A team of top education researchers at Stanford University analyzed nearly a decade’s worth of test score data, attempting to understand the gap that separated the results of white students from Asian, Black and Latino students nationwide.
Their study of scores from students in 3rd through 8th grade from 2009 to 2018 (at BUSD, just through 2016) found yawning gaps in reading and math scores at schools across the country.
But Berkeley Unified stood out more than nearly any other. Among the nation’s 5,000 largest districts, it had the second-largest gap in scores, behind only Washington, D.C.
Five grade levels separated the reading and math scores of white and Black students in Berkeley. White students scored three grade levels above the national average in English and math, while Black students scored two grade levels below.
This chart shows the difference in test scores in reading and math between white and Black students at districts nationwide from 2009 to 2018. BUSD is marked in orange with the number “1.” Credit: Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University
For white and Latino students, the achievement gap — now often called the opportunity gap, referring to the difference in educational opportunities available to students of different backgrounds — spanned almost four years, among the very worst nationally. Asian students also scored below white students, while performing about one grade level above the national average.
This chart shows the difference in test scores in reading and math between white and Hispanic students at districts nationwide from 2009 to 2018. BUSD is marked in orange with the number “1.” Credit: Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University
For close observers of the school district, the results would not be surprising. It’s a district where children of professors rub shoulders with those whose families have been living below the poverty line for generations. The opportunity gap continues to dominate Berkeley’s school board races, budget decisions and superintendent priorities, as it has for decades.
In 1968, the district cemented its progressive reputation by becoming one of the first to voluntarily integrate its schools, intending to end unequal opportunities for its students. But the differing outcomes for students have stubbornly persisted, haunting each subsequent superintendent to take the helm, each pursuing myriad initiatives designed to improve outcomes for the lowest-performing students.
“Our values say that we believe in educating all students but our data doesn’t necessarily reflect that,” said school board director Ka’Dijah Brown, an ’09 Berkeley High grad.
Tai Dickinson, a 2021 Berkeley High graduate, put it this way: The progressive ideals enshrined in the school district’s policy books, he thinks, have little to do with whether students feel supported by their teachers at school.
“You can talk about how you change this and that policy, but it’s not really enacted — it doesn’t make a difference,” Dickinson said.
It’s difficult to determine exactly how BUSD’s achievement gap has changed over the last 50 years, owing to a lack of historical data that’s easy to compare across time. In general, Black and Latino students across the United States caught up substantially to white students between 1970 and 1990, but progress has been uneven since.
Over the years that the study spanned, scores for Black Berkeley students slid. The gap was wider in 2016 than it was in 2009. Scores for Latino and Asian students improved during that time.
Race is just one way to cut the data. Students with disabilities, those who are homeless or in foster care and those learning English also struggle at schools nationwide and in Berkeley, though the Stanford data doesn’t offer the same kind of analysis for those student groups.
Today, there are some signs the achievement gap in Berkeley is no longer quite so grim as illustrated in the Stanford study. But as the number of low-income and Black students in the school district shrinks each year — Black students make up 13% of the BUSD population today, down from a peak of 43% in the 1990s — the results become more difficult to interpret. A new study by the Stanford team, for example, no longer includes scores for Black students because the sample size is too small.
The recent state data we do have show that the gap — still wide — has started to narrow.
Even as the pandemic set students across the country back, Black, Latino and Asian students in Berkeley did a bit better in reading, though scores fell in math for most student groups. In 2022, 30% of Black students in Berkeley met reading state standards, up from 27% in 2019. The same year, 83% of white students did.
Data for last year’s state test scores are not yet available, but in a presentation at the end of her first year as superintendent, Enikia Ford Morthel struck a hopeful tone, backed by promising internal data in elementary reading scores.
“I want there to be a day we can ask [‘How are the children?’] of each other in Berkeley and truly answer, ‘All the children are well,’” Ford Morthel said at the presentation, referencing a traditional Maasai proverb she routinely uses at school board meetings. “They’re not all well yet. But they are a whole lot better because of our collaboration.”
Still, the stubborn gaps in test scores at Berkeley schools beg answers to the fundamental questions facing education: Why are Black and Latino students still performing so far below their Asian and white peers? To what extent are test scores a mirror for the inequality and structural racism permeating American society? How — and for what — should school and district leaders be held accountable?
In this story
- Integrating Berkeley schools failed to close the opportunity gap
- Early discourse around achievement gaps was rooted in racist pseudoscience
- Data show that family wealth tracks closely to academic performance
- Berkeley students say racial biases and dismissive attitudes held by some of their teachers contribute to academic disparities
- Teachers look beyond the classroom to help students overcome daunting challenges
- District leaders say they’re motivated, not discouraged, by persistence of opportunity gap
Integrating Berkeley schools failed to close the opportunity gap
In 1968, Berkeley Superintendent Neil Sullivan reported on a staggering achievement gap: The top quarter of Berkeley 8th graders scored in the top 1% in the nation. The top half scored in the top 3%. The bottom quarter, in the bottom 14%.
That data, published in a report to the school board, became the impetus for Berkeley’s decision to voluntarily integrate. “The large discrepancies between the results achieved at different schools represent … a serious challenge to the concept of equality of educational opportunity,” the committee on integration wrote in its 1968 report.
The initial years following integration were tumultuous, filled with racial tension as well as optimism that scores would rise. But integration turned out not to be a silver bullet for closing the opportunity gap.
By 1972, school board director Mary Jane Johnson warned of a “full-blown rebellion by Black parents,” who were furious with the district over Black students’ poor performance on standardized tests. “If Black kids and Chicanos can’t make it in this community,” Johnson, who was Black, told the San Francisco Examiner, “they can’t make it anywhere.”
read more about integration In berkeley
A radical decision, an unfinished legacy
Berkeley Unified made history by voluntarily integrating its schools 50 years ago this fall. In a special three-part series, Berkeleyside explores that history and its legacy in a very different present-day Berkeley.
Articles in regional newspapers assessed Berkeley’s so-called “integration experiment” with skepticism. The Examiner concluded in 1981 that integration had made it possible for some exceptional Black and Latino students to excel, but scores remained unchanged for the vast majority.
One effort to close the achievement gap included the work of Pedro Noguera, who served on the Berkeley school board from 1990 to 1994, whose son graduated from Berkeley High and who is the Dean of Education at the University of Southern California. In 1996, a team of researchers led by Noguera started what they termed “The Diversity Project” at Berkeley High, using research to raise awareness about the achievement gap.
At the end of six years, the researchers felt they had made progress, but the gap persisted.
“Despite the optimism that led us to believe that Berkeley High School could be a place where racial disparities in achievement could be reduced through school change, we did not achieve our goals,” Noguera reflected on the project in the book Unfinished Business.
“If Black kids and Chicanos can’t make it in this community, they can’t make it anywhere.” — Mary Jane Johnson, Berkeley school board director, in 1972
By 2000, the statistics were still appalling. This time, the top 47% of Berkeley students ranked in the top 25% in the nation. However, not one Black student ranked in the top quartile, and 70% were in the lowest 25% nationally, according to data shared at a meeting of Parents of Children of African Descent, which had formed to agitate the school district to do more about the results.
“In desegregating schools in 1968, we thought all we had to do was mix everybody up to assure equality,” school board president Shirley Issel told the Los Angeles Times in 2002. “We were so naive. To achieve the dream of public education as the great equalizer, we have to work a lot harder than we thought.”
And work they did. In the last two decades, the district has implemented a flurry of initiatives designed to improve the scores of Black and Latino students.
District leaders identified internal structures that they thought reproduced inequality.
The district added small schools at Berkeley High, hoping to foster supportive communities, and the universal 9th grade. There was a campaign to raise attendance. Efforts to reduce suspension rates for Black students and reduce tracking. Culturally affirming programs like Umoja, Puente and the Talented Tenth. The growth of career and technical education classes and programs to get students to college like Bridge and RISE. The establishing and expansion of the Office of Family Engagement and Equity.
Parents have formed advocacy groups like Parents of Children of African Descent and Latinos Unidos de Berkeley to hold the district accountable for educating their students.
And the city has put its weight behind the issue, too, attempting to address the achievement gap in its 2020 Vision.
And after all these efforts, the gap persists.
Early discourse around achievement gaps was rooted in racist pseudoscience
As efforts to address the achievement gap were underway, so was a fierce debate about the root cause of it.
Why, in a city that believes so staunchly in equality, is this problem so persistent?
The debate carried on with fervor in boardrooms, ivory towers and kitchen tables. Some in Berkeley blamed children’s families. Others blamed the school district. Meanwhile, academics laid out statistical arguments attributing poor academic outcomes to poverty and parent education.
“It’s been a really long time since I’ve heard anybody blame families.” — Dana Moran, Berkeley High ethnic studies teacher since 1993
The origins of discourse around racial achievement gaps date back to the 19th century, when pseudoscientists measured the size of human skulls and attributed the differences to genetic inferiority. Scientific racism was used to explain differences in everything from IQ to health outcomes. Debunked in the 20th century, the arguments morphed into a social justification for the low test scores of nonwhite students and resurfaced with books like Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve.
