The Black Informant

One school is finding it hard to keep up

(seattletimes.com) Seattle’s African American Academy was supposed to be a model for educating black children.

After almost two decades, it has come to represent the district’s continuing failure to raise black students’ academic achievement.

Seventh-grade math test scores at the K-8 school are the lowest in the district. Enrollment has declined, from a peak of 508 students six years ago to 339 today. When the district chose someone from outside Seattle to take over as principal this fall, the school’s backers protested the decision, a controversy that threatens to drain more students from the school’s half-full building on South Beacon Hill.

Now, as part of a new commitment to boost low-performing schools in the South End, the district is pledging $462,769 this year — enough for six teachers — to the academy, along with a math coach and a reading coach. If the school doesn’t show progress over the next few years, the district may close it.

“We are making that change, putting the supports in, holding them accountable, and if that doesn’t work, we have to look at other options,” said Chief Academic Officer Carla Santorno.

“Letting it limp along is a mistake we’ve made.”

A longtime dream

The African American Academy was the longtime dream of black education activists who were frustrated that even with integration efforts like busing and school choice, black students weren’t doing well in school. They wanted a school the African-American community could rally around, where black students felt accepted. When it opened in a shared Central Area building in 1991, 167 students were turned away because of a lack of space.

They planned a K-12 school where any student could enroll, but with an African-American focus, where curriculum is grounded in cultural principles such as unity, purpose and creativity, and where African-American history doesn’t start with slavery. Students wear uniforms and are called “scholars.” Some of the curriculum focuses on identity issues. For example, in one unit, middle-school kids watched the evening news and discussed its portrayal of African Americans.

District leaders say they want parents to have the choice of a school with an African-American focus, but they stop short of outspoken support for the school.

“I don’t feel like the district always made the academy the priority that it could have been and should have been,” said Tony Orange, one of the school’s founders who now runs a social-service organization in the Central Area. “I think that had they seen it as the jewel that it is, that they would have invested more into it and felt more like we felt about it.”

[…]

Departing principal Malone, 57, has now retired for the second time. She was among a group of African-American educational leaders who first posed the possibility of an academy in the late 1980s. She still has “a mighty hope” for its success, she said. But she’s moving out of state to escape the school’s politics. She’s baffled by the school’s marginal academic success.

“It’s pitiful,” she said of the school’s test scores. “I’m the first one to say that. We’re not doing what we truly believe we can.”

This year, the academy was the only school in Seattle facing the fourth step of federal sanctions under the No Child Left Behind law. Step four means the school must prepare for alternative governance.

In response, the district pointed to things it is already doing: installing a new principal and adding academic coaches. If the school can’t catch up with state standards next year, the district will already have begun the next step: restructuring of the school. Under federal law, replacing the principal and adding staff in critical roles count as restructuring.

District analysis of test scores shows that academy students make impressive academic gains year over year, especially in the elementary grades. But their seventh-grade math scores are the lowest in the district. In the 2005-06 school year, less than 4 percent of the academy’s seventh-graders passed the reading, writing and math portions of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL). (more…)

While I do believe that an African/African-American based education does have its good points, using the cultural approach alone is not a guarantee that kids will do better in school. I especially do not agree with the notion that “…kids learn best if they perceive that their teachers like them.” Here are two of my reasons:

1 - Most of the low test scores amongst Black students in this country come from mostly Black districts with a high percentage of Black teachers.
2 - Apparently this principle does not apply to Asian students as they consistently outscore other groups in areas like math and science under mostly White teachers.

I think that this is just one example of a good idea with less than marginal support both internally and externally.
On the other hand, schools like J.S. Chick elementary school in Kansas City, MO seemed to have been able to become a success story.

Related:

African American Academy