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Official School Statistics And StoriesEach school had its own webpages that can be understood as presenting an official story of the school and some of “school report card” for public evaluation, but the categories of information available is sufficiently different to make a precise comparison impossible. The information presented in Table 2 was selected to provide an overview of the schools, but there are many reasons to interpret the information cautiously, a few of which will be described. The most reliable information, with one exception, is that regarding enrollment and ethnic composition. The exception is at Boarding High, where all the students are Native American, but the total enrollment is questionable: During the first video production program, a huge portion of the class, reflecting a school-wide event, was “sent home.”9 The teacher reported that there were only about 200 students left, but there are no statistics that reflect this huge shift. The following school year, the number of students enrolled was reported as being over 700—almost 50% more than the previous year—and when I visited the school that year for the third video program, the class was sufficiently large that the teacher allowed only half of the students to participate in the video program. The visits, however, were before the mass expulsion had taken place the previous year, thus I currently can only guess as to how normal the action is. What is clear is that the school was tiny compared to the other two schools, and that Suburban High was about half the size of Urban High. The ethnicity of students in Suburban and Urban High Schools fit my expectations of the major difference between the suburban and urban areas: “Minority” (in the U.S.) students are nearly 100% of the Urban students and an actual minority in Suburban High. The story offered about Urban High is that it was almost entirely African American twenty years ago but has smoothly made the transition to being mostly Latino, the students coming mostly from Central America. Suburban High, on the other hand, has no majority. While European-Americans are the largest group, the Latino population is just behind it. Nevertheless, there is the impression that European-Americans dominate, which may reflect the ethnicity of teachers and administration for whom there are no statistics available. The attendance at Boarding High appears to be higher than the other two schools, which is not surprising because they live at school, but I question that the dropout rate is truly as low as indicated. The art teacher at Boarding High said that her students were mostly there as a last resort—that they had been expelled from every other school. And if half the students are sent home every year, they would not officially be considered dropouts. It is possible that a significant number came back the following year or attend other schools; I did speak with more than one eighteen and nineteen year old while there. Nevertheless, there are significant reasons to doubt the dropout rate. Similar problems exist at Urban High. The attendance rate is the lowest of the three schools, but whether or not it is accurate, it does not reflect attendance in the New Media 1 class, where there were usually only half the number of students that were officially registered for the class. Additionally, the teacher of New Media 3 provided a newspaper story that described a numbers game in calculating the dropout rate, which included counting youths who had runaway as having moved. The rate listed in Table 2 is about two percent higher than the previous two years, which can be attributed to the new principal, but Fine (1991) discusses a whole system of hiding the numbers while pushing youth out of school without a diploma. Performance on standardized tests is also a problem. The report about Boarding High did not specify which test had been given, and the comparatively high rate of success indicates a difference in measures. A comparison between Urban and Suburban is possible, indicating that neither school did particularly well but that Suburban students performed well above Urban students. While this is not a surprise, the magnitude of difference is: Suburban High was 20 percentage points higher than Urban on reading and 31 points on mathematics. The most shocking score is the one indicating that only one percent of Urban High students were proficient in mathematics. Even in fitness, Suburban High students performed more than twice as well as Urban High students. These scores mean something, though perhaps not what they are intended to mean. Substantial differences in student behavior problems or student/teacher ratios are not detectable with the available information, but it should be noted that Urban High was the only school at which I witnessed a lock down due to the discovery of a homemade bomb. A review of crime statistics at the school revealed such a wide range of incidents—such as zero “chemical substance abuses” in 2001-2002 and 16 in 2000-2001 and 35 in 1999-2000 or 4, 1, and 11 incidents respectfully of “possession of weapons”—that they are difficult to interpret, and such a report was not available for the other schools. The big pieces of missing information concern the relative poverty of students and the percent of students who have English as a second language. At Boarding High, general statistics about Native populations and indications by the teacher suggest that students come from relatively poor backgrounds—perhaps more so than at the other two schools—but specifics can only be guessed at from available information. There are no indications about the level of English proficiency. At Urban High and Suburban High, different measures of performance are broken down by whether students are “socio-economically disadvantaged” or not and in terms of their language dominance, but there are no numbers to clarify how many students fit these descriptions. The 2000 census (www.census.gov) indicates that the neighborhoods in which the schools were located had median family incomes between $14,939 and $32,768 for Urban High and $40,221 and $49,187 for Suburban High. Urban High is a Title 1 school, meaning that at least 40% of students come from impoverished homes (US Department of Education, n.d.), and 35% of the students were considered to be English Learners. The school report for Suburban High from the year 1998-1999 shows that more than 40% of students received free lunch, up 3% from the previous year, and 7% were Limited-English Proficient. Thus some degree of poverty can be assumed to exist at all three schools, but Urban High is probably the only school with a high proportion of students whose primary language is other than English. The main web site for Boarding High was rarely functioning, but when it did, it offered applications and important dates—information specifically for students and potential students—and a few photographs of students doing art work. A related web site was consistently working and focused on the history of the school. The school’s history as a place where Native Americans went to lose their identity and live in poverty is put forth, maintaining an implicit story that things are different now. The Centennial celebration I attended devoted a section of the school and many programs to the school’s history of assimilation and humiliation. While a clear message about the history of the school exists, the present is left somewhat ambiguous. In addition to the unofficial history on an online Native journal, which mourns the loss of traditional ceremonies at the school Pow Wow, I found an interesting discrepancy between the Bureau of Indian Affair’s (2001) assertion that “American Indian” was the preferred term and what the students said when I asked them; they all preferred Native American. The history and an unofficial website suggest an uneasy relationship between students and the school, but officially there is no recognition of it. This uneasiness is furthered by the location of the school: away from Native resources. The websites of the other schools consistently worked, but the Urban High site changed little over the two and a half years I have visited it. The page devoted to the history of Urban High did not change at all but got a new year written on the bottom recently. Much of the Urban High web site is clearly out of date, and few teachers have personal websites. The websites students made as part of their New Media 1 class were not posted on the internet. The message from the principal on the School Report Card stresses the evidence of a school committed to improvement, implicitly admitting how bad things are but remaining positive. Suburban High, in contrast, clearly uses its website to communicate with the community. It conveys scheduling information, announcements, and sports events. There is contact information for most staff, including email addresses, and the video program uses the site internally to broadcast their news program. The principal’s note in the Suburban Annual School Report commented on a change in administration and acknowledged being below the desired Academic Performance Index; they could afford to admit this deficiency because they were not far below it. At Urban High, the ethnic background and the economic status are important because they relate to academic deficiencies, but the website is for show and a largely abandoned project. Perhaps there is an assumption that their families do not use the internet. At Suburban High, the website actively maintains connections and schedules but does not acknowledge who its students are, reflecting a more suburban concern with school athletics, clubs, and property. |
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9It
is not known whether or not these students were permitted to reapply
for the following school year, but they were expelled for the year in
question. |
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