People who still hold these ideas believe that inequality in test scores is fundamentally the result of deficits inherent to Black and brown people. That explanation shifted away from genetics to the cultural deficit argument that was popular in American discourse through Barack Obama’s presidency. Some in Berkeley put the responsibility of low test scores on “parents who don’t care.”
This view has increasingly fallen out of fashion in Berkeley. “It’s been a really long time since I’ve heard anybody blame their families, which is how it originally started,” said Dana Moran, an ethnic studies teacher at Berkeley High since 1993, though the case is still made in anonymous comments on Berkeleyside articles.
Data show that family wealth tracks closely to academic performance
As these arguments were unfolding, a growing body of research was developing that linked test scores with socioeconomic status, parents’ education and children’s achievement in school.
When it comes to economic inequality, Berkeley is particularly unequal. The median white household in Berkeley earns $128,000 per year, compared with $68,000 for Asian households, $67,000 for Latino households and $43,000 for the median Black household. About 80% of white and Asian adults in Berkeley have a bachelor’s degree, compared with half of Latino adults and 29% of Black adults.
Together, these factors fundamentally shape children’s lives, from how much their parents read to them to how much chronic stress they experience on a daily basis. It means the difference between a parent who can pay for private tutoring for their struggling child and a parent who is struggling to put food on the table. Racism, separate from class, also leaves a mark on children’s ability to perform in school, research shows.
While Black Berkeley students score below grade-level on average, it’s the extremely high scores of white students that explain the city’s exceptional achievement gap.
In Berkeley, family income tracks neatly onto students’ academic performance. In 2000, students from the Zip codes with the wealthiest families had the highest GPAs, and the reverse was true, too. The wealthier the neighborhood, the better the students’ grades, with few exceptions.
Analyzing hundreds of millions of standardized test scores for American schools from 2009 to 2018, the Stanford researchers found the same trends were true at schools across the country. Their research found that parents’ income and educational level, as well as patterns of racial and ethnic segregation, were by far the most significant factors shaping achievement gaps.
Most schools with large gaps in scores are not integrated like Berkeley. The Stanford researchers found school segregation to be the most important predictor of achievement gaps, but Berkeley — like districts in Evanston, Illinois, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Menlo Park — was an outlier in this trend.
School districts with the smallest achievement gaps between students of different races tended to be places where all students performed poorly. The exceptions tended to be school districts serving wealthy students. The best test scores for Latino students in the country came from Briarhill Manor Union Free School in Westchester, where 4% of the student body is low-income.
Of the largest 464 districts in California, there are none where Black students perform more than one grade level above the national average, but schools in wealthy enclaves like Orinda and Los Altos come the closest. Piedmont, an affluent city carved out of Oakland, is the only school district, among the state’s 772 largest, where Latino students score two grade levels above the national average.
“Would we make more progress if you would address poverty? Absolutely. And is it unfair to expect schools to solve these problems by themselves? Definitely. Is there more schools can do to better serve low-income kids of color? Absolutely.” — Pedro Noguera, former Berkeley school board director
In Berkeley, while Black students score below grade-level on average, it’s the extremely high scores of white students that explain Berkeley’s exceptional achievement gap. In Oakland, San Francisco and Los Angeles, Black students are slightly further behind than they are in Berkeley, but white students are not as far ahead as they are here.
In his 2004 book Race and Class, academic Richard Rothstein looked at the data and concluded: “The influence of social class characteristics is probably so powerful that schools cannot overcome it, no matter how well trained are their teachers and no matter how well designed are their instructional programs and climates.”
While the data is undisputed, Rothstein’s conclusion is far more controversial, and a huge portion of education research is devoted to the study of what schools can do to fix unequal outcomes.
Noguera doesn’t dispute the intimate relationship between poverty and test scores. But, he said, there are exceptional schools that overcome these barriers. There is no reason that Berkeley High, with its progressive values and its resources, cannot be one of them.
“Would we make more progress if you would address poverty? Absolutely. And it is unfair to expect schools to solve these problems by themselves? Definitely,” Noguera said. “Having said that, is there more schools can do to better serve low-income kids of color? Absolutely.”
In California, several of these exceptional schools are in the KIPP charter network, where students consistently score two grade levels or more above the national average. (Critics of the network have argued the strong results are tempered by high levels of attrition, suggesting that the most challenging students may be dropping out, though it’s been years since the debate resurfaced in the national press.)
What makes the difference at exceptional schools? Studies converge on things like high-quality preschool, effective and experienced teachers and a challenging curriculum — but there’s no one-size-fits-all approach.
Berkeley students say racial biases and dismissive attitudes held by some of their teachers contribute to academic disparities
Asked what’s keeping Berkeley, with all its resources and good intentions, from becoming one of those rare schools where poor students perform on par with wealthy students, some will definitively answer that it’s the racism of low expectations.
“Perhaps the most devastating root to the achievement problems at BHS lies with the teachers. Teachers too often prejudge their students because of their ethnicity, social background, or academic history,” Berkeley High student Rachel Hamburg wrote in an opinion article for The Jacket in 2004. “Students who are expected to achieve less usually do.”
This view reverberated throughout conversations with some students, parents and district leaders. In a passionate outgoing speech in 2018, school board director Karen Hemhill called implicit bias the “single most significant factor in our continuing academic disparities.”
“There are many middle-class and other college-educated Black families, including mine, that can cite chapter and verse of how their student was perceived as less than,” Hemphill said in the speech.
Ashley Felipe Campuzano, a recent graduate of Berkeley High’s International Baccalaureate (IB) program, recalled how a teacher talked her out of taking AP Chemistry because she thought she couldn’t succeed. Tai Dickinson, also an IB grad, said that while retaking a test with a group of students, his AP science teacher referred to them as “the dumb kids.”
They said some of their teachers held low expectations for them and gave preference to high-achieving white students. “I was trying to improve my grade and the teacher was like, ‘No, I don’t think you can,’” Felipe Campuzano said.
These isolated incidents stack up, Dickinson said. “You’re not worthy of my help, is what it feels like,” he said.
From his perspective, what mattered was whether his teachers held him to a high standard, believed whole-heartedly he could meet it and did what they could to help him get there. Too often, Dickinson said, that’s not what happened, at least when he was a student. This fall, Dickinson will be attending Cal after two years at Berkeley City College.
Beginning in elementary school, school board director Laura Babitt said she went through the same thing with her daughter. In kindergarten, Babitt noticed that her daughter’s teachers sent home low-level independent reading books, even though she was reading above grade-level at home. In first grade, the same thing happened again.
“I thought that the rest of the class must have still been behind, which is why she kept sending home little baby books with my child,” Babitt said. “I found out that … other kids in her class were reading higher books.”
Reflecting on his work at Berkeley High, Noguera, the researcher and former school board director, said the most frustrating manifestation of this problem was Black and brown kids wandering the halls of Berkeley High or smoking weed in Civic Center Park, when they should have been in class.
“The school district is there, the city is there, the police department is there,” Noguera told Berkeleyside. “It was such a disgrace. There’s almost a total professional disregard for the fact that many of those kids are not getting an education, but it’s disguised by a kind of liberalism.”
That’s the kind of racism most prevalent in Berkeley, Noguera said, though more overt examples exist, too. Haleemah Majahid, a junior at Berkeley High, said her teacher used the N-word in class in a historical context, deeply offending students.
“Students who are expected to achieve less usually do.” — Berkeley High student Rachel Hamburg, in 2004
Last year, students in RISE, a program that prepares low-income students for college, began conducting their own research study on the academic success of Black and brown students at Berkeley High. In the end, the students will offer suggestions for teachers, informed by the surveys, on how to improve their relationships with their students.
One solution, often proposed but difficult to actualize, is to hire more diverse teachers. It’s not just that students want a teacher who looks like them. They want a teacher who they can relate to — a teacher who can discipline them with a familiar raise of an eyebrow, recognize when they’re not giving their best and draw on examples that resonate with their life experiences.
To be sure, there are already many teachers in Berkeley who raise the bar for their students and lovingly hold them to it.
Jose Gonzalez Vasquez, a junior at Berkeley High, said he feels close with pretty much all his teachers. When he missed multiple weeks of his sophomore year due to illness, they were understanding, he said, helping him learn the material he missed. Some parents Berkeleyside spoke to said they have few complaints about their children’s education at BUSD.
Still, the experiences of tacit and overt racism, repeated by some students, parents and school board directors, are part of the district’s lore, as ingrained in its story as integration, putting cracks in its progressive veneer.
Teachers look beyond the classroom to help students overcome daunting challenges
To be a teacher in Berkeley is to every day be confronted with the challenge of closing an achievement gap that too often falls along racial lines — and to face the difficulty of interrupting the deep-rooted pattern.
“We are trying to address and respond to generations of systems of oppression,” Superintendent Ford Morthel said.
Teachers “take a ton of personal responsibility for the failure of our students,” Moran said. “We also understand there’s certain realities that we’re up against that make it sort of wishful thinking to think that one teacher could have some huge influence.”
