise been possible, even if
racially mixed schools have yielded an academic achievement gap. “To resegregate would be a really sorry
statement on America,” says Gordon Smith, a Lincoln Land Community
College trustee. This, the three men say, is merely an alternate
instructional strategy. Still in its early planning stages, the proposal is
being lauded as an out-of-the-box approach to a complex issue. Sheila Stocks-Smith, education liaison to Mayor Tim
Davlin, says she’s encouraged that the proposal was generated by
members of the Springfield community. Former Springfield NAACP head Rudy Davenport
personally supports the plan but says that despite the fact all three men
are “eminently qualified” to pull off such an endeavor,
it’s likely that the Springfield community won’t embrace the
idea. “It will get the usual response: ‘We
don’t like it; we have spent too much money on minorities.’ The
usual response is what got us into this,” Davenport says. Although Woodson believes that citizens will
eventually warm up to their proposal, he agrees that the status quo
hasn’t worked. “Staying the course is not an option. That needs
to be taken off the table,” he says. “Staying the course means
that 89 percent of the African-American juniors at Southeast High School
aren’t doing very well in math. If that’s what staying the
course is, you need to put that in the trash can, throw it out the window,
and find something else.”
This article appears in Jul 6-12, 2006.
