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Growing minority enrollment forces schools to adapt

Howard expected to follow Baltimore County into minority-majority status soon

By Larry Carson

By the start of classes in August 2011, white students in Howard County are expected to be a minority, joining those in Baltimore County. The two school systems are riding a demographic wave that carries broad implications for how students are taught.

Baltimore County two years ago joined Baltimore City and Montgomery, Prince George's, Charles and Somerset counties as Maryland jurisdictions where minorities outnumber white students in public schools, although the development was little noticed at the time.

In those districts and others, the trend is sparking intensive efforts to shape children from all backgrounds into eager, high-achieving students. And that's just what is going on in Howard, school officials say.

"Howard County is a magnet for kids from all over the world. We have students from 77 different countries," most speaking different languages, said Sydney L. Cousin, Howard's school superintendent and the first African-American to hold the job. "We have to think differently. This is not 1989."

Growing diversity is a national phenomenon, and school enrollments are where the change can be the most visible, experts say.

"Across the country, we've seen in the last 15 years immigrants moving into suburban areas that we haven't seen before," said Audrey Singer, a senior fellow on demographics and immigration at the Brookings Institution in Washington. The Baltimore metro area "has seen a big uptick," she said.

"Statewide, the population is clearly becoming more minority," agreed Mark Goldstein, an economist and state planner who follows trends. "All of the net change [in population] is due to minority growth. That is increasingly true as we go through the decade," he said.

Driven mostly by changes in Maryland's largest jurisdictions, white students became a minority group statewide during the 2004-2005 school year.

Last school year, white students made up just 4.7 percent of Prince George's enrollment and 7.8 percent of Baltimore's. They accounted for 46.2 percent of students statewide.

Overall, white students still represent 52.8 percent of Howard's enrollment, though that majority has been declining several percentage points each year. In 2004, whites were a 64.7 percent majority.

African-Americans are the second-largest, at 22.1 percent, and the percentage is still growing. Asians, by contrast, were 11.9 percent of the total in 2004, but have grown to 16.3 percent this year. Hispanics make up 5.8 percent of Howard students this year, up from 3.6 percent six years ago.

Even though Baltimore County is two years past the milestone, many parents and students hardly notice, and many individual county schools are still mostly white.

Hayley Mullen, 14, who is a white student in Baltimore County, says the change isn't evident at her school, Ridgely Middle, where white students are 74 percent of the total, and the news surprised her parents, Laura and Tim. But the transformation has been taking place for years.

"It surprises me, because I don't see it in this area," said Laura Mullen, whose family lives in Timonium and whose other child, Lea, 20, attends Ridge Ruxton School for children with developmental disabilities.

"It doesn't surprise me at all," Hayley said. "It never occurred to me that we were the majority," she said, explaining that her classmates at school mix easily without thinking about their race or ethnic origins.

That might be the most profound meaning of the change, some observers say - that increasingly, young people are less concerned with the traditional racial groupings and divisions.

"I think the old patterns in the world will melt away," said Joe A. Hairston, Baltimore County's school superintendent for the past decade and, like his Howard counterpart, the first African-American to hold his job.

"It's not about Baltimore County or Howard County. It's about the world. Our kids are going to be competing against kids in other countries," Hairston said. "They get it. I see [race] becoming irrelevant."

In Howard, change has been driven more by a slow decline in whites and a burgeoning Asian enrollment that has increased by nearly half in the past six years. Ten Howard elementary schools, mostly in Ellicott City and Clarksville, are a quarter or more Asian-American. At Hollifield Station, near Patapsco Valley State Park, 42 percent of the children, the largest single group, are Asian-American.

Sue Song, president of the Korean American Association of Howard County, has seen the trend develop during her 25 years in Maryland.

"It is the reputation that Howard County has the best school system" that brings Korean families, she said. "Now we have a fair amount coming directly from Korea here."