To Moran, there is no bigger challenge, or bigger success, than changing the mind of a student who thinks that they cannot succeed in school.
“We are trying to address and respond to generations of systems of oppression.” — Enikia Ford Morthel, superintendent
In recent years, she has tried to do this through a class called LEAP, a tiny support class for 9th grade students that makes explicit the kind of invisible academic knowledge that leads to student success. She feels hopeful that she is reaching students. Alumni of the class, some attending colleges like UCLA, come back to tell her that she made a difference in their lives.
Adrianna Betti runs RISE, the college prep program that is part academic support, part social work. In her 25 years with RISE, she has witnessed the wide range of challenges students face — homelessness, food insecurity, deportation, friends lost to violence. She sees her job as helping students succeed in school in spite of those challenges.
Programs like RISE and Bridge are working: They are getting low-income, first-generation students to college. But they serve a small share of the students who need it. Program directors say they turn away students every year. “Why don’t you fund programs that have shown a track record since 1976, that have been successful every year?” Betti asked. (This year, the district agreed to give RISE more funds to be able to grow their program and pay their staff better wages.)
Retired math teacher Dan Plonsey believes teachers and school board directors have an obligation to advocate for policies at the state or national level that will redistribute wealth and address intergenerational poverty, alongside running their schools and classrooms.
“I believe the moral obligation remains for all who are involved in education to collectively, as a profession, protest the root injustice” while attempting to improve schools, Plonsey wrote in an email to Berkeleyside. “It’s akin to doctors striving to improve treatment for gunshot patients while at the same time advocating for gun control.”
District leaders say they’re motivated, not discouraged, by persistence of opportunity gap
With each new superintendent, the Berkeley community holds its breath, hoping that this will be the leader to bring about a turn in the achievement gap.
Before Superintendent Ford Morthel started in her role last summer, she told Berkeleyside she intended to “make some changes in a system that’s pretty stubborn.”
A year into her tenure, it’s still too early to evaluate her success. But we asked if she is discouraged by the persistence of the opportunity gap, year after year, decade after decade.
“Revolution has never been easy,” Ford Morthel replied. “I don’t think that any of us come into this work taking for granted how incredible the task at hand is.”
Describing her work as “social justice in action,” Ford Morthel said she is motivated, not disheartened, by the persistence of score gaps, a sentiment shared by her leadership team and repeated in many conversations with school teachers and administrators.
“We need to recognize that structural, societal challenges do play a role in how students come to us every day,” said Associate Superintendent Jill Hoogendyk, who oversees curriculum and instruction. “But we come to education believing that we can help encourage and inspire and make a difference.”
This year’s focus is on improving classroom instruction, Ford Morthel said, and literacy is the heart of that. The hope is that if educators get it right the first time, incorporating more explicit phonics in the younger grades in a way that reaches all students, they will need to rely less on intervention strategies later on.
Much hope has also been placed in the African American Success Framework, led by a team of education consultants, with Robyn Fisher at the helm.
Started during the pandemic, the framework is an umbrella for a list of initiatives that support Black students. The consultants offer their own programming, like Step Up Academy, a summer intervention program, and bring together existing offers, like the case management designed to reduce the number of Black and Latino students identified for special education. Brown described it as the most comprehensive effort to address the opportunity gap she has seen.
The district’s other initiatives, like the Latinx Resolution and Multilingual Learner Master Plan (in English and Spanish), are in play as well, though they have received less air time at school board meetings.
“Even 20 years from now, there’s still going to be work to do.” — Ka’Dijah Brown, Berkeley school board director
The district also offers a range of supplemental programs targeted toward low-income students. If parents can buy private tutoring and academic summer camps, Berkeley Unified wants to offer intervention through BEARS after-school and makerspace camps in the summer.
“People’s socioeconomic status, I can’t really influence that as much,” Babitt said. “All I can do is try and fill in the gaps with these culturally relevant programs.”
District leaders also don’t neglect to list the other things that are integral to their work, like partnering with families or offering classes that will engage a more diverse set of student interests, like sound design, through BUSD’s career and technical education program.
Ford Morthel doesn’t believe schools alone can address all the effects of systemic oppression. That, she said, will require collaboration — with parents, with the city, with community organizations.
When can we expect to see the end of the opportunity gap at BUSD?
“There’s no magic formula,” Babitt cautioned.
“Even 20 years from now, there’s still going to be work to do,” Brown said. “But incremental progression is the name of the game for academic outcomes.”
3 college bound, 1 tutor for one child in one course.
“My feeling is that the majority of students of color actually live in Oakland” – wow, just wow. This is an incredibly uninformed (and unsubstantiated) “feeling” that not only reflects a complete lack of understanding of Berkeley demographics but also seems to (offensively) imply that students of color from Oakland who are dragging down BUSD’s test scores.
You seem to know a lot of teachers who are quick to make racist generalizations about their students/their families, including your mom (who you specifically mention above).
It’s quite troubling to hear that an educator is making racist generalizations about her students/their parents (or that her son is framing them as such) and speaking about them to her family in such a disparaging way. Not all parents have the time, ability, and resources to support their kids’ education in the same way that other parents do and it doesn’t mean those parents “don’t care about education.”
Look at the poverty rates in Berkeley and Cambridge in my initial comment.
Note also that the poverty rate in the US as a whole is 11.6%, compared with 19.4% in Berkeley, despite the high level of inequality in the US.
Note also that my initial comment said: “That isn’t a complete explanation but is part of the explanation.” It is very clear that different methods of teaching reading at different schools lead to different outcomes, for example, but it is also clear that poverty affects outcomes.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=poverty+educational+outcomes
Micro-agression and a certain characteristic smugness, which results in same, are not unknown here. It’s obvious if you mingle in public and pay attention.
Even without formal tracking, it still exists in the minds of many educators, as suggested by the “Caring Relationships” responses in the chart posted above.
That attitude fuels the low expectations of some teachers that Berkeley High students mentioned as having a corrosive impact.
100% correct!
“Achievement gap in Berkeley schools has long been among the nation’s very worst”
And yet we throw more money at the problem than anyone else…Maybe just maybe we are doing it all wrong? OR Lets just keep doing things the same way over and over expecting a different outcome…
You’re reacting to a problem that exists in, say, NYC, where bad teachers entrenched in poor neighborhood schools are impossible to dislodge. In Berkeley there are no neighborhood schools, so all kids from all cohorts have the same set of teachers from day 1 of kindergarten. Complaining about the teacher’s unions is extrapolating from a national problem to a locality where it just doesn’t apply.
The Radicals, now known as the Progressives, have been completely in charge of the school district since at least 1970. So, the impression that the District can’t achieve the results it desires, despite significant increases in funding, is contrary to logic. The school district has set out to define children into groups, identifying some groups as victims and others as oppressors. Now the Superintendent proposes reparations, which will allow the beneficiaries to drop out of school and stay home.
Isn’t the teacher’s union fighting the new curriculum since they don’t want to undergo training and do something new? Wish Berkeley residents could recognize that monopolies (government) and unions don’t combine well. Unions are fine for car companies since one bad company union relationship won’t ruin cars for everyone.
My mom taught in south central LA for over thirty years and always said that if parents don’t care about education, neither will their kids. The answer is to keep academic opportunities open to all kids and invest in more tutors and a gifted program. That way you help all the kids that need extra tutorial help as well as kids who are bored with the current curriculum.
Thanks, Ally, for this excellent piece of journalism. My wonder is about whether school districts with similar demographics and better education results have been identified and studied for their best practices. And possible adoption! Sounds, obvious, but…
I have a lingering question, as well. Has there ever been a study in Berkeley of the correlation between parental involvement and student achievement? I would suspect there is a very strong connection.
My feeling is that the majority of students of color actually live in Oakland, and that there is scanty effort to connect with parents or other caretaking adults, to work out how they can be regularly involved with their student’s learning experience.
So why are teachers anxious about black students and their parents? Are the students or their parents abusive toward the teachers? I hear some horrible stories about students insulting or even assaulting their teachers. Is this true? Is there data? Has anyone talked to the teachers. If this is a problem, it might be affecting performance.
Yes 100% this. Family income is an important piece of a family’s socioeconomic resources, and while the article notes it in passing, it seems critical.
This tracks with what the Stanford study shows, as Hyperlexic points out. But district income is not exactly the same as family income. I wish the Stanford study (which is a great resource) would dive into family income vs. school performance specifically.
It’s important because the strategies BUSD and our community need to pursue are different depending on which problem we’re trying to solve. Unfortunately the answer is probably “all of the above”, and we can’t neglect training against bias but we do also need to provide better tutoring resources for economically disadvantaged families.
Great article. As the parent of two BUSD kids, I would focus on the idea of implicit bias that many of the students interviewed talked about. This bias of lower expectations exists, but it is completely well intentioned. In trying to close the achievement gap, BUSD and its teachers have focused on special “culturally affirming” programs for kids of color rather than simply expecting more of them, which is essentially what the higher-performing charter schools do. Kids internalize this message. BUSD needs to try a different approach.
