Evanston Township High School District 202 Board President Pat Savage-Williams said she’s “close to tears” when she thinks about the disparity in academic achievement predictability between the school’s students of color and their white peers.
Race dominated a discussion between the board’s members at a recent meeting in which officials considered a draft proposal of the district’s revised goals. The meeting was part of an ongoing process to revise the district’s list of priorities. The new slate of goals, which will likely be adopted by the end of this current school year, will guide the district through 2021, said Superintendent Eric Witherspoon. He said staff, students and other stakeholders have had the opportunity to weigh in on the process via an online survey and a full-day public workshop hosted by the board in late February.
A draft of goal number one states that the district will “increase each student’s academic trajectory, while eliminating the racial predictability of achievement, as demonstrated through multiple measures.”
Several board members debated the inclusion of English language learners, low income and special education students within the goal.
“I will not support eliminating race from that goal,” said board member Monique Parsons. “We can’t get around the fact we still have work to do when it comes to that area.”
The board’s student representative, Camille Allen, said her race is “the single identity I’m most impacted by.”
She said it’s essential for the board to isolate race in their list of priorities so that students can “look at the goal and know the board is intentional in their racial equity work.”
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Savage-Williams said she would be in favor of naming the other groups so long as race continues to be highlighted as an issue of concern.
“I still feel very concerned about race and how it impacts students … any time we look at any data in the school, the students of color, the African American students are always at the bottom,” she said. “And I’ve been close to tears because that is the pattern.”
Witherspoon offered the board an impromptu quiz, asking which racial group out of the school’s special education and low income populations performs the lowest academically, and which racial group is least represented in Advanced Placement courses.
“Frankly, I could keep this quiz going and I bet in your minds every one of you will get the answer right because we know the answer,” he said. He asked the board to “keep our feet to the fire” by including the elimination of racial predictability of achievement as a centerpiece of the district’s goals.
“I don’t care how we try to explain it away, there is some predictability going on here that is just very problematic,” Witherspoon said. He urged the board not to put a “smoke screen” on the issue of race and academic achievement simply because it’s a difficult subject to discuss.
“If the reason for the persistence of the (achievement) gap based on race is because of our inability to talk about it, why do we see that persistence for (ELL, low income and special education) groups?” asked board member, Jonathan Baum.
Witherspoon said students of color are overrepresented across all three groups at ETHS, and particularly in low income and special education populations.
“Those with disabilities and (individualized education plans) who are struggling most mightily as an aggregate are the kids of color — I don’t want to diminish that,” he said. “If we could solve the disability issue we’d solve a lot of the racial issue.”
Baum said he wanted to ensure that by highlighting or putting a spotlight on race, it “does not send the message to limited English proficient or special education students who may not be students of color that we don’t care just as much about solving their problems.”
Parsons said the ultimate goal ought to be increasing every students’ academic trajectory, “but we have targets we need to meet and one is eliminating racial predictability across the board.”
“I think it’s important to acknowledge we have this history, and the history is predictability based on race and that’s what this proposed goal does — acknowledge that and address it,” Savage-Williams said.
ETHS staff members are expected to develop a new draft of the goals following the board’s most recent conversation, Witherspoon said. Once the goals are adopted, targets and measurements based upon the goals and strategies to achieve the district’s priorities will be developed and fleshed out over the summer months, he said.
Lee V. Gaines is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.