According to a report delivered last year to Tacoma's superintendent and the Washington Board of Education, Tacoma has failed its students of color. Nobody even tries to deny it. Especially not Tacoma School's Deputy Superintendant Carla Santorno, a former chief academic officer from Seattle who was courted strongly by Tacoma officials, presumably to help fix a few things.

"It's a brutal fact," she says. "We have an achievement gap. I take this very seriously, and so does the school district."

She means it. Even with what sounds like a nasty cold, Santorno has power and conviction in her voice. When asked questions that most bureaucrats would cringe over, she answers like a lioness. She also shares some startling statistics that were reflected in the report delivered to local officials last year.

"Tacoma schools suffer from an opportunity gap, a resource gap, a readiness-to-learn gap, a preparation gap, and a teacher quality gap that constitute an overall education gap," the report reads. "In 2009, we continue to witness the cumulative effects of years of pedagogical failures in our schools."

According to the Washington State Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, 58 percent of Tacoma high school students qualify for free or reduced-cost lunches, compared to 38 percent statewide. Tacoma students have higher than average high school dropout rates, resulting in lower than average high school graduation rates. There're a lot more statistics like these, but you get the idea.

During the last few years, especially as it related  to the achievement gap among African-American students, Tacoma schools have begun an aggressive effort to fix a whole mess of issues. First steps included hiring Santorno, and commissioning a massive amount of research. That research included a lot of community dialog, and resulted in a report and recommendations for fixing things. 

They include strategies in seven areas: Recruitment, retention and relationships; teacher and leader quality; student voice; equitable distribution of resources, opportunities and services for students; professional development in culturally-responsive/competent instructional practices; culturally-inclusive curriculum aligned to state and district standards; and family and community involvement and use of external resources.

Translation: We have a lot of work to do. And it ain't simple.

"We know what we have to do, and we are capable of doing it," says Santorno. "There are specific ways that we can advance this agenda. We have good community support in Tacoma. We have lots of good partnerships with lots of different entities. It's not magic. But we have all the ingredients we need to get this work done."

Bold Generation

Names missing from the roster of the 2010 Race and Pedagogy National Conference at the University of Puget Sound this week: Shakera Harper, Ulises Torres, Nettie Wayne, Keenan Grayson, Shontia Copeland and Ike Castro. They're Lincoln High School  students. I sought them out for this article about race and education because most of the discourse surrounding education still tends to derive from the same old core curriculum, made up of the same old Euro-rationalist axioms, scientistic-academic triumphalism and ruling-class teleology. 

That last bit was for the academics.

The rest of this is for the people in Tacoma whose future is being decided by people running public education.

The people running public education, by the way, should include everyone, one way or another. That's the resounding, overarching message sent by people who want to fix the school system. This can't be left up to people who supposedly know better. Even the people who supposedly know better think everyone should be involved - administrators, teachers, parents, legislators, community organizations, business owners, students, you name it. 

But especially students.

The Lincoln High School students mentioned above are still bubbling with energy and inspiration from a Youth Summit that was held as a precursor to this year's Race and Pedagogy Conference.

But one or two youth summits aren't going to cut it. Not according to the students.

"We are a bold generation," says Wayne, noting that kids are ready and willing to be involved in reshaping education. "Why aren't there more students on education boards?"

"Sometimes I think they don't want us to have power," says Harper. "We might change things."

Talking to these kids, I believe it. The people running this conference would do well to recruit them.

Don't get me wrong. The people running the conference in Tacoma are good people by all accounts. And they really do believe that we can and should make education work well for everyone, regardless of their skin color. 

In Tacoma, at this point in history, it's not.

Time for a change

Now is the time for change. That's the theme of the 2010 National Race and Pedagogy Conference.

"The conference theme is informed by the notion that history is marked with moments in which action and inaction have determined whether human rights, civil rights, and social justice were advanced or thwarted," reads the official event synopsis.

Translation: We are at one of those unique points in history where we can take charge of making a fundamental  change. At this point in time it's the United States public education system, and the way it treats students of color, that needs to be fixed.

Why is it such a big deal now? Several reasons.

First, education reform has become a major priority for federal, state and local officials. Now more than ever, pardon the phrase, school funding is distributed based on student performance.

It also has a lot to do with something called standards-based education. Tacoma Public Schools are just now beginning a process of implementing recent, popular models of standards-based education.

Pay attention, because this is the crux of what's happening to education, and what will happen to education during the next 20 years. Right now we have a chance to decide how it's going to work. Critical moment. Got it?

"In the recounting of our nation's drive toward educational reform, the last decade of this century will undoubtedly be identified as the time when a concentrated press for national education standards emerged," say researchers Robert Glaser and Robert Linn. "... it might be only in retrospect that we recognize the importance of the current discussion of standards in American education."

Standards-based education started in the early ‘80s, and most recently culminated in the No Child Left Behind Act. It's all about measurable outcomes - good standardized test scores, skills assessments and graduation rates. Those aren't the only measurements, but they are the most popular.