I recently read “The Parent Trap” by Nate G. Hilger and it completely transformed how I understand the achievement gap. He convincingly shows how historical economic and social conditions have worked to help or hinder various groups of parents give their children necessary skills. He then makes what seems to me a very compelling argument for moving most of the burden of skill building away from parents and onto society as a whole. In concrete terms this looks like an enormous increase in public funding for things like high quality universal preschool, tutoring, summer camp, enriching after school activities, internships — all the things wealthy parents provide as a matter of course outside of school. We provide some if this in Berkeley but not nearly enough.
But how do Berkeley’s students compare with students in other school districts, for each racial and/or income group? Thinking about rent control, tenant protections, and how our white and Asian students may simply tend to be very rich compared with black and Hispanic students.
High levels of economic inequality is consistent with Cambridge and lots of other places than Berkeley. So again, not really explanatory
Could it be that BUSD is making things worse ?
This article obviously discusses Berkeley schools, and the racial gap that exists here.
Is the ‘gap’ significantly different in other school districts, or is this rather unique to Berkeley?
I am still reeling from some of the accusations leveled by a couple of astute commenters below. I remember being stuck in traffic a couple of years ago and listening to part of the American Public Media report that NYC BETTY linked below. Are you telling me that Berkeley Unified is using an elementary school curriculum that was developed by whole language guru Comrade Calkins?
Professor Calkins became a revolutionary leader in education by bringing these practices to young children at a time when penmanship, spelling and sentence structure were often a bigger focus… her influential 2001 book, “The Art of Teaching Reading,” warned about what she saw as the risks of too much sounding-it-out. She praised one teacher for avoiding “an intricate series of activities with phonics,” and argued that a simple way to build “lifelong readers” was to allow children to spend time with books they chose, regardless of content or difficulty.
…
Some children seem to turn magically into readers, without deliberate phonics coaching. That has helped fuel a mistaken belief that reading is as natural as speaking. In fact, functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain demonstrates that humans process written language letter by letter, sound by sound. Far from being automatic, reading requires a rewiring of the brain, which is primed by evolution to recognize faces, not words.
In the Fight Over How to Teach Reading, This Guru Makes a Major Retreat
This almost wholly explains the Reading test results we see in the Berkeleyside article.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaG3dgZItL0
A+ –> “Get the stars out of your eyes and the lead out of your feet.”
That was my reading of the email as well. And if one took the time to read the task force’s meeting materials/agendas (posted online for public access) you would see that no plan has been proposed and they are only seeking public input at this time.
I think their peers are not presumably learning because Berkeley does such an incredibly poor job of teaching early literacy. They were many measures taken for how to break down various groups in Berkeley, but one measure that was not taken is post secondary education of parents. Parents who know that reading books early and teaching letters early is an advantage, do so. If the district manages to embrace science of reading this year we may see some improvement but so far we’ve only seen a tiny bit of intent. Hopefully the superintendent’s plan will lead every teacher in the early grades to retrain and become totally proficient with a new early literacy curriculum.
Wouldn’t it be something if 2024 was the year that our whole city embraced the concept “ Berkeley reads!” Let’s see the district create a PR campaign to go along with the science of reading and have the message plastered all over Berkeley. Let’s see Berkeley Federation of teachers embrace this idea, create incentives, and get on the bus with enthusiasm.
Unfortunately, what is missing from this otherwise excellent article is a focus on the school districts who have improved, who have successfully reduced the achievement gap. There are definitely good examples that BUSD could follow. What have they done that Berkeley has not? There was once an opinion piece from a UC professor in Berkeleyside that highlighted the success of the Long Beach Unified School District, a district without the advantages of sharing its geography with a world class university. Could Long Beach USD provide a model?
Terrible idea. Why not hire more tutors (from Cal) available to all kids.
Some in Berkeley put the responsibility of low test scores on “parents who don’t care.” Including many of the teachers I know.
“More than 50% of this school district’s test score data from recent years (2016-2018) is missing. Estimates should be interpreted with caution. See the FAQ for information.”
Why is BUSD’s test score data missing? https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/3303bd867d79c81250fd12ef03f9a75e6d132448a2271031e3e77794d165770a.png
As a parent of 4 children who attended Berkeley schools, I sat in many classrooms. Honestly, the anxiety and fear which many white teachers showed Black students and their parents was really obvious. Some kind of education and conscious raising is needed for the teachers. Also, reducing some of the financial stress for the families would indeed help students who attend summer tutoring programs. These two supports one would think are be relatively easy to implement and could make a difference.
I can’t imagine what that $39k number is. The median household income for families with children in Berkeley is $157k (2021 Census ACS 5-year estimate).
When I was in high school it seemed that a lot of students were only there because they could take auto mechanics, welding, machine shop, drafting, electrical training, etc. I think Berkeley schools have eliminated these courses based on our belief that everyone should be a doctor, lawyer, or similar professional.
Excellent article! Berkeley is perhaps the community that has worked the hardest in the US to reduce the achievement gap. Maybe some of these initiatives are actually undermining the initiatives. For example, repeatedly telling students that they carry a burden of 400 years of inequality and face a seemingly implacable wall of white supremacy damages their self confidence and makes them feel that getting an education is unlikely to help them.
President Obama brought up the separate issue of “acting white” being a put down. I don’t know if that occurs in Berkeley schools. However, the problem of some kids being called “nerds” for trying to do their work was a serious problem, at least in the past.
Hats off to Ally Marcovich for your diligent research and this finely tuned article.
Anyone who reads this article can see the interplay of many factors. Many solutions are needed. I don’t think I disagree with anything here but wish to add several thoughts.
1. “Black students make up 13% of the BUSD population today, down from a peak of 43% in the 1990s.” In the early-mid 2000’s the category “mixed race” was finally added to BUSD metrics. Many biracial kids who had identified as Black then became part of this new category, which explains part of the shrinking Black population of BUSD.
2. “In the last two decades, the district has implemented a flurry of initiatives designed to improve the scores of Black and Latino students.” The school board has always leaned heavily on initiatives and policy. It needs to track, immediately, rate of implementation and data on what works well and what doesn’t. BUSD moves like a snail. It needs to learn to pivot quickly away from actions that do not work. Get the stars out of your eyes and the lead out of your feet. Find out what works, fund it and do more.
3. RE: The growth of career and technical education classes. This has been great but it only happened because the District was caught redhanded mis-spending state CTE funds. (See Federal Program Monitoring 2016-17 Notification of Findings, CTE: 6 findings.) You bet the School Board addressed this but it had gone on for years.
4. “From his perspective, what mattered was whether his teachers held him to a high standard, believed whole-heartedly he could meet it and did what they could to help him get there.” This is essentially the definition of Growth Mindset (https://www.mindsetworks.com/science/) and BUSD has discussed re-tooling toward this for years. Implementation is everything. Still waiting for this to go district-wide.
Additionally, BUSD has consistently rejected any form of student evaluations of teachers, protecting and prizing the feelings of their teachers above the success of their students.
5. In the past, great strides were made in middle school math, which then dwindled throughout high school. My own daughter had 3 miserably bad math teachers in high school. Two were so bad they were let go, but only when the year was fully over. The third, when I asked her to please explain equations to my daughter and write them on the board, looked at me in shock and said, “You mean direct instruction?” as if that was a bad thing.
There are lots of kids in the middle; mine was one. BHS math needs a ton of work, just not at the calculus level. Many kids need direct instruction. It should not be a dirty word. How can we promote STEM when math is such a poorly taught subject?
6. Every year the initiatives that work have to fight to get funded again. Usually $$ gets cut back. Why?
Overall, I am a fan of Superintendent Ford Morthel and her focus on improving classroom instruction and literacy. But in BUSD the divide between policy and implementation is everything. ALL of our kids need to learn to read, and early. Every parent of every elementary student should look on the classroom walls for phonics charts. If they are not there, why not? Say something.
In Albany, kids who were not reading at grade level were simply put into afterschool reading support starting in first grade. (I’m not sure if this is still true, but it was.) In Berkeley first a parent needs to find out if their child is even reading at grade level, then needs to request testing and go through many months of process to request support. It takes forever and is like pulling teeth. It is an especially difficult process for non-native speakers and people who do not know how to work the system. Waiting until 3rd grade to intervene is two years too late.
Let’s look to Richmond – both VA and CA. All of Richmond VA moved to a Science of Reading curriculum and in only one year, reading scores started zooming upwards. The same happened at Nystrom Elementary in Richmond CA, a school with a very low socio-economic average.
If they can do it, so can we.
I live 2 blocks from BHS.
All day long kids are hanging out in the parking garages of apartment buildings smoking weed.
Pretty sure they aren’t there instead of class because a bus didn’t show up.
The premise of this article is racist: Researching of test score data looks to quantifiable correlations, thus fastening onto ethno-racial traits because those are assessable, rather than researching the difficult correlation between underachieving students and the actual conditions of their underachievement, which is unavailable private data, thus modeled on more quantifiable demographic markers, lacking accessibility to individual life-situational factors.
