They knew when they opened a new portal to civil rights education data that they were opening a volatile box.
The U.S. Department of Education’s statistics on school experiences divided by race and ethnic groups expose communities anew to hard-to-explain disparities.
The Star examined much of the data for Kansas City area districts on both sides of the state line and found gaps as large as or larger than trends seen across the nation.
With few exceptions, black and Hispanic students in area schools are far less likely than white students to be enrolled in gifted programs or accelerated into early algebra classes.
Furthermore, black and Hispanic students are more likely to be held back a grade, and black students in particular are far more likely to be sent to in-school or out-of-school suspension.
“We are not alleging overt discrimination…,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said to reporters earlier this month, trying not to be accusatory while acknowledging that, “for far too many students … inequity remains the reality.”
The data portal, which collected information from more than 72,000 schools in 7,000 school districts covering about 85 percent of the nation’s students, needs to be used thoughtfully and carefully, said John Rury, a University of Kansas professor with the Kansas City Area Education Research Consortium.
“Everyone is tip-toeing around it, saying it is not necessarily discrimination,” Rury said. “But some of it is.”
Unpacking the data could have a positive effect “if it gets people to look at these issues in a thoughtful way … and (if people) get to the root of a complicated problem,” Rury said.
“The danger is that the headline can reinforce stereotypes and have people say, ‘Here we go again.’ ”
The Star examined much of the data, from 2009, for area districts with enrollment greater than 5,000 students.
From Liberty to Blue Valley, from Kansas City, Kan., to Raytown, the numbers showed stark differences in the education experiences of minority and white students.
In Kansas, in the area’s five largest districts, black and Hispanic students made up 28.4 percent of the total enrollment, but represented just 7.2 percent of the students in gifted programs and 10.3 percent of the students in early algebra.
However, they made up 64 percent of the students who were held back to repeat a grade, 50.5 percent of the students sent to in-school suspension and 63.4 percent of the students sent to out-of-school suspension.
Overall, in the 11 Missouri districts, black and Hispanic students made up 33.8 percent of the total enrollment and were better represented, totaling 26.9 percent of the students in gifted programming and 42.3 percent of those in early algebra.
But those numbers were boosted by the Kansas City Public Schools’ black enrollment in gifted programming and Hickman Mills’ black enrollment in early algebra.
Remove Kansas City from the equation, and the black and Hispanic enrollment overall fell to 24.7 percent and participation in gifted programs fell to 13.2 percent.
If Hickman Mills is taken out, black and Hispanic students made up 31.4 percent of the enrollment overall and 25.8 percent of those in early algebra.
With suspension data, high rates for black students carried across the Missouri districts.
Although only 24.4 percent of overall enrollment, black students made up 42.9 percent of the students sent to in-school suspension and 64.4 percent of those sent to out-of-school suspension.
Civil rights leaders who sampled some of the Star’s data appealed for unified efforts to improve the education experience of minority children.
On the Kansas side, numbers generated for the four largest Johnson County school districts clearly are troubling, said James Connelly, president of the Johnson County chapter of the NAACP.
Black and Hispanic children make up 16 percent of the students in the Shawnee Mission, Olathe, Blue Valley and De Soto districts, but 3.7 percent of the students in gifted programs.
“Some people are going to want to say that black students can’t learn as well as white students, but that’s not what the numbers say to me,” Connelly said.
“I don’t think (the under-representation) is intentional by the schools,” he said. “It comes out of the norms of the community and the values (held by) the students.”
The NAACP this year is working with the Shawnee Mission School District to recruit mentors for students, Connelly said.
“Schools should also give more attention to cultural gaps, said Gwen Grant, president of the Urban League of Greater Kansas City.
“There is a disconnect between teachers, who are majority white, who are not trained to work effectively with the cultural backgrounds of these students,” Grant said.
In particular, she said, black males are often thrust into roles as a strong male figure at home. “It’s a survival skill,” she said.
In school, that student’s style of communication often can carry a “passion that is misconstrued as aggression,” she said.
The factors that foster the gaps have created a knotted combination that has stagnated the remarkable growth of academic success of minority students from the 1940s through the 1970s, said Rury, co-author of the book, “The African-American Struggle for Secondary Schooling.”
Graduation rates for black students went from 13 percent to around 65 percent in that time, closing the gap with white students, whose graduation rate rose from around 50 percent to 85 percent.
But there the gap stands.
Some people put the onus on families and cultures that they suspect too often lack a zeal for pushing their children into a competitive academic environment, Rury said.
Others see persistent tracking by white institutions that, knowingly or unknowingly, expose low expectations for too many minority students.
A combination of all these things, Rury said, established “a historical pattern … tipped against poor and minority students.”
The Department of Education has been gathering the data — self-reported by school districts — to help inform the nation, Duncan said, in pursuing “the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise.”
“Education,” he said, “is the civil rights of our generation.”