Cousin and Hairston said the influx of immigrant families requires more teachers for students without English proficiency and other specialized programs.

Baltimore County saw the number of students with limited English grow from 496 in 1985-1986 to 3,722 this year. In Howard during the 1989-1990 school year, 289 students were in a similar program with six teachers. Now there are 2,369 students with 121 teachers.

Because of the changing demographics, Howard schools have put a plethora of programs in place, ranging from those aimed at newly arrived immigrants and preschoolers to efforts to get more African-American high-schoolers involved with honors courses and college preparatory tests.

Howard system spokeswoman Patti Caplan said the county is placing increasing emphasis on its Black Student Achievement Program to boost standardized test scores for African-American students.

Schools in Howard, as well as in Baltimore County, print materials for parents in multiple languages, mostly Spanish, Korean and Chinese, as part of the campaign to get parents involved. Howard has an employee dedicated to making connections with Hispanic students' families. Leadership forums are held to encourage involvement among parents unaccustomed to participating in their children's educations.

"That really helps the parent help their child," Caplan said. In other cultures, particularly in Hispanic families, "they're used to turning their kids over to the school system. They have to understand they're welcome in county schools."

Diane Martin, director of student, family and community services for Howard schools, said the county operates after-school programs and does an individual assessment on each student and family who arrives from other nations before the child reports to the assigned school. The school system also works with community-based ethnic advocacy groups for blacks, Asians and Hispanics.

Baltimore County has also developed a lot of programs to address the changes, according to Barbara Dezmon, an assistant superintendent who specializes in programs to help minorities.

There are teacher mentors who help new hires understand children from different cultural backgrounds and how to reach them and their parents. Seminars, after-school workshops and daily help from mentors are all part of that effort.

A "Summer Bridge" program, designed for African-American students, encourages eighth-graders to try for Advanced Placement courses in high school. And a Bridge Center for students newly arrived to the U.S. provides a 15-day transition to county schools. A social worker and a teacher follow each student for six months as they work to fit in.

Overall, whites this year comprise 47.8 percent of Baltimore County's total enrollment, while blacks represent 40.6 percent, Asians 6.1 percent and Hispanics 5 percent. Six years ago, white students were a 56 percent majority.

To appreciate the scope of the change, Hairston points to 1976, when more than 90 percent of Baltimore County students were white.

The changes in Baltimore County, for decades a destination for white families fleeing Baltimore City, come despite earlier strife, such as the 1994 race-fueled hysteria that swept the county's east side over a federal housing program aimed at moving poor blacks out of central Baltimore.

The housing program was killed by Congress, but black families have since moved on their own into the older southeastern and southwestern county neighborhoods, and school enrollments reflect that. The auditorium of Hawthorne Elementary in Middle River was the scene of a raucous, shouting protest during that 1994 turmoil by white residents who feared the federal Moving to Opportunity program would send thousands of poor city black families to eastern Baltimore County. The school is now 60 percent black, with 306 black students to 230 white students.

Howard County Councilman Calvin Ball, who graduated from Woodlawn High in 1993, said that Baltimore County schools' enrollment was heavily black then - and had been just as heavily white 10 years earlier when his older sister graduated. That reflects white flight and the trend called re-segregation that has left many Baltimore County schools along the Liberty Road corridor nearly all black, while most in the central county remain heavily white.

But Howard County, where Ball, an African-American, moved in 1999, has had a different history.

Since Columbia's birth in 1967, Howard's leaders have welcomed diversity, and many who moved there have sought it.

Now the only nonwhite member of the five-member Howard County Council, Ball and his wife, Shani, are having their two young daughters learn a foreign language. Alexis, a precocious 7-year-old, is taking Chinese at a Columbia Chinese school, while her sister, Alyssa, 3, is learning Spanish.

"The world is becoming a smaller place," said Ball, 34. "We wanted our daughters to be well prepared for that future world."