Students are made to be data points in a hegemony of quantifiable “background” variables. Students
are subjects of broadly “epidemiological” (demographic) traits, which no actual agency or school expeiences in the abstract. Indeed, “statistical arguments [focus on…] poverty and parent education,” which has nothing to do with schools.
But Ally Markovich does a decent job of making the challenges tangible in terms of Berkeley voices, the upshot of which is that the schools are victims of large-scale trends which data points signal, but impractically.
Anyway, students of various backgrounds don’t “rub shoulders.” They interact (or not) in each others’ very individual presence day after day after day. Those are lives, not observable processes. The “opportunity gap” has nothing to do with the daily lives of students who know each other. The dedication of teachers cannot be the focal point of bridging the gaps without concerted engagements at every level of society, obviously. Indeed, Ms. Markovich’s article expresses that abundantly.
But when Berkeley schools pioneered integration, it was recognized as the beginning of a process, not “intending to end unequal opportunities.” Unrealistic expectations from parents relflected broad-based lack of insight about structural challenges, which are about far more than racism.
Anecdotal input from students is interesting, but has no policy-pertinent relevance other than need to inform students better about the difficuties of durable change.
In fact, Ms. Markovich’s insightful analysis makes the Stanford results blind to the reality of living with challenges. Income data says nothing about the parenting practices of higher income households. One may muse about “reading time” and “chronic stress,” but that critical factor is barely anecdotal.
I would like to say more, but this is already too much for a comments box, I suppose.
I wrote a long emai to the Editor. Maybe she will make some use of that.
This article was specifically about how Berkeley lags behind almost every school district in the country with respect to the achievement gap.
The idea that BUSD’s performance is so poor is because it leads the
nation in micro-aggressions just doesn’t pass the smell test.
I challenge you to name me another school district in America that is more race conscious, that has a population that has taken more actions to create a level playing field for children of all races than BUSD?
By your logic, BUSD should not be outperformed by school districts in the backwaters of Alabama, or North Dakota, or Florida. Yet we are.
This is about the expectations we have for our children. We owe it to our children to hold them to the highest standards, to ask them to be the best version of themselves that they can possibly be. Children have a remarkable way of responding when they know that and adult who believes in them is watching over them.
Addressing absenteeism in the lower grades is crucial. Would you want to attend classes that you couldn’t comprehend because you missed so much of what came before? You too would probably be in the park smoking! Connecting with parents around school attendance in elementary and middle school should be a priority.
Sure, I guess, we don’t have state sanctioned segregation anymore, poll taxes, “colored” drinking fountains, and the very recognizable forms of racial discrimination from the past. Lynching is now a Federal crime in the 21st c. But we still have PTA parents questioning if the mixed race mom, who’s in line to get her holiday goodie bag like everyone else, has a child at the school; we still have the white parent wondering if the older Black man getting a cup of coffee at PTA coffee hour has a connection with the school. Or being publicly yelled at for doing rolling drop off wrong while Black. All I’ve witnessed recently. And we have a bad literacy curriculum. So you take all the micro aggressions, that young kids are just starting to experience; you give them a middling chance of learning to read at grade level with your poor curriculum; if they don’t get to grade level, it becomes increasingly hard for them to catch up; by 1st grade they know if they’re no keeping up; other subjects fail them too- cuz you have to read to learn. All the while they’re dealing with microaggressions daily and have to have the fortitude-that no child should have- to craft their existence and prove that they belong. And they start becoming less engaged, start “misbehaving” and becoming ostracized. Is it any wonder they don’t think of school as something for them? Your exhortations about going to school, doing homework, and taking responsibility- sure- but the damage has already been done. Some of these kids who we wish were all acting in way that we all might recognize as being a conscientious student are responding rationally to a system that early on did not do well by them.
I mean, “differential outcomes based on parental achievement” (and family wealth and status) is the very definition (and shame) of America! And yes, it’s absolutely unacceptable and the antithesis of what public education is supposed to be about. I just don’t think it’s fair or helpful to say “Berkeley USD is uniquely failing and so Berkeley USD needs to fix this on its own.” Yes, it needs to be fixed. Yes, BUSD can and should do better. Yes, BUSD — and every other similarly challenged district — needs vastly more support from the state. It’s the lack of the last part that pisses me off, not the unsuccessful flailing of BUSD.
I have wondered, without access to any useful research or data, what role cultural focus on a different accent and different language construction at home for routine communication plays in both the obvious ability to read and perform on grammar tests but also to understand mathematic concepts explained in traditional English dialects. If black communities continue to invest in their own expression formats and language as a symbol of their community participation does this doom their ability to perform ‘at grade level’ where those tests are focused on a more traditional and uniform language construction. Do these families desire to conform to more traditional English expression in exchange for potentially higher ability to test?
Well at a back to school session the other night the (lower elem) teacher proudly announced the now discredited Lucy Calkins’ TCRW as the “research-based” reading framework adopted by the District. Clearly, not all teachers got the memo, that the District is under a Federal class action lawsuit settlement to abandon that and implement a truly science-based curriculum. What’s it going to take? Pay for a tutor for our child again? I sat down with a childhood friend of mine who ran a kindergarten during the pandemic. Partly because her adult child is dyslexic she learned how to teach structured literacy. She showed me how she does it- it’s amazing, thorough, recognizing patterns, morphology, phonemes, spelling exceptions, explaining how English is complicated with words from other languages, well thought out and fun. Do I have time to learn all that and teach it at home? After a day of my job why do I need to come home and do my teacher’s now? We gladly raise our taxes, contribute money and countless hours. We trust our teachers. We believe in the pact: we trust you with our child during the day and you teach them. It’s truly amazing we can’t get this right. If you see 5 Black kindergartners today , in 12 years how many of them will be able to apply to UC or CSU?
thank you ally for another wonderful, deeply researched, and thoughtful article on our kids– one thing that really stuck out to me were comments from students about the implicit racism in the classroom– when I think back on the opportunities I was given in education, it was usually a single teacher that I can point to that made it clear to me that I could go to college, and grad school, if I wanted. if the adults teaching our children don’t actually *like* them or care about their education (as evidenced here in the things these kids are hearing from the adults! OML), how can we expect them to be able to learn?
something to check out is the CA healthy kids survey for BUSD: https://data.calschls.org/resources/Berkeley_Unified_2122_Sec_CHKS.pdf (for high school 2021-2022) and https://data.calschls.org/resources/Berkeley_Unified_2122_Elem_CHKS.pdf (elementary schools) and https://data.calschls.org/resources/Berkeley_Unified_2122_CSSS.pdf (staff). there’s so much more information in here that’s worthy of attention or inclusion in looking at our kids’ education. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/bb08c8a8862a1a5091e5bc28af84d8459e343e4e53550b1f1e0eee097eab89f1.png
If the general approach that Berkeley public school have been following for several decades does not appear to be working, perhaps it is time to consider a fresh start. Starting with a clean slate, try to examine all the components of the issue without already having solutions in mind. Consider how modern tools might support the individual needs of students and whether we can learn something from programs like https://asuprep.asu.edu/khan-world-school/.
Achievement gap is a red herring – the big story here is that Black students in Berkeley have reading levels among the lowest 20% of all Black students in the US. How is it possible, that Black kids, sitting in the exact same classes where their peers are presumably learning, fall so far behind? They are grades behind by 3rd grade if you look at CAASPP data.
When I was a student BHS in the early ’60s many of my black friends were high academic achievers, and came from well to do families. They were called “oreos” by black student who had not had the same advantages.
I mean, you just named five of the most uniformly wealthy communities in the nation as a direct comparison to Berkeley, when the entire question revolves around the generational poverty that the richer towns entirely lack. There’s plenty of money here, sure, but it’s a massive leap to say that we’re comparable to Palo Alto: the high school there is half the size, the Black population is 1/3 as big in % terms, and the median income is literally more than double it is here (over 80K vs 39K)! The communities have essentially zero in common other than being in the same broad geographic area.
“For example, parents have told me anecdotally that all college-bound kids at BHS have some kind of outside tutoring help.”
That certainly is anecdotal, in the sense of being laughably untrue. All college bound kids get tutoring? I can name five off the top of my head that got zero. One lived in my house.
You are dismissive of this effect but chronic absenteeism certainly impacts outcomes. Missing only 10% of the days, which is just 2x days per month, is considered chronic. Ask yourself what the on-time performance rate, and the run cancellation rate, is for AC Transit. Transportation is one of known causes of chronic absenteeism. I think it’s ridiculous for anyone to say only the student can be blamed for “not showing up”.
Black students as groups are not homogeneous. Black kids in Santa Cruz may be culturally very different, on average, than black students from Berkeley, Richmond, San Pablo, Oakland.
The list of cities you mentioned are affluent, mostly, and it’s likely that culturally the black families are more similar in those cities, but quite different than those in Richmond, San Pablo etc. even after controlling for parental income and education. There’s a reason why one black family may choose to live in Santa Cruz or Los Altos and not in Berkeley or Richmond. Sometimes there isn’t a choice, it’s just a necessity.
Berkeley is sort of in the middle as far as income is concerned in the Bay Area. Berkeley is high in the inner East Bay, but some the poorest Bay Area communities aren’t far away Berkeley.
