By JOSEPH DITS
South Bend Tribune
SOUTH BEND — As the minutes closed on her last school board meeting last week, Ann Rosen spoke of "the elephant in the room that we don't talk about."
Over several years, she said, the students of the South Bend Community School Corp. have changed. More of them are poorer and are minorities. As a result, the needs of students have changed. The schools must do a good job of educating both the kids with these needs and the kids who excel, said Rosen, whose term on the board is ending.
Rosen pointed to research from 1998 that found that children in welfare families heard one-half to one-third as many spoken words as children in more affluent households. And the kids' vocabulary reflected that.
"This language gap deeply affects children's ability to read," said Rosen, a consultant with a local group called the Family Connection.
Indeed, numbers from the Indiana Department of Education show that minorities have grown steadily in the school corporation since 1990, from 35 percent of the student body to 59 percent. During the same time, minorities grew from almost 14 percent of students across Indiana to 24 percent.
Hispanic youth grew from 7 percent of the school corporation's student body to 15.5 percent.
And the percent of South Bend students on free lunch programs has grown from 42 percent in 1996 to a high of 58 percent this year — while students with reduced-price lunches have gone from 6.5 percent to a high of 10 percent in that time, according to the DOE.
"If I had one wish for the community," Rosen said, "it's that it would invest in quality early childhood education."
She said James Heckman, a Nobel Laureate economist at the University of Chicago, argues that it's wise for communities to invest in good early childhood education to ward off social problems.
Earlier in the meeting, John Ritzler touched on a similar theme.
When it comes to ISTEP results, the biggest challenge the school corporation faces is the achievement gap between whites and minorities and between income levels, said Ritzler, director of research and evaluation.
When you look at all South Bend schools together, the number of students who passed the ISTEP this year dropped 1.4 percent from last year. But it was up 3.5 percent from five years ago, Ritzler said. If you look at particular grades and schools, you'll see ups and downs in those five years.
But overall, the achievement gap hasn't diminished, Ritzler said. For example, in those five years:
-Fewer students on free or reduced-price lunches have been passing the 10th-grade English/language arts portion of the test than kids with paid lunches — by 27 to 34 percentage points.
-Fewer Hispanic students have been passing 10th-grade English/language arts than white kids — by 33 to 40 percentage points.
-Fewer black students have been passing third-grade English/language arts than white kids — by 22 to 29 percentage points.
Ritzler said individual ISTEP results were mailed last week to families' homes.
School board member Dawn Jones agrees with Rosen's points and says the achievement gaps are driven by poverty. It just so happens that many low-income families tend to be minorities, she says.
Jones, who is black, says: "Education changes your perspective on things around you. You're able to identify resources to help you get to the next level."
She tries to help families to identify those resources as director of the YMCA Urban Youth Services.
For example, she says, poor families are less likely to afford and have Internet access in their homes, which normally helps kids to do their homework and learn so much more.
She acknowledges that immigrant Hispanic students may not hit the same ISTEP scores as other kids, which she attributes to culture and communication gaps. But she gives them credit for working hard to learn English in a short time.
Trina Robinson, president of the local NAACP branch, says there always will be achievement gaps until the schools understand the family dynamics of poor, struggling households — that is, what it takes just to get a child to school. And, she adds, there needs to be teachers whose passions are to work with these kids.
Staff writer Joseph Dits:
jdits@sbtinfo.com
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