The national vision of the standards-based movement looks like this:  Every student will receive a high school diploma that guarantees that everyone can read, write and do math at a level that is likely to be useful to an employer. The touted upside to standards-based education is that no student, regardless of poverty, age, race, gender, cultural or ethnic background, disabilities or family circumstances will be exempt from meeting basic standards - no child left behind.

Tacoma's vision is more complex, and incorporates some of what we've learned about standards-based curriculum development. Which is good. Because so far, standards-based education has been a mixed bag.

Early critiques of standards-based education referred to fears of a sort of educational apartheid. That's a term coined by Michael Apple, University of Wisconsin-Madison's professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies, who says this big drive toward accountability could end up making things worse for students who are already challenged.

Others fear that standards-based education would fail in the same way that previous, fairly creepy efforts at education reform did.

The efficiency movement, for example, began in 1913 and lasted until the early 1930s. It attempted to apply the principles of scientific management to schools. It was funded by private economic interests, designed by an industrial efficiency expert and essentially re-designed American education to produce good little factory workers. It didn't work.

Other critics have compared standards-based education to something called the behavioral objectives movement, which happened in the ‘60s. That effort involved detailing so-called behavioral objectives - hundreds, sometimes thousands, of measures like this one: "At the end of a 50-minute period of instruction, students will be able to complete eight out of ten problems in two-column addition within a five minute period."

The effort eventually produced so many varied forms of measurement that the whole thing collapsed under the weight of its own complexity.

Standards-based education has been criticized for both appearing to be aimed at satisfying workforce needs instead of encouraging students to follow their own path, and for creating unmanageable volumes of standards for students and teachers to follow.

But in some parts of the country, a more refined approach has led to a lot of success. Some of the efforts in Atlanta that Tacoma officials hope to replicate, for example, have been very successful in closing the achievement gap.

Here's what Tacoma's vision looks like, according to Tacoma School District's Plan of Action 2010:

"If we build the capacity of culturally-proficient administrators, teachers and instructional leaders to guide and facilitate the implementation of rigorous, culturally-responsive instruction in classrooms, we will succeed in creating a culturally-competent, sensitive system that addresses the academic needs, programs and services to ensure all students are successful. All students will learn the skills and concepts they need when they are provided the necessary conditions: high and consistent standards, challenging curriculum and highly-qualified teachers."

Translation: We have to teach the teachers and administrators a few things. Like how different people, especially people from different cultures and backgrounds, learn differently. They have different interests and strengths. Those are things we have to take into account while we're developing curriculums and school programs, buying textbooks, etc. We also have to hold teachers and administrators accountable for learning these things. If we do that, more students - including more students of color - will perform better in school.

That's the really, really simple version.

Students speak

The truth of the matter is that this is going to be a long haul. There's so much work to do that we're gathering some of the best minds in the country for a second national conference designed to unravel this issue.

Meanwhile, there are whispered concerns that talking to students is more of a token effort, and that the same old people are going to continue to define education.

But in Tacoma, one of seven foundations of education reform is "student voice."

Based on some of the smarts displayed during an hour of conversation with a small group of Lincoln High School students, that student voice part is important beyond measure.

"Standardized testing only shows that we've learned what people running colleges think we need to learn," says Harper.

"Sometimes I feel like I'm not being taught to my full potential," says Wayne.

"College kids at the summit told us that most of what we are learning (in high school) gets thrown out," says Copeland. "I'm way more interested in the things I learned from them."

"Sometimes we don't focus on learning the real history," says Torres. "They should focus on the important stuff that we can use in the future."

"I want to know what's going on now," says Castro. "Not some stuff from the past. I want to learn about things I can change. We want to learn about stuff that's affecting our lives."

"Change the whole thing," says Wayne. "Update it. We're still learning the same old things, and our test scores are getting worse."

All of the students gathered at the table seemed far more interested in what they were learning at the Youth Summit, which included instruction about linguistics, semiotics, cultural anthropology, alternative history and a range of other subjects usually reserved for college. These kids are ready now.

"Everybody has a different plan," says Grayson. "But we're all taught the same plan. We end up taking a lot of classes that don't mean anything to us because we have to meet this criteria."

Apparently this latest generation demands that their dreams and individual desires get the respect they deserve. These kids, more than any previous generation, seem to know what they want out of life. And fewer and fewer of them are content to be shunted into roles defined by the needs of the modern workforce. These kids want to change the world, not slip into roles the world has prepared for them.

Eddie Sumlin, who works with nonprofit Fab-5 to develop programs for the very kids falling through the achievement gap, says changing the approach and environment can make the difference between a bored kid and an active student.

 "At any point, we have 150 super-focused, on task, super-intelligent kids involved in our programs," says Sumlin. "And these are the same kids who are part of those schools that people say aren't passing (their standardized tests). We work to give them relevant programming. These are the kids that are ‘caught'  in the achievement gap. But I don't buy that. These kids are brilliant, passionate and inquisitive."

Sumlin echoes some of the sentiments offered by Lincoln students.

"Once they have a relevant presentation and group of people teaching them, they're brilliant," he says. "Education seems to be based on an empty glass theory. We're supposed to fill them up with knowledge. But I think our job is to help bring out the best that's already in these kids."