Another thing about Berkeley (much the opposite in Dublin or Mountain View ) is that it’s a fairly diverse city, but at the same time there’s almost zero diversity at the intra-city or neighborhood level. Berkeley High is a good example of poor intra-city diversity in that yes it’s diverse, but really it’s pretty self segregated.
My understanding of the email and linked material is that the reparations task force at BUSD predates Superintendent Ford Morthel and that she personally has endorsed no specific plan. Rather the district is hosting these informational events to present the work of the task force thus far and discuss as a community what form reparations might take if that were something the district decided to take on.
75% of Black kids in Berkeley are economically disadvantaged. Not sure what the degrees have to do with it. As I pointed out above, 75% of Black students in Berkeley are economically disadvantaged, while 25% are in Palo Alto. What percent in Cambridge are economically disadvantaged?
In Palo Alto, the not-economically disadvantaged Black kids are still way behind their white and Asian peers. Explain that.
Yes, thank you to Markovich and Berkeleyside. I just read the article for the second time more thoroughly and really appreciate the breadth of information and historical context included in this special feature. It has certainly opened my eyes to some of the challenges experienced by other students and families in the district, and the various efforts towards equality that have been made in the last 50 years.
The IMP math program ensured that students in the small schools taking that math course would achieve low math proficiency scores. But BUSD supported that program because more underachieving kids got higher grades. It was like pulling teeth to get BHS to provide test scores broken down by small schools.
The Stanford tool allows several views – for example you can chart test scores vs median socioeconomic status for the district. https://edopportunity.org/explorer/#/chart/none/districts/avg/ses/wb/2.69/51.99/-89.74/2503270,42.386,-71.136+0604740,37.873,-122.266
But Jeff’s point is that Cambridge’s demographics look extremely similar to Berkeley’s (~10% Black, Black median household income well below overall city) – but Cambridge’s Black students test at the national average but Berkeley’s are 2 grade levels behind. There’s definitely a real question there.
The district had exactly that system in the 80s and 90s when I was a student. The results were entirely predictable: those of us in the top (AP) track got a wonderful education and went to amazing universities; the people in the lowest tracks correctly saw that they were just being warehoused and, mostly, dropped out.
IIRC my BHS high school class had a 40% dropout rate.
I really appreciate the depth of historical context and research in this article. Great job, Ally!
In Palo Alto, about 25/100 Black students are economically disadvantaged. In Berkeley, the ratio is roughly reversed – 75/100 black students are economically disadvantaged. Looking at CAASPP test performance, Black low income students in Berkeley and Palo Alto perform about the same.
Those children who were not sounding out unfamiliar words were not taught phonics. Hopefully the new Super will correct the deficits of the whole language approach (recognizing complete words), which handicaps students with foreign language or dialect interference.
Berkeley didn’t feel very bike-friendly to me when I went straight ahead through a green light and was hit by a driver making a left turn without even looking for bikes. It didn’t feel very bike-friendly to a friend of mine who was hit by a driver who was not even looking for bikes and overtook her from behind, causing multiple fractures that took months to heal. And both those things happened on bike boulevards, which are supposed to be safe.
I don’t know why any biker would complain about things like those and want safer streets. Those crazy bikers must just love to complain.
You yourself say that biking in Berkeley is only for “risk-taking, able-bodied adults” – so you obviously know it is not safe. Apparently, you haven’t heard about the two children hit while crossing Dwight at California before the city made that crossing safer – so you don’t know that it is not only for adults.
Have you been to Amsterdam or Copenhagen, where the streets are safe enough that it is not risky to bicycle, so the streets are filled with bikes??
This is a structural problem that mirrors so much of what ails this country. A great article that really lays-out the challenges facing our community. There are many factors that are unique to BUSD.
The size of BHS really should be addressed. Whose idea was it to have only 1 massive HS? Even NYC HS’s are smaller. why not 2 or 3 schools where kids are less anonymous. When kids are known their teachers and peers can track them emotionally and academically. The small schools do help but not as a whole community.
There is an enormous mental health component to all of this. If kids are not feeling mentally well, it’s very hard to do well in school. If they are overwhelmed by the sheer chaos of the campus how can they do well? This cuts across race and income level but truly affects those with fewer resources to help them cope. Independent study has helped many students opt out of this chaos but probably requires way more parent involvement than many can provide.
The article points out the laissez-faire attitude about vaping and weed at BHS ( also middle school btw) now add to that PHONES. How ’bout a policy that restricts all use of substances? And phones in the classroom. Haha they are trying. I know. Oh, b/c then who will enforce it? who will get suspended? How does that play out?
The income disparities also probably need to be parsed more. It feels like something so intractable here vs. other communities where there is a viable middle class comprised of POC.
Giving out free money to certain people based on their race will not create any improvement in educational outcomes.
It will simply serve to further a FALSE narrative that black students cannot achieve what white and asian students achieve academically without adding to their bank account. I see this thinking as profoundly harmful to these children. The idea that they require special conditions to succeed.
Black students are just as capable as any other student. Superintendant Ford Morthel’s academic career and achievements are a perfect example of this.
If black students in BUSD aren’t excelling, it’s not because they are under the boot of “the man”. This is Berkeley for Christ’s sake.
Turning this into a money thing is distracting from the real issues. But maybe that’s the point.
If our leaders were really were about the kids, They’d be encouraging family engagement.
Check the backpack, do the homework with your kids, limit screen time, check their grades. But perhaps it’s easier to blame structural racism.
That way nobody is responsible and we can just write checks all day long and pat ourselves on the back, continuing five decades of failed status quo in Berkeley.
Good points. And since humans all vary, it would be really weird for outcomes for all groups to be the same. It would be super odd if all students in a school went to college. Talk about lack of diversity.
Frankly, I wouldn’t go to college these days unless I was an aspiring scientist, lawyer, MD etc. If you’re in a “studies” major it’s your own fault if you can’t get a job after. Do your home work folks.
That’s not an explanation. Low SES Asian and white students do not have anywhere close to the same discrepancies.
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4144
Given this article, that should take the form of subsidized tutoring. I have been paying Berkeley taxes for 40 years, and it’s clear that money alone isn’t going to solve the problem. We have been generous, and the results are extremely disappointing.
But it could be solved at the Berkeley level, and that’s the shameful part about it.
Possibly, but Berkeley’s Black population is relatively highly educated, with 97% high school or better and 26% bachelor’s degree or better. Compare that to Cambridge MA where only 77% of their Black population are high school graduates. Most of these other California jurisdictions have so few Black residents that no conclusions can be drawn from the Census.
In any case, differential outcomes based on parental achievement is the very definition of systemic bias. The public education system is supposed to help decouple the child’s success from the success of their parents.
And we are making low income kids travel all the way across the city when they could easily walk to a nearby school. It adds another reason for tardiness/absence – can’t easily get to school.
Biking is not universal mobility. It’s an option for a small group of risk-taking, able-bodied adults. Literally just 14% of the population use a bike and 6% use a bus, versus the 77% that drive. To sacrifice the supermajority for a small minority is what’s insane. Berkeley is the most bike friendly city in the state and yet the bikers still complain.
No, every other district does not struggle at the lower end like BUSD. That’s the point of coming in second to last out of 5000 schools.
Related news: Yesterday, BUSD parents received emails about Ford Morthel’s plan (not yet approved) to pay reparations to Black BUSD students, which would be funded by district money. Two public meetings with the Reparations Task Force constructing this plan are being held in September. My understanding is that Ford Morthel believes BUSD reparations should be paid to help close the achievement gap.
Berkeley has a poverty rate of 19.4% and median income of $65,887.
Cambridge has a poverty rate of 12.3% and median income of $76,264.
That isn’t a complete explanation but is part of the explanation.
There is a paradox involved. If a city is completely gentrified and has a poverty rate of zero, it will have a smaller achievement gap – but that isn’t necessarily a good thing.
I would say the biggest underlying problem is the high level of economic inequality in the US.
That’s just not true. Just go to Downtown Berkeley BART and watch the students get of the train. Count the busses. Yes, they might be late occasionally, as my child is taking AC Transit to school, but “lack of a comprehensive, reliable system of public transportation” is not even 1% of the achievement gap.
You can’t fire a teacher in Berkeley. Now that the teacher’s union has tried and failed to solve this problem, how about we try without them?
Well, okay, you are certainly correct that the problem described in the article — poor educational outcomes for low income black students just like everywhere in California, contrasted with exceptionally strong academic performance for higher income white students — is unique to Berkeley. Maybe it’s just me, but I think that mis-states the problem. The part that I care about is the poor outcomes for lower income black students, which is endemic everywhere in California. All the research shows that schools don’t need to do anything special in order to achieve high outcomes for students from high income/education families, so it’s not like BUSD is to be congratulated for those students on the top end. And every district struggles with the other end, so it’s not like Berkeley is uniquely bad. It’s definitely a problem, and a big one that has lasting detrimental effects on the lives of students who graduate without good academic achievement, but it’s not going to be solved at the Berkeley level.
