DATE: Friday, October 24, 1997              TAG: 9710240745

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: NORFOLK                           LENGTH:   86 lines

EDUCATORS HAVE TUG OF WAR OVER STATE STANDARDS

The state's new education standards are a one-size-fits-all straitjacket that will deny minority students a shot to get ahead. Or they are a long-deferred lifeline that will finally give them equal opportunity.

Those sharply contrasting views were presented at a conference Thursday on race in education.

The conference, which attracted more than 200 people to Norfolk State University, covered a swath of issues, including segregation in public schools and black graduation rates in colleges. Among the most contentious was the assessment of the new Virginia standards.

The standards, among other items, toughen the curriculum from social studies to math in kindergarten through 12th grade and require high school students to pass a majority of new state tests toreceive their diplomas. In addition, schools will lose their state accreditation in 10 years if they don't meet a 70 percent pass rate on the tests.

Carol Camp Yeakey, an education professor at the University of Virginia, derided the standards for their ``extraordinary ordinariness'' and ``one-size-fits-all approach to schooling.''

The highly specific curriculum guidelines, she said, might not give black students, often from low-income families, the special help they may need. Yeakey likened the approach to giving one dose of penicillin each to two patients, the second of whom needs three doses to recover. That's equal, but not equitable, treatment, she said.

``Without addressing the issues of equity and equality, we are hurting the students we purport to help,'' Yeakey said. ``We must be mindful of standards that further stratify society, where the rich get richer and the poor get custodial care.''

However, state Education Secretary Beverly H. Sgro said the standards will make ``algebra in Accomack the same as algebra in Abingdon. . . .

``All children in the commonwealth, not just children in suburban neighborhoods, will have the opportunity to be successful,'' Sgro said. ``We will provide every student, black and white, the opportunity to have a basic core of knowledge.''

Sgro also noted that the Virginia curriculum standards were cited over the summer by the American Federation of Teachers as the only ones in the nation ``exemplary'' for every core subject.

Many of the statistics cited by speakers Wednesday showed little progress in erasing educational inequities.

Over the last 20 years, there remains a 20-point gap between the percentage of black Virginians and the percentage of whites who received advanced-studies diplomas, said J. Michael Mullen, the interim director of the State Council of Higher Education. The advanced-studies track requires college-prep courses.

Mullen also said that two-thirds of white freshmen at Virginia schools graduate in seven years, compared with one-third of blacks.

The problem, Mullen said, is that more black students enter college without the requisite skills. The cause of that problem, Harvard professor Gary Orfield said, is the ``resegregation'' of the nation's public schools.

With court decisions dropping requirements for busing in cities including Norfolk, Orfield said, ``we're moving backwards from the vision of the Brown v. Board of Education decision (mandating integrated schools). And there's a lot of evidence that that's going to accelerate in the years to come.''

Compared with their peers nationwide, Orfield said, black students in Virginia rank midway on the integration scale - neither sitting in the most integrated or the most segregated classrooms in America.

At mostly black schools, Orfield said, students are less likely to get college-prep courses or solid counseling - two crucial ingredients for steering them to college: ``For low-income folks, counseling is much more important than anyone realizes. . . . Thousands of kids are in settings where it's impossible to prepare (for college), and nobody tells them until it's too late.''

But Reginald Wilson, senior scholar at the American Council on Education, offered a bright light, citing programs that work to bring black, often low-income, students up to speed.

At the University of California at Berkeley, black students had an 80 percent failure rate in calculus, compared with less than 10 percent of whites. After a program was started to work intensively with minority students, he said, their failure rate dropped to less than 4 percent - lower than the white students.

``Human beings are malleable,'' Wilson said. ``It just becomes harder to change them, the older they get.''

The two-day conference is being sponsored by a state commission, led by Del. Jerrauld C. Jones, D-Norfolk, to assess the state's progress in desegregating colleges. ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]

MARTIN SMITH-RODDEN

Harvard's Gary Orfield says public schools are resegregating. KEYWORDS: RACE EDUCATION STANDARDS

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