In case you missed this thought provoking article....

washingtonpost.com 8/3/04

Seven Myths About Diverse Schools

By Jay Mathews

   Diverse is an elastic word, but no matter how you stretch it, my
high school was not diverse.

  Hillsdale High in pleasantly suburban San Mateo, Calif., had about
1,600 students in 1963, the year I graduated. A basement flood recently
wiped out my yearbooks, so I cannot make an exact count, but I don't
think there were more than two or three African Americans and a dozen
Asian Americans in the entire school. I suspect there were a few Hispanics,

but I don't remember any.

  Hillsdale is very different now, as are the schools my children have
attended, which I think is good, but we still have a major problem with
this odd concept of diversity. Diverse can mean a nice blend of all
ethnicities, but can also mean lots of low-income black and Hispanic
children, and to many people who have not thought about this very deeply,
that is a bad thing.

  They are wrong, and their failure to understand what is actually
happening in many heavily minority schools is aggravating both our racial
problems and our education problems. To bring light to this issue, I am
adding a new selection to my Better Late Than Never Book Club, which
spotlights splendid works that I have overlooked because of my habitual
sloth and stupidity.

  The book is a modest 163 pages. You can read it in a couple of hours.
The title is "Debunking the Middle-Class Myth: Why Diverse Schools Are
Good For All Kids," published in 2003 by The Scarecrow Education Press.
The online book stores list it for about $23.50, although you can get
some copies for under $14 on amazon.com.

  The author, Eileen Gale Kugler, is a communications specialist who
knows exactly how to get to the point. More importantly, she is the
parent of two children who attended Annandale High School in Fairfax
County,

one of the most successful diverse schools in the country. Annandale's
student body is 37 percent non-Hispanic white, 25 percent Hispanic, 21
percent Asian and 15 percent Black. Thirty four percent of the students
are poor enough to qualify for federally subsidized lunches.

  The first sentence of Kugler's book is: "I am a middle-class white
woman." She knows all about the misinformation that rules in
neighborhoods where people such as she and I tend to live. Kugler's
Northern

Virginia neighborhood experienced a typical demographic switch in the 1980s

and 1990s when more low-income minorities, including many children from
foreign countries, suddenly appeared in the local public schools.

  "As often happens when minority populations increase, some homeowners
left the neighborhood for 'whiter' pastures," she said. "Negative
stereotypes about the recent immigrants were whispered over backyard fences

and around the neighborhood pools. Older residents decried the changes
to their school, which no longer looked like it did when their children
attended."

  Kugler knew that great teaching was still going on at Annandale High,
and her children were thriving -- not in spite of, but because of the
diversity. "Learning comes alive," Kugler said, "when wisdom is shared
not only by competent teachers and textbooks, but also by fellow
students with life experiences and cultures that illuminate whole new
worlds."

She began to organize a series of meetings for parents to get to the
root of the distorted image that was being passed from neighbor to
neighbor. "Whenever I heard something negative about the school," she said,

"I began asking where they heard it. I was shocked at what I found. In
virtually every case, the negative comments originated with people who
had nothing to do with the school. The negative comments were coming
from people whose children graduated from the school decades earlier when
it was all white or from parents of children in predominantly white
schools. They were simply spreading the prevailing myths. On the other
hand, people who got their information from someone who had firsthand
knowledge of Annandale High, be it students, teachers, or parents, heard a
completely different message."

  In her book, Kugler identifies seven myths that keep otherwise smart
parents away from such schools. I have only enough space to hint at the
detailed way she dismantles each misimpression:
Myth 1: "The best school for my child is the one with the highest
standardized test scores."
  A recent Washington Post survey of Montgomery County, virtually a
twin of Fairfax County in size and demographics, found that children from
middle-class backgrounds consistently scored very high on reading and
math tests, even if they went to schools with a high concentration of
low-income students. Annandale High's average SAT score is lower than
that of schools in homogeneous middle-class communities, but that is just
an average. Large numbers of Annandale students score very high and are
accepted at Yale, Columbia, Duke, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, William
& Mary, the University of Virginia and many other schools on the U.S.
News & World Report list.
  Myth 2: "One style of school leadership will work in every school."
  Kugler praises the atmosphere created by Susan Akroyd, principal of
Parklawn Elementary School in Fairfax County, who has a bus pick up
parents at their apartment complexes for important meetings and even rents
an apartment to be used as  a Parklawn Family Center where mothers and
fathers can take parenting and English classes. During Ramadan when
Muslims fast, Annandale High offers Muslim students a classroom where they
can study during lunch and don't have to enter the cafeteria. She
quotes one student telling a mother who complained about a basketball
teammate's subpar performance, "Come on, Mom. Don't you know it's Ramadan
and
she's been fasting all day?"
  Myth 3: "The best teachers prefer homogeneous middle-class schools."
  Tom Pratuch, a national board certified chemistry teacher, sought out
a job at Annandale High precisely because of the range of backgrounds
of its students. He thinks many top-flight teachers share his taste in
schools. "Most teachers are trained to reach a uniform population and
that's what they are comfortable with. So, many good teachers seek out
homogeneous schools," he said. But the best teachers, skilled at teaching
different students in different ways, yearn for variety. "Just look at
who is winning the national awards and major grants," he said. "They
are predominantly from diverse schools."
Myth 4: "Diverse schools can't provide rigorous classes."
  This is an especially irksome canard to me, and easy to discredit.
Every year in the Washington area I measure the degree of participation
in college-level courses of high schools in the Washington area, and do
the same thing in Newsweek every three years or so, looking at high
schools nationally. Annandale has an International Baccalaureate program
that provides the most demanding academic experience available in
America at that grade level. Its college level course participation rate
ranks in the top 3 percent of all U.S. public schools, and there are other
schools just as diverse that are doing just as well.
  Myth 5: "Diverse schools are not safe."
  Kugler argues that in many ways they are safer, because educators in
such schools are very sensitive to the problems of adolescents from
different cultures and much better at dealing with them. There are studies
showing that drug- and alcohol-abuse is much higher among non-Hispanic
white than minority students, and white males are more likely to bring
weapons to school than black males. I received an e-mail recently from
a reader outraged at the murder of a white student who attended another
diverse Washington area public high school, T.C. Williams in
Alexandria. The reader said this showed how awful such schools were at
teaching
character and values, and why so many parents put their children in
private schools. The reader apparently didn't know that the victim had
tried to avoid a fight, but was assaulted anyway by youths at night in
front of city hall. All of his attackers were whites who attended private
schools.
Myth 6: "Family beliefs and values will be threatened if we expose our
youth to people with different perspectives."
  Jaime Bacigalupi sent three children to Annandale High after they
attended Catholic schools through the eighth grade. She told Kugler she
had wanted a more intense religious education when they were younger, but
appreciated the quality of the public schools, particularly Annandale,
and did not feel their values were ever threatened by Annandale's
diversity. "If you only live within the boundaries of your values," she
said, "then you have no idea of the strength of those values. If they are
never challenged, never questioned, never tested, you don't grow."  Myth 7:
"Minority parents don't care about the education of their
children."
  Anyone who has spent any time at all with minority parents knows that
this is nonsense, but sadly the notion is still widely held. Kugler
cites a survey by Public Agenda showing that minority parents actually
place a great priority on higher education than non-Hispanic white
parents.

Kugler, an adviser to school districts, has many suggestions for
persuading parents to take a closer look at those neighborhood schools that

seem to be full of slow learners, but are actually taking American
public education to new levels of achievement. Read the book and then,
instead of asking your neighbor what she thinks, go to talk to someone like

Kugler who has actually had a child in one of those schools.

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