I agree to a certain extent but you also have to understand that BUSD uses “Balanced Literacy” and Lucy Calkins to teach kids how to reach. And, guess what? It doesn’t work. So let’s start with the basics and bring back literacy programs based on the science of reading. Listen to “Sold a Story” if you want to learn more about this major issue.
Thank you. Balanced Literacy is not the way to teach reading and writing. And, if your kids are dyslexic like mine are, it actually DOES damage as you have to reverse what the learn in school. Listen to “Sold a Story” if you want more information on Lucy Calkins and how Balanced Literacy fails children. If states like Mississippi can increase scores, we can too, but it takes overhauling the way we teach reading and writing at BUSD. Let’s do it PLEASE NOW.
As a BUSD student from 40 years ago and with kids in BUSD today, I can say with confidence that feel-good ideology > measurable results and always has. Better facilities now but the regressive and counterproductive policies essentially the same. RESULTS MATTER.
This view is the correct one, after decades of research: “The influence of social class characteristics is probably so powerful that schools cannot overcome it, no matter how well trained are their teachers and no matter how well designed are their instructional programs and climates.“
The district also needs to create tracks so different kids get an appropriate education. The dogma that all kids need to go to college is a harmful one, and many kids would benefit from trade programs, hard skills, and internships. I’ve seen too many unqualified kids go to city college and then a UC/CSU, study subjects with no economic value (Eg English or ethnic studies), and then end up angry with high debt and low wage jobs.
I am only looking at the chart. If you go straight up from where Berkeley stands at the bottom of the chart, other comparable jurisdictions, that are in this region even, that have the same achievement among white students as Berkeley, but far higher achievement among Black students, include Mountain View, Los Altos, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, and Orinda. Expand your scope to surrounding counties and you can see that Davis Unified has Black student achievement a full grade level higher than Berkeley Unified. Santa Cruz is 1.5 grade levels higher. Why?
One thing this otherwise thorough article and the District lack are statistics on how much affluent families supplement their kids’ education not simply with enrichment programs but actual tutoring, hours of help on homework, etc. For example, parents have told me anecdotally that all college-bound kids at BHS have some kind of outside tutoring help.
When curriculum fails most kids, education is effectively privatized. And income/wealth become the best predictor of success.
I can’t tell you the countless hours I’ve spent to learn Common Core math, to help my kids. When one of our kids was having difficulty in reading– a fact that we learned very, very late, as our teachers at the time never shared our child’s poor test scores with us–, we ponied up the cash for a local, pricey tutoring center. Who can do any of that if you don’t have the money and/or time? A caregiver I’ve talked to has mentioned how challenging it is to help her Black grandson with lower school math because it’s not taught the way she learned.
When you add poor curriculum and implicit bias, is it any wonder that only 22% of Black graduates of Berkeley public schools were able to even apply to UC or CSU in 2021 (cf 60% overall)? These numbers are probably not helped by the open secret, even among Berkeley city council members, that if your child is Black and you have the means, you do not send him to BHS.
Programs like RISE, U9, and BRIDGE are urgently needed and effective, but much, much too late. Imagine the years of heartbreak, psychological distress that can be avoided if we can get all kids reading at grade level by 3rd grade. Hopefully AASF will correct this by intervening earlier
Low expectations and implicit bias cannot be overstated. At a goal-setting meeting a couple years ago led by the previous Superintendent, a goal was set to get 50% of Black students reading at grade level, above the current 30%. “Steady wins the race,” he said. Would this community ever accept such a goal for girls, say? “Let’s set a goal for 50% of girls to be proficient at math.” Really?
In our child’s lower elem class I would often come to do “community read” (wherein caregivers are invited to read books to small groups of kids in the classroom at the start of the day), and I would notice nearly all kids engaged, except the few Black children. When I was able to get one of them to sit with me to read I noticed they didn’t read well. They were guessing at the words, not sounding them out. And the teacher didn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that they was floating around and quite unengaged. We have later learned they are quite behind, sadly. Their primary caregiver was so alarmed. Not being able to read while the rest of the class appears to be reading is the ultimate othering.
The Board should be spending the majority of their hours long meetings on student achievement. At every single biweekly meeting. What else are they there for?
Or for that matter, why Madison WI, which is very similar to Berkeley in many important ways, is in a race for dead last with Berkeley when Cambridge isn’t?
Step one: Drop any sign of Lucy Calkins and the “balanced literacy” philosophy from elementary school curriculum immediately. (And listen to this – https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ – if those names are not familiar.)
“If BHS kids are in the park smoking/vaping, why aren’t office-bound
administrators (who often make 3X the salary of classroom teachers)
outside rounding them up and getting them back into class?”
the answer: laziness & fear, in equal measure
It boils down to the age at which kids can read. If kids from wealthy families are entering first grade reading, and other kids are learning to read in 3rd grade, there is no amount of careful education by BUSD that is going to narrow this gap later on.
BUSD might want to look at how montessori curriculums get kids reading early (because it works)
Nope. This is a Berkeley problem – at least the one described in the article.
So we can disregard the long held arguments that the racial gaps are the result of falling down, dilapidated buildings and inferior equipment since all in BUSD have the same. And, since all have the same teachers we can dispense with the notion that only inferior, poorly prepared teachers are advancing one race while holding back another.
Second to last in the gap, not in the absolute performance level at the low end, about which this article provides little data (“In Oakland, San Francisco and Los Angeles, Black students are slightly
further behind than they are in Berkeley, but white students are not as
far ahead as they are here.”)
To really address the racial achievement gap problem, you have to entertain the idea that what we’ve been doing all along doesn’t work.
Hurricane Katrina was the disaster and blessing that New Orleans needed to ameliorate the achievement gap for poor blacks. High-quality charter schools were the result of starting from scratch (new teachers, new administration, new infrastructure)
According to Harvard’s Roland Fryer, high-quality instruction must have 5 tenets – (1) high teacher feedback, (2) high doses of instructional time and (3) tutoring, (4) use of data to guide instruction and (5) high expectations.
Berkeley doesn’t seem to take this seriously yet.
Eliminating educational tracking and insisting that high school should be treated as college prep for everyone is what got us where we are today. College isn’t the right choice for everyone and putting kids who know they won’t go to college into classes designed to prepare them for it is a guaranteed way to increase truancy and troubled behavior.
BUSD needs to stop trying to sell the increasingly-overpriced college dream to everyone and invest in creating life-skills curriculum for students whose educational journey will end when they graduate high school. If BUSD was teaching them things like household accounting and basic finance, basic business software, giving them an introduction to the many types of skilled trades and teaching them how to enter journeyman programs where they can get paid while they learn on the job they’d help the kids and keep them interested.
But BUSD won’t do that. BUSD will continue to push the same failed programs, trying to force children along a path they don’t want to go down, because BUSD cares more about improving their metrics than they do about helping children.
Well what a convenient excuse for the USD. So I guess nothing to see here. Let’s all go home whistling leisurely.
As if professors were all white! But, for sake of argument, let’s for a moment assume that were the case. How does this status quo manage to not self-replicate? You don’t become a professor if you fail grade school. Are non-professor non-white children supposed to remain at the bottom of the barrel forever?
It’s grating that in deepest blue cities like DC or Berkeley where folks can’t blather enough about “equity” while pronouncing their love for “minorities” – it’s exactly these places where public schools fail at precisely their primary responsibility: creating a level playing field.
Perhaps such perpetual failure comes from focusing on talk and incessant display of virtue instead of on how to actually get the the job done and deliver on the previously proclaimed goals. If after five decades of “doing the right thing” you don’t move the needle, well then folks, it’s likely not the right way.
When does the point arrive where even the most PC among us are willing to accept that, assume responsibility for our prior failure, and put down the blinders such that we can actually focus on coming up with a better plan rather than perpetually just pronouncing our virtuous aims? When some backwater in AL prepares black kids better for college than Berkeley, you know we are seriously missing the mark. Inconvenient truth time, people.
Parent education/income.
A few things I would like to dive deeper into:
– Curriculum: we’re in the midst of a massive math curriculum change in CA that could very negatively impact the very populations it’s supposed to help.
– Class size: the mandate for free preschools (and TK) has led to increased class sizes. This could negatively impact the elementary schools that have made improvements in closing the gap please look at average class size and how it affects the gap).
– Cost of living: it’s so hard for teachers who did not grow up in this area to be able to teach here. We can never have diversity in teaching staff at current costs. It’s also not clear to me how we’re recruiting the next generation of teachers if they can’t afford to live in Berkeley.
– Lack of math / STEM teachers. There’s a bias in Berkeley towards humanities. But math and science teaching – especially hands on experiments that can be done at school without parental involvement or homework – have the potential to be an equalizer.
Statistics, just look at that little red dot on that plot. There are a couple of things to take from this article that come to mind. Firstly how far does progressive ideology get you? There is no evidence of success here, and just look at what those school kids say about it. Secondly, there is the fall in the number of Black students from 43% to 13%, a figure so low that the data cannot be used in a survey, statistically insignificant. I hope those who have left or not come to Berkeley in the first place have found better fortune elsewhere. Then, what data were used to inform the recent ‘desegregation’ policy for allocation of places at the middle schools (it did look like the rainbow method was used in that exercise)? Almost by definition it won’t make a difference now anyway.