Lester Spence, assistant professor of political science at the Johns Hopkins University, said there's an added dimension to the change.

"A school system is not just about educating kids. It's about resources, staff and faculty. As the percentage of whites decreases, it increases the degree to which other groups want that to be more representative," he said.

And although attitudes might be changing, they haven't yet been totally transformed. "The presence of African-Americans means something very different than other nonwhite groups," said Spence, adding that sometimes white flight results. "These other groups don't have the same type of weight in the white psyche."

In December, two Howard County schools were vandalized with racist graffiti including Nazi swastikas and " KKK" symbols. Three students at Mount Hebron High School in Ellicott City - one of the schools defaced - were charged as juveniles.

Despite setbacks, Patricia Gordon, a septuagenarian and the only African-American member of the Howard County school board, said the signs of a multicultural future are clearly seen in most children's attitudes.

"I think our kids are going to grow up with it. It will be the norm for them," she said.

From Education Week...

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Backers of Magnet Schools Question Charter Push

Some scholars, activists are calling for increased attention to diversity.

By Mary Ann Zehr

In comparison with charter schools, some educators and researchers contend, magnet schools have been given short shrift by the Obama administration. These critics argue that magnet schools have a strong record of increasing racial or economic diversity and deserve more federal funding and support than they are receiving.

“In Washington, all the attention has gone to charters,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank based in Washington. “There is something of a disconnect between what’s happening locally and what’s happening nationally. My sense is that magnet schools continue to be quite popular with parents.”

Magnet schools typically have a particular academic focus, such as the arts or science and technology, that is aimed at helping the schools attract a diverse student population. They saw significant growth in the mid-1980s and are run by public school districts. Charter schools are a newer kind of public school with much more flexibility than traditional public schools to choose their own curricula and set their own policies. They can be run by individuals, nonprofit organizations, or private companies.

Gary Orfield, the co-director of the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles of the University of California, Los Angeles, said he’d like to see the federal government provide an “open field” for grant competitions for all kinds of public schools, rather than allocating separate amounts of money for charter schools and magnet schools. The federal government should build on the political support among both conservatives and progressives for magnet schools, Mr. Orfield argues.

A report released by the Civil Rights Project this month, “Choice Without Equity,” found that charter schools are more racially isolated than traditional public schools in practically every state and large urban area in the United States. The press release for the report argued that “magnet schools are overlooked, in spite of showing greater levels of integration and academic achievement than charters.”

‘Last Generation’

The Obama administration’s fiscal 2011 budget proposes to increase funding for magnet schools to $110 million from $100 million this fiscal year. The budget also calls for spending $400 million for “promoting effective charter schools,” an increase of $81 million, or more than 20 percent, over charters’ current funding. In addition, it proposes spending an additional $90 million on promoting public school choice.

Justin Hamilton, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Education, said the administration thinks magnet schools play an important role. In clarifying the Obama administration’s position on charter schools, he said, “[U.S. Secretary of Education] Arne Duncan has consistently said he’s not for all charter schools, just good charter schools.”

Education reformers tend to see magnet schools as “the last generation’s innovation” and are generally more excited about charter schools, said Michael J. Petrilli, the vice president of national programs and policies for the Washington-based Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “Even on the left, there’s so much more enthusiasm for charter schools right now,” he said.

But at the same time, he said, education reformers should be supporting magnet schools as well since they increase choice in education.

At a Capitol Hill briefing sponsored by the Civil Rights Project to release its report on charter schools, David Cleary, the staff director for U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., expressed support for magnet schools.

“We need to do more to improve and expand magnet schools,” Mr. Cleary said. However, he noted that he didn’t agree with the report’s strong emphasis on the need for diversity in charter schools, characterizing the findings as saying some charter schools “aren’t white enough.”

