Being black and poor is no barrier
to test success for these kids


by Mary Jane Smetanka
Minneapolis Star Tribune
May 16, 1997

Read student profiles

The stereotypes say Kehara Snowden, 13, should be an underachiever.

She is poor and black and lives with one parent. Her family doesn't own a home or have a car or a phone. She has moved a lot, in the past couple of years going from Wisconsin to Minneapolis to California and back again to Minneapolis.

<Picture>Kehara Snowden, an 8th-grader at the Northeast Middle School, attends a pre-international baccalaureate class, where she is challenged to read difficult texts and write often.

But if that describes her life, it does not describe Kehara. The round-faced eighth-grader at Minneapolis' Northeast Middle School is confident, self-possessed and focused on going to college. She excelled on the basic-skills math and reading tests that state students must pass to graduate with the class of 2001. On tests that require a score of 75, she achieved a 90 in math and an 83 in reading.

To Kehara, it was no big deal. "I was a little nervous, but not enough to talk about," she said. "I knew my mom expected me to do well, and I didn't want to disappoint her."

But her scores and those of other disadvantaged black students who did well on the tests are a big deal to educators and legislators.

Failure rates are shockingly high among black students: Last year, 75 percent failed the math test, and 79 percent didn't pass the reading test. White students' failure rates on the same tests were 26 percent and 43 percent, respectively.

As legislators discuss giving schools money for remediation, conversations with Kehara and three other Northeast students who aced the exams despite coming from families poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches suggest that schools may have a hard time replicating the qualities those students have.

Some things, money can't buy.

Different in personality and interests, they are united by a conviction that education counts, that they are nobody's victim, that in a fast-changing world they must excel or be lost. And they said they know that if they failed the tests, an adult in their lives -- a dad or mom, a godmother, a grandma or a teacher -- would jump on them.

Northeast English teacher Karen Lee works with Kehara and Sandy Lucius, 14, who passed her math test with a 76 and her reading test with an 85. They are motivated teenagers with character and inner strength, Lee said.

"Life is choices," she said. "I can be the best teacher in the world, and I can pour knowledge over the kids, but they won't absorb it if they don't want to. . . . For these two girls, someone along the line told them that education was important, and they believe it. That makes a big difference."

Poor kids, poor scores?

Poverty has been tied to poor test scores for so long that many people have stopped questioning whether one really causes the other. That link, and the large number of students in poverty in Minneapolis and St. Paul, has been one of the main explanations for the city school systems' poor showings on state basic-skills tests.

That's why there was such an uproar last month when a University of Minnesota researcher who did the first detailed study of individual test results concluded that poverty, as measured mainly by the use of free or reduced-price lunches, had only a small effect on creating the racial gap in scores. Legislators who opposed giving more remediation money to urban schools seized on the news as proof that schools did not need more funding. Puzzled school officials said they wanted more information about the conclusions.

<Picture>Preston Buckner, Sandy Lucies, Kehara Snowden and Eric McCottry, left to right, talk about why they have excelled at school.

The study's author, Samuel Myers Jr., director of the Wilkins Center on Human Relations and Social Justice at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, found that regular school attendance and good scores on standardized achievement tests in second grade were far more reliable predictors of how students did on the basic-skills tests. He said he worried that focusing on poverty as a cause of low scores "clouded the issue of what can be done to help even poor students achieve."

Part of the debate, though, is what constitutes poverty. Minneapolis school Board Member Judy Farmer argues that the number of students who receive free or reduced-price lunches -- the measure available in state data -- doesn't begin to convey impoverishment as it is seen in the most troubled areas of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

She says the situation of a child on a farm whose parents had a bad harvest but who has a stable home, a car, a phone and books at home doesn't compare to that of a child on welfare who moves three times a year between Minneapolis and Chicago, lives in a drug-infested neighborhood, doesn't know who his father is, has a mom who fears the schools and doesn't have a phone.

As the definition of socioeconomic status is broadened to include such factors as parent education and occupation, it increasingly influences how students perform on tests, said experts at the University of Minnesota. But even then, said Mark Davison, professor of educational psychology, "people have gotten a somewhat exaggerated view of its relation with achievement."

People assume that socioeconomic status is primarily a reflection of what's happening to kids at home, Davison said. It is that in part, he said, "but it also mirrors what happens in school." Kids from upper-income families are studying different textbooks and taking different course work, he said.

Courses steer success

Research shows that the single biggest influence on how kids do on tests is what kind of classes they take at school. Fifty percent of the variance in how eighth-graders did on national math tests was related to the classes they took, said Ernest Davenport, associate professor for educational psychology.

<Picture>Preston Buckner, age 14, said that he is motivated to do well in school because his father emphasizes the importance of his taking responsibility for himself.

Elementary students often begin splitting into advanced or remedial courses that determine the classes they will take in junior high, and that shows the importance of good early education, Davenport said. It also illustrates the importance of teacher attitude -- and the risk of bias. Studies show that advisers are less likely to direct able black students into advanced math courses than they are white or Asian students. And they are less likely to try to keep those students in advanced classes if they start having academic trouble.

Davison said some researchers argue that teachers in inner-city schools are so concerned about damaging disadvantaged kids' self-esteem that they don't demand enough of them. Others believe that well-off parents may demand more of their schools -- and their kids -- than parents who struggle to make ends meet.

No one really knows, Davison said, but "I'm not sure you can justify the large difference in course work that exists."

"We also know there are differences in attendance rates, and we need to talk to parents and kids about that," he said. ". . . Much of it is working with parents of these kids and working with communities, not just the schools in isolation. We have to extend accountability to parents, too."

A recent paper co-authored by Jeremy Finn, a visiting scholar at the Educational Testing Service in New Jersey, found that at-risk minority students who stayed in school and did well were distinguished mostly by behavior that shows commitment by both parents and school: They attended class, were on time, completed homework and avoided disruptive behavior.

"You can break that dependency on race or poverty under the right conditions," Finn said. "A lot of that comes from home. . . . But one thing we believe is that engagement begins in early grades. That's when most powerful intervention in school begins."

© Copyright 1997 Star Tribune. All rights reserved. <Picture: Related Item> <Picture: Article>Bios on four successful scholars