One parent recalled her young son coming home and saying he wished he weren’t black. Another parent said her daughter lost her confidence and began questioning her skin color.
The anecdotes, delivered at a recent Santa Monica-Malibu school board meeting, accented a troubling portrait of racial disparities in education as district officials reviewed an achievement gap that has existed for years on local campuses.
The district is currently working on the details of a partnership with renowned scholar and educator Pedro Noguera to address a variety of race-related issues in SMMUSD schools, spokeswoman Gail Pinsker said.
Noguera’s contract and scope of work are expected to be finalized by next month and eventually will be presented for board consideration. The plan will likely include overarching goals as well as specific goals and metrics.
Talks with Noguera arise as district officials attempt to narrow the stark gulfs in performance and behavior that exist between African-American and Hispanic students and their peers.
Noguera’s efforts will be part of a broad assortment of district programs aiming to improve academic outcomes and race relations.
District officials ultimately hope Noguera will help them determine what they can be doing better to support African-American and Latino students.
“He has experience that nobody here has,” board member Jose Escarce said. “Our goal is to draw on his expertise in a way that is helpful to us. … I want to set up a mechanism where he can interact with the community. He might be the one who knows how to do that in a way that’s helpful to him so he can understand the different points of view.”
Noguera was recently appointed to join UCLA’s education faculty after a stint at New York University.
He received his bachelor’s degree in sociology and history and a teaching credential from Brown University in 1981, earned a master’s degree from the Ivy League college in 1982 and finished his doctorate in sociology at UC Berkeley in 1989.
Noguera, who taught in public schools in Rhode Island and Oakland, California, has worked with campuses and districts around the country in advisory roles. He has published hundreds of articles and reports on education and has researched the influence of social, economic and demographic factors in schools.
News of the district’s forthcoming work with Noguera was met with a mixture of optimism and frustration. Some were encouraged by the district’s plans to tackle racial problems, while others said they feel it’s a systemic issue that one scholar can’t solve on his own.
Robbie Jones argued during public testimony that i’ll take much more than hiring Noguera to solve the district’s race-related issues.
“He’s a wonderful person, but he’s not a fix-all,” Jones said. “He’s not our savior.”
Contact Jeff Goodman at 310-573-8351, jeff@www.smdp.com or on Twitter.
Pedro Noguera is a genuine, nationally recognized and highly-skilled Black-Latino educator/scholar, and we are lucky to have him….
SMMUSD also has unfortunately overlooked prior calls for Ethnic Studies curriculum programs by Intercultural DAC (which I chaired 3 yrs back) and declined program proposal by experienced teachers from Tucson MAS program (which successfully REVERSED the “achievement gap”)… but I’m glad they’re paying attention now. Irony is that the work of the IDAC and AMAE in Santa Monica helped start a state/national movement for Ethnic Studies in high schools, but we are mostly ignored at home (http://www.ethnicstudiesnow.com).
People of color need to have a GENUINE/AUTHENTIC presence on a campus. COMMUNITY must be involved in Ethnic Studies, it’s a tenet of the discipline. I’m born and raised in SM Pico Corridor, but recently I and others have been censored by SMDP over the PYFC struggle (which is mostly politics by SM development-backed politicians who have their greedy eyes set on Pico Neighborhood real estate), they’ve long wanted to destroy PYFC, silence Pico voices. Racial hostility exists in SM institutions. Institutions typically silence Black/Brown neighborhood voices and replace them with outside token figures, to cause division and control things, but I think this situation can be very different. I hope and think so.
The Santa Monica Malibu Unified School District’s Achievement Gap in API scores by Race/Ethnicity is Among the Worst in California
https://lawofficesofbarryfagan.wordpress.com/2015/02/25/the-santa-monica-malibu-unified-school-districts-achievement-gap-in-api-scores-by-raceethnicity-is-among-the-worst-in-all-of-california/
Education West Grades for SMMUSD Relative to Other School Districts in California
2012 __ ___ 2013______________
Overall Grade: C C
White/African-American Gap F (among worst 3% in CA) F (among worst 6% in CA)
White/Latino Gap F (among worst 15% in CA) D (among worst 18% in CA)
____________________________________________________________________________Sources:
EdWest Report Card 2012 for SMMUSD
http://reportcards.edtrustwest.org/district-data?county=Los+Angeles&district=Santa+Monica-Malibu+Unified&report_year=2012
EdWest Report Card 2013 for SMMUSD
http://reportcards.edtrustwest.org/district-data?county=Los+Angeles&district=Santa+Monica-Malibu+Unified&report_year=2013
Education starts in the home. The problem is not our educational system, it’s the parents (or often parent) who don’t educate their children and expect the schools to everything.
A scholarly approach to ending systemic racist practices and procedures will probably not work as long as bigots get to keep their jobs, fraudulent calls to DCFS are allowed, and the misuse of the State Attendance Review Board is allowed.