The Best Of Intentions ; Don't Like School District Of Lancaster's Plan For Helping Black Students? What Would You Do?

editorials

The School District of Lancaster wandered into a minefield with anew mentoring program for African-American students at McCaskey EastHigh School, and the decision has been blowing up in the district'sface ever since.

Nationwide controversy erupted following an Intelligencer Journal/Lancaster New Era story last month on the program, which groupedsome black juniors into homerooms by race and gender. Critics,including at least one civil rights group, screamed segregation.

And last week, the district backed out of the minefield,announcing that the mentored homerooms would be available to anystudent regardless of race or gender.

In a way, we're relieved. We admit to a certain sick pit-of-the-stomach feeling when we first read about the program. Any classroomin which a dividing line is drawn according to race is sure to raisethe ghosts of the bad old segregation era.

But the intent of the homerooms was good: to match black studentswith teachers of the same race and sex for frank discussions of theacademic challenges the kids are facing. In that regard, we're sorrySDoL felt pressured into giving up.

School officials said the homeroom experiment grew out of staffconcerns about black students' low scores on the state'sstandardized PSSA test. About a third of African-American studentsat McCaskey ranked proficient in reading, and just 27 percent wereproficient in math.

In the mentored homerooms, teachers could address the problemshead-on because they understand the kids' situations and are morelikely to be heard than teachers who don't share the students' raceand gender. It's not as if the students were always in single-raceclassrooms; homeroom periods are usually six minutes a day, and 20minutes twice a month.

You know what they say about the road to Hades being paved withgood intentions, though, and the blowback on cable news and theInternet since the first story was published was intense.

We were hoping SDoL would give the homeroom experiment a chanceto succeed and wouldn't pull the plug too soon. This could be one ofthose "teachable moments" in which the entire community can have aserious talk about race and education.

Why do so many African-American kids underperform other McCaskeystudents on the PSSAs? How do family situations figure into theequation? Are there cultural and peer-group factors that discouragethem from making academics a priority? And how can the communitychange that?

Let's hope that opportunity to talk hasn't vanished along withthe race- and gender-grouped homerooms. And let's hope the districtlearns a lesson from this about handling controversy.

Early on, the district issued a statement in response to thenational critics that sounded awfully defensive: "The high school isdisappointed by the negative perception and focus on single racialcomposition programming." Board President Richard Caplan told thePhiladelphia Inquirer that the district didn't want "a civil rightslawsuit by a disgruntled white person or Latino." In other words, anawful lot of ducking and covering was going on.

District administrators have pretty much admitted they didn'tanticipate the reaction to the homerooms, and last week it developedthat the school board didn't know about the program before it wentviral. The board doesn't need to be informed about every littledetail of the schools' operation, but members certainly should havebeen told about an experiment as potentially explosive as this one.

We'd like to have seen SDoL be forthright about the homeroomproject. Perhaps the district should have challenged the critics:Well, then, what would YOU do?

It's easy to lob verbal bombs online and on TV. It's a lot harderto build an atmosphere in which students want to succeedacademically. In a minefield, maybe a good offense is the bestdefense.