Mr. Orfield responded at the briefing to Mr. Cleary’s criticism by saying “our report doesn’t say all charter schools can be desegregated.” Rather, he said, the federal government should have some civil rights requirements for charter schools that encourage diversity plans where they are feasible. He added in an interview that charter schools could be required to have outreach plans, for example, that would aim to recruit a mix of students, including English-language learners.

Federal education officials are indeed interested in supporting diversity, Russlynn H. Ali, the assistant secretary for civil rights for the Education Department, said in an interview this month.

When asked why the Education Department didn’t give any points for diversity for states’ applications to receive some of the $4 billion in Race to the Top stimulus grants, Ms. Ali said diversity was addressed with points for equitable distribution of good teachers and closing the achievement gap.

States can be awarded 40 out of 500 possible points for having created conditions favorable to charter schools and other innovative schools.

Ms. Ali said federal education officials are preparing several pieces of civil rights guidance that will apply to federal education grantmaking and are expected to be rolled out this spring.

The Obama administration’s proposal to increase funding for magnet schools is a nod to their importance, she said.

Economic Diversity

But even among magnet schools, diversity has waned as a goal.

In a 2008 report, the Civil Rights Project found that while at the start of the magnet-school movement, many had racial diversity as a goal, some had moved away from that ideal over time. Nearly one-third of magnet schools in the study’s sample, for example, still had desegregation goals, while 43 percent of the sample no longer or never had such aims.

A U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2007 on admissions policies in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., restricts public school districts from using race to determine where students should go to school. The court left open the option for race to be a consideration in certain instances, such as in drawing boundaries for attendance zones or deciding where to locate schools. But a growing number of school districts integrate primarily by students’ socioeconomic status, according to Mr. Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation.

The 100,000-student Jefferson County district in Louisville bases students’ assignments on where they live. The boundaries for geographic attendance areas are drawn in a way that aims to create a mix of students from the part of the county with a concentration of affluent white families and a part of the county with a concentration of families that are minorities or have low household incomes.

Because the plan is new, it’s unclear whether it will yield a similar diversity in schools as did the race-conscious policies that were struck down by the Supreme Court, according to Pat Todd, the district’s executive director for student assignment.

Ms. Todd said she is concerned about the federal government’s emphasis on charter schools because “charter schools are about going around districts, not thinking about policy at a district level.”

Sandy Day, the president of the Washington-based Magnet Schools of America and the coordinator for magnet programs in Omaha, Neb., said she’d like to see more federal funding for magnet schools, and is encouraged that officials in the Obama administration seem to be listening to educators promoting such schools.

“There was a time that students of color and living in poverty could not access high-level courses,” she said. “That’s one of the things that magnet schools provide.”

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Dr. Linda Clautti wrote:

Magnet schools definitely serve a good purpose in traditional public schools; however, in many school districts, students must meet certain criteria to be a part of a magnet program. For example, in magnet schoosl for the Performing Arts, students must have specific talents. Students are chosen for those programs. In charter schools, admission is on a first come first serve basis. Since charters and magnets are both public schools, the same rules should apply to both.

2/22/2010 12:05 PM EST on EdWeek

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awechsler wrote:

I agree with the comment above. It is misleading to say that magnet schools show greater levels of academic achievement than charters since many magnet school have admissions citeria. In fact, there are many magnet schools set up specifically to serve "gifted and talented" students. Charter schools give no such preference, accepting students by lottery. 2/22/2010 12:28 PM EST on EdWeek

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cyned wrote:

I truly cannot understand why it is that people, and especially those in school leadership and legislative positions, cannot see that charter schools ARE NOT public schools and that they don't deserve public school funding. If they cannot or will not accept everyone and anyone like the true public schools must and do, then they are NOT public.

If public schools need reform, then THEY need reform; taking away any or much of their funding they might use for reform for non-public school endeavors does not make any sense, unless you want to make charters available for EVERYONE. And then, if and when that would happen well, won't they just be the public schools again? So why are we wasting our time and money with these games? And I'm wondering why isn't anyone else TIRED of this charade?