Raising the bar: Minority pupils excel the old-fashioned way

Policy Review, Mar/Apr 1996 by Shokraii, Nina H

"I feel like I'm in a war zone," replies Sister Helen Struder, the school's principal, when asked how she feels about the location of her school. You'd never guess that from the students' performance. A comparison of scores on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills published by the Chicago Public Schools shows that, in 1994, the number of Holy Angels eighth-graders scoring above the national norm in math was quadruple the average number of eighth-graders at the three area public schools on the same test. The data also show that twice as many Holy Angels eighth-graders scored above the national norm in reading as did the average of the three area public school eighth graders.

How did this happen?

Sister Helen, who has been on the school's staff since 1960, before reaching her post as principal a year ago, believes that the secret to the school's success is threefold: its basic curriculum (mathematics, English, reading, science, and social studies), its strict discipline (it teaches respect for self and others and holds students responsible for their actions), and its high academic expectations for its students. Instead of making excuses for the children, Sister Helen and Holy Angels teachers expect them "to paddle their own canoes." Instead of offering an array of extracurricular classes or dumbing down its curriculum to increase the "self-esteem" of its African-American pupils, Holy Angels offers a strict diet of math and reading and expects students to get the job done. The principal believes that "by success you build self-esteem."

No one can attest to the success of a school like Holy Angels or a teacher like Rafe Esquith better than Barbara Lerner. A lawyer and psychologist, she was an outspoken advocate of the "minimum competence testing" movement in the late 1970s--a grass-roots movement demanding that no student be allowed to graduate from high school without first passing a test proving he or she had mastered basic skills in reading and math. Lawyers from the Center for Law and Education at Harvard and a bevy of other "experts" tried to convince the federal courts that this requirement was unconstitutional because in Florida--the first of many states to adopt such a test--80 to 90 percent of African-American students failed it on the first few tries. Lerner's 1983 testimony in Debra P. v Turlington (the case challenging Florida's minimum competence test) convinced the courts that minimum competence testing provided just the push these kids needed, pointing out that by the fifth attempt, more than 90 percent of them passed.

As Lerner noted in a 1991 article in Commentary, children who mastered the basics went on to improve their scores on more advanced tests like the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) too, because "

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inimum competence is the entry ticket in the race for advanced competence and, as in any race, increasing the number of entrants increases the number who cross the finish line." That, she argued, is why the SAT scores of African-American students rose by more than 47 points between 1980 and 1989. Lerner believes that the only way to expand the success of the minimum competence exam is to make it the standard for grade-school graduation, and also to require children to pass an advanced competence test like the SAT to graduate from high school. Such a test would go beyond literacy and numeracy to measure abstract reasoning and problem-solving ability with both words and i numbers.