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

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

Nearly 50 percent more Hispanics took the test in 1995 than in 1994, and 2,033 passed it (280 more than the year before). About a third more African-American students took the exam, and 2,532 passed it (184 more than the year before). Cortines's bold efforts received a boost last year when State Education Commissioner Richard P. Mills required that all New York City students not enrolled in Regents courses do so.

Regents courses put pressure not only on students, but also on teachers. Many of the complaints about Cortines's and Mills's efforts come from educators unfamiliar with teaching Regents-level courses. But as Kay Toliver, an award-winning math teacher from East Harlem Tech puts it, the pressure to perform pays off.

She should know. For 30 years, Toliver has been teaching elementary school and junior-high-school math at Public School 72/East Harlem Tech, a school for pre-kindergarten through eighth grade with 792 students, 88 percent of whom are Hispanic. She teaches pupils in grades four through eight in a program called the Challengers, designed for teaching mathematics in an integrated curriculum that emphasizes communications skills, history, and problem solving. She says she considers high expectations vital to success, "especially for students who are constantly being told they are 'disadvantaged' and who may have the impression that mathematics in particular is a subject beyond their abilities."

"Every student can succeed in mathematics, even if

he or she has

never before been successful," Toliver wrote in the Journal of Negro Education. "I let my students know two things from the beginning: (1) I am with them to teach, and (2) I expect to be met halfway." She's determined to eliminate the stigma attached to poor minority students as underachievers. "I believe

that

the greater the problems surrounding the students, the more important it is that they triumph in their education and thus receive the key to a better life." Last spring, her fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-graders averaged above the 50th percentile on New York City's annual standardized math test, while the school scored in the 30th percentile.)

In 1993, an award-winning PBS documentary, Good Morning Miss Toliver, brought her efforts to a wider audience. Since then, she has given many teacher-training workshops, and the Foundation for Advancement in Science and Education, in Los Angeles, has underwritten two sets of teacher-training videos featuring Toliver.

No wonder a good portion of her students end up in such elite schools as the Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics. Perhaps forcing students to take Regents-level courses will result in the creation of many more teachers like Kay Toliver. Yet until more states decide to follow New York's lead in devising and mandating courses and exams like the Regents, teachers like Toliver will need to take on the challenge by expecting more from their students.

Brother Bob Smith, the principal of Milwaukee's private Messmer High School, sets similar standards of excellence. We won't allow students to perform poorly because they are poor, black, or from single-family homes and have often suffered years of neglect," he says. "Our kids are evaluated and reviewed in the middle and at the end of each quarter. Our kids see themselves as students, not as black and white or members of a group.' Messmer has 320 students, of whom 65 percent are African-American, 10 percent are Hispanic, and 25 percent are white or of other ethnic background. And how does Brother Bob's "no-nonsense" recipe fare? Forty of his 52 juniors taking the PSAT last fall scored in the top 30th percent nationally, his African-American students hold the same grade-point average as the school's white students, 98 percent of his students graduate, and 80 percent move onto college. All this at a per-pupil cost less than half that of any of the public high schools in the Milwaukee school system.