This times a 1000. Yes, the children of wealthier families do have inherent advantages because of the extras that those children have access to (tutors, expensive after-school activities, etc.) But that is a relatively small co-hort. There are enough resources at most schools whereby if parents – no matter their own intellectual capabilities or economic status – demand excellence and accountability from their children, most of those children can close the educational gap.
Oh, and get rid of the racist teachers with low expectations.
BUSD dumbed down its curriculum years ago by getting rid of memorized skills like spelling, vocabulary, and math facts. They quit teaching phonics. The result has been disastrous for kids whose families can’t make up for these skills with extra practice or tutoring. Practiced skills are basic building blocks. Vocabulary and spelling help kids read. Quick access to math facts help kid figure. This curriculum content is called”opportunity to learn”. BUSD, by lowering content, lowered opportunity to learn. The kids with the least resources suffer most.
Okay Jeff, I guess you know something about K12 schools in Cambridge (which are not discussed in this article); why don’t you tell us how they have broken the otherwise intractable link between parental income/education and educational achievement? And if you know of a district in California, operating under the CA Ed Code and with CA funding, that is doing vastly better than Berkeley — or SF, or SJ, or LA, or Sac, or or or — I’d love to learn what they are doing.
Great report on a deep and ongoing community challenge. Well done Ally Markovich, and a hearty thank you to our educators and families.
Please stop using the term “achievement gap.” It encourages solutions that include a reduction in performance from those on the high side of the gap. The problem is not that high performers perform too well. Calling it a “gap” fails to put the focus where it belongs.
Call it an “achievement shortfall.” Don’t call it a deficiency, or lack, or any other pejorative term. Just don’t ever call it a “gap” again.
It took me all of five seconds to come up with a reason why kids of lower socioeconomic status (disproportionately racial minorities) might not arrive at school: we do not provide a comprehensive, reliable system of public transportation. We have sacrificed universal mobility on the altar of convenience for drivers of private cars, who are wealthier. We systematically favor private drivers while canceling bus lines all over the city, and delaying plans for bike routes to school that have been on paper since the 1970s. If you do not perceive these systematic biases, it is also possible that you are overlooking other aspects of the system that disadvantage the poor and minorites.
Thanks Ms Markovich for an indepth article. I’m trained in data analysis and a parent of a BHS alum. We absolutely need to improve learning for all students, but Berkeley’s high “opportunity gap” is an artefact of poor analysis. As the article states, it is the high test scores of BHS whites which result in such a high difference compared to other school districts. As the article also shows, parental income and education are also strong predictors of student scores. The essential question is what progress is BHS making in decreasing, eventually eradicating a racial gap in test results adjusted for parental income and education. Using such a measure could help figure out what program(s) are helping. And yes, we should also eradicate any gaps by those variables. But ignoring relevant variables is likely to obscure effective programs…
To state that the gap exists because of the high level of white students is a form of blaming the victim in reverse. If the white students do so well, they don’t do so in a vacuum. They are able to do so because they get so much more out of the school system than the students of color. That still indicates a structural problem that is race based. It does not point to a skewed statistical data point.
And can we admit that white parents in Berkeley have been exceptionally successful in resource hoarding? Here is an example, following the adage that what gets measured gets improved.
We can, if we wanted to, figure how many students in the BUSD play the cello. Those data are available.
We don’t know how many students go to bed hungry. We simply don’t have those data. It is important to ask why we don’t know this.
How can you have glanced at the first graph in this article and concluded that this is the same everywhere? The only things that can explain Berkeley being almost dead last in this metric are either bad luck or a broken system. Why is Cambridge, Mass., a city directly comparable to Berkeley in every way, achieving far better outcomes for minority students?
Please get into the weeds about curriculum and the impact of home life. The poorest kids are the most distracted. Their families often struggle to make home a safe calm place to study. Every kid has a phone. If BHS kids are in the park smoking/vaping, why aren’t office-bound administrators (who often make 3X the salary of classroom teachers) outside rounding them up and getting them back into class? As to curriculum, most Black and Brown students arrive at high school not knowing their Math facts (e.g., the multiplication table, division rules, PEMDAS). They were supposed to learn that stuff in elementary school. They spend 3 years in middle school not learning. They do, indeed, learn about oppression and revolution. But all of that is not going to help them boost their scores on Math tests. Why did the elementary schools fail the high school students? Have you looked at how much time is devoted to Math at the elementary school level? It might shock you. Get into the weeds. Count the minutes, and find the results. Schools promise access to STEM careers for all who want them, but simultaneously hamstring students by failing to teach them the skills that open up the access to STEM careers. You are a journalist and former teacher. Get into the weeds. Follow the money. Find out why teachers are paid so little, asked to do so much, frequently asked to short-change curriculum, and cannot get any traction on closing the achievement gap. The truth is out there, and it’s not pretty.
Students who lag behind in reading and math should be paid to attend specially designed summer programs that blend academics, mentoring, sports and cultural enrichment trips. It will keep them out of trouble and provide opportunity and motivation for those who need more attention. The expense will be worth it in the long term.
Is there a place where the study is broken down by family income and not ethnicity? I noticed that the study or the author seems to conflate being Black (or non-White) with being low-income in two places, but of course not all people of color are low-income. It is true that generations of structural racism has ensured that a disproportionate number of families of color are low-income, but in this district specifically it seems like breaking that distinction down (i.e. whether being poor or being of color is a stronger indicator of an academic gap) might give more information about what, specifically, can be done within BUSD to remedy the problem. Do there need to be more affinity groups and advocacy and social supports for students of color? Or do more funds need to be allocated toward programs like RISE that work to help low-income students catch up? In terms of effectiveness, I’m thinking it’s probably the latter (as well as more financial support for the district’s wonderful Office of Family Engagement and Equity).
I’m glad there are cultural support groups and the hiring of more diverse teachers seems like a great idea, but it seems like solving the problem of students who have suffered because of unequal access to academic investment will be most directly connected to increased academic investment in such students.
The article mentions that 80% of Asian and White adults in Berkeley have a bachelor’s degree and that the average income of Asian households is $68,000. Are the UC Berkeley students included in that number? I find it odd that 80% of Asian adults have a bachelor’s degree and have an average income of $68,000 a year.
While the schools invest way too much time in pushing these agendas onto the students, it should have instead focused on teaching the basics, remove so much of the time used for social justice causes in the lower grades and focus all the open mindedness lessons on the teachers and staff. It is they who are meant to teach by example.
Kids learn a lot by modeling adults, basic developmental psychology. Basic. It is not rocket science or neuroscience. Teach the adults to behave they way you’d like the kids to behave, remove the adult influence of systemic racism and the kids will be fine. As long as they get taught and supported for who they are without attaching labels to them. Let them just…BE .Model kindness, acceptance and support and teach the kids the basics of math and reading.
Four BUSD elementary schools have made huge strides in closing the gap between white and Latino students: Rosa Parks, Washington, Sylvia Mendez and Arts Magnate at Whittier:
https://www.greatschools.org/california/berkeley/berkeley-unified-school-district/schools/?gradeLevels=e&tableView=Equity&view=table
Ruth Acty made a huge jump in closing the gap for low income students, with Rosa Parks and Arts Magnet not far behind.
Perhaps some schools have figured out a few things.
One thing I’ve seen at Sylvia Mendez, in the after school program older students mentor younger ones, reading to them and helping them academically. This helps builds social connected-ness and pride among the whole student body, and perhaps contributes to their success.
I’ve sent 2 kids through Berkeley High.
In the basic classes (non AP) if you show up to class and turn your work in, no matter what quality the homework is, you’re guaranteed at least B’s. The academic bar is shockingly low, especially in the smaller “small schools”. (CAS etc)
If kids aren’t meeting that bar, it’s because they are not showing up to school or not turning their work in. You can’t blame the teachers, or the administrators, or structural racism if kids aren’t showing up or turning their work in.
When did we decide that students bear no responsibility for their academic fortunes? That if they are not awarded A’s for work they didn’t do, that it’s somehow someone else’s fault?
Anybody who is familiar with BUSD schools knows that every administrative effort that can be made to close the achievement gap has already been tried to no avail. It’s not systemic. The students need to do the work. The families need to take responsibility. Make sure your kids go to school. Check their homework and grades. Hold them accountable. There is no “man” in BUSD holding black and brown kids down. Let’s stop the charade.
This isn’t just Berkeley, every school district has the same dismaying outcomes. Why are we expecting individual school districts to fix this on their own? At one point we might have said that by doing so we’d get a thousand experiments, learn what works, and then replicate it all the other districts. Except that after decades of efforts, we’ve gotten nowhere and have no recipe for success. So where is our State Superintendent Thurmond, the one who never misses a chance to bleat about his commitment to improving outcomes for black and brown students? Leaving this to districts is committing to failure, and a life of struggles for students who graduate without basic skills; this is a statewide problem and calls for serious research, experimentation, best-practice dissemination, and funding at the state level.