Unit 4 Equity Updates

Since the last Cheat Sheet post on Unit 4 Updates, there has been additional news coverage and public response worth mentioning. The last updates revolved around equity concerns. The ACLU and NAACP raised racial disparities in the district's gifted program and discipline. The school board raised the possibility of swapping the Garden Hills and International Prep Academy facilities, which brought a strong reaction by the Garden Hills community and parents. More on all that at the previous Cheat Sheet post here. WILL had an overview of the school swap proposal and reactions the day after our last update here.

First off, it was announced in the News-Gazette that there would be two listening sessions for the community in early January:

The Champaign school district is planning two listening sessions regarding its proposal to swap Garden Hills Academy and International Prep Academy.

The first meeting will be held at 5:30 p.m. Jan. 7 at the Garden Hills Academy library, and the second will be at 6 p.m. Jan. 9 in the IPA gym.

Superintendent Susan Zola will visit the schools to “listen to feedback from the community and discuss possible options for several topics,” according to the meeting notice.

That full blurb available here. First meeting notice here, second meeting notice here. For those interested in attending, the school board meets for its regular meeting on January 13th at 5:30pm (more school board meeting information here).

Local education equity activist Craig Walker sent an e-mail to the Unit 4 school board that has also been circulating among Garden Hills families and other organizations. The letter itself takes a strong position against the swap proposal and cited some of the relevant initial equity negotiations from past referendums:

Attached is a flyer for the sales tax referendum that was utilized to pass the funding necessary for several Unit 4 school initiatives including Garden Hills. I was part of the community team that worked with the Board to get the referendum passed.

What is important to understand about this history is that this package was negotiated with the community as a resolution to end the Consent Decree and provide equitable school facilities for the black students in Unit 4.

His full email letter is available here. The flyer he sent along with it is available here. An old blog post covering Unit 4 issues has a well cited timeline on the various taxing issues around the end of the consent decree and the tax issues here. Unit 4's current website also reiterates its commitment to the end of the consent decree being the beginning of its work on ensuring equity in schools:

Champaign Schools are committed to diversity, and believe diverse schools offer the finest education to all students. From 2002 to 2009, Champaign Schools operated under a consent decree, which changed the way we view diversity in our schools. The expiration of the consent decree was not the end, but the beginning of our renewed commitment to increasing achievement levels and access to opportunities for all students.  Our district has established a number of initiatives and programs to help achieve these goals.

More information at that page on the consent decree and other related Unit 4 programs.

In regards to the issue raised by the ACLU and NAACP about racial disparities in the gifted program, Juliann Xu had a guest commentary in the News-Gazette. Excerpt:

Champaign-Urbana’s greatest pride should be its diverse community, and this should be represented in the spaces in which youth interact. When these spaces lack diversity, the students are deprived of the most comprehensive education this town can offer.

Centennial administrators work tirelessly to increase enrollment of underrepresented groups in AP classes. They administer surveys, send letters home and organize informational meetings. Although there is more work to be done to increase enrollment, this is not where the problem lies. The gap is established much earlier, when elementary school students are divided into enrichment and gifted programs.

Once a student is in the gifted program, they are more likely to enter the honors track in middle school, which then makes them feel better equipped to enter AP classes in high school.

Full commentary here. The News-Gazette editorial staff, for its part, argued that implicit bias and discrimination other than "" does not exist:

In fact, unless school officials are intentionally penalizing black students while ignoring or minimizing the same or worse conduct by Asian and white students — intentional invidious discrimination — it’s not really a racial issue, but an issue of disproportionate misbehavior among some members of an identifiable group.

Kids who get in trouble in the K-12 public school system are essentially volunteers for the disciplinary process. That’s because they’re attracting negative attention and potential punishment as a consequence of their own behavior.

That full editorial here. The ideological differences locally on this have been highlighted in a previous Cheat Sheet post on Urbana's discipline disparities here. A recent GAO study on the subject highlighted the problem with some of the other assumptions in the editorial:

Black students, boys, and students with disabilities were disproportionately disciplined (e.g., suspensions and expulsions) in K-12 public schools, according to GAO's analysis of Department of Education (Education) national civil rights data for school year 2013-14, the most recent available. These disparities were widespread and persisted regardless of the type of disciplinary action, level of school poverty, or type of public school attended.

That study available here. Local statistics on racial disparities in our schools available here, including a link to a searchable database. Pinning the blame on racial disparities in housing and poverty as if those racial disparities are somehow unrelated to racial discrimination in the past and/or current systems propagating those racial disparities gets problematic very quickly. 

One has to exonerate current institutions from playing a role in continuing racial disparities, ignore a lot of history that is far more recent than many of us would like to admit, and carefully word individual responsibility to dance around the end result of this construction: they are walking right up to the line of arguing that there is a racial disparity in good character. 

What's certain is that there is a chasm between those who believe America has overwhelmingly resolved its institutional discrimination problems and those who believe modern institutions evolved in a way that maintains discriminatory outcomes. I leave it to the reader to decide whether the disparate outcomes and data support their own views.