Aurora – For two Thursdays each month, a dozen Cherry Creek School District teachers gather in a fourth-grade classroom at Highline Community School and confront one of society’s greatest fears. They meet to talk about race.
They are a mix of teachers-in-training and those who have recently switched careers. They sit behind metal desks arranged in a semicircle and talk about “white privilege” and black students with low self-esteem.
They share personal experiences – about openly racist relatives and having been trailed in stores by clerks who expected them to steal. One black teacher confesses a reluctance to speak her true thoughts, for fear of being called “paranoid.”
School psychologist Kinette Richards shares that “as a black woman in America, what I have to say about race will not be what people want to hear.”
With these tentative remarks, the teachers are having what has come to be known as the “courageous conversation.” They are in the first month of a year of meetings led by fellow teacher David Gonzales aimed at changing the culture in the district’s schools.
It is delicate, emotional and painfully awkward. But a candid discussion about race is also a vital first step to close the achievement gap between white and minority students, Superintendent Monte Moses says.
On average, white and Asian students outperform black and Latino students in the district by 30 percentage points among those who scored at least proficient on Colorado Student Assessment Program tests, said Elliott Asp, an assistant superintendent.
When the scores are adjusted to account for risk factors such as poverty, high mobility and poor English skills, a gap still exists, he said.
“What it says is there is a racial factor that we need to look at,” Asp said.
In Cherry Creek Schools, a district known as white and wealthy, the minority population has nearly doubled since 1995 – from 16 percent to 31 percent during the 2003-04 school year. Of the district’s 3,443 teachers, only 259 are not white, district data show.
The growth in minority students has been concentrated in the district’s northern area, said Brooke Gregory, former director of the district’s multicultural office. Five years ago, the district interviewed black and Latino students and families in the northern area and learned that many felt they were held to a lower standard based on their race, said Gregory, now assistant principal at Cherokee Trail High School.
The district recognized it needed outside help. Led by Moses, the district hired the California-based Pacific Education Group to launch “Excellence and Equity,” a training program in which educators examine the tie between race and student achievement.
So far, the district has invested more than $275,000 in the program. It went districtwide this year.
Until now, what has been missing from the discussion on the achievement gap is “a dialogue on the impact of race,” said Glenn E. Singleton, executive director of Pacific Education. “It’s not even acknowledged. We’re not even grappling with the idea that race could be a factor.”
Singleton said many white educators struggle with what he calls a “culture of whiteness,” the characteristics whites share, from their appearance to their way of speaking and their mannerisms.
“They’re unable to recognize that they too bring a culture of race to the school,” Singleton said.
For some children of color, “the behaviors the teachers normalize in the classroom may not be normal,” he said.
Moses said it’s difficult to refute “the argument that the dominant way of doing everything in our schools is around white children.”
However, he said, the training is not about blaming teachers.
“This training helps us realize that without meaning to do so, it’s very easy to have different expectations for students of different races, just as society has groomed us to,” Moses said.
So far, about 1,000 teachers and administrators have been through the training, and some, such as Gonzales, also learned to lead discussions. An additional 2,000 are scheduled this year for training, which begins with “courageous conversations” and continues with sessions on how to develop teaching strategies that appeal to all students.
Teachers learn, for example, that black and Latino students are more engaged when taught collectively, while white and Asian students are more competitive and individualistic, Singleton said.
Cherry Creek officials say it’s still too early to track results, but at the Oak Grove School District in California, similar training has produced results, said Manny Barbara, superintendent of the San Jose-based district.
The district, which serves 11,600 students in kindergarten through eighth grade, has been working with Pacific Education for at least eight years.
About 42 percent of its students are Latino, while 28 percent are white, 19 percent are Asian and 6 percent are black.
Five years ago, no minorities were enrolled in eighth-grade geometry. Today, out of 77 students enrolled, six are black and eight are Latino.
“That might not sound like much, but eight (Latinos) is more than we had five years ago,” said Barbara. “We looked at how we were placing kids.”
In Cherry Creek, the “Excellence and Equity” program hasn’t had total buy-in. Teachers have walked out of sessions in tears. Some have felt they were being called racist.
Alvin Poussaint, a professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and author of several books on African-American culture, said such training can be beneficial if teachers “pick up on things they are blind to,” but it may not not be effective if teachers are resistant.
What’s most important is for teachers to “have high expectations for all of their students,” he said, “not setting a standard that’s a white suburban standard.”
At Highline Community School, David Gonzales paces the aisles, talking to his diverse mix of fourth-graders about a book they have just read.
“Let’s think about one character from the book,” he says, then adds an idea he learned from training: “Relate that character to a family member or a neighbor.”
With more family references used in his questions, his lowest-performing Latino students improved by 14 percent in their reading assignments, he said.
During the first “courageous conversation” held with new teachers this month, Gonzales invites teachers to discuss the impact of race in their lives and how racial attitudes might relate to the achievement gap.
Journalist-turned-teacher Bill O’Brien says that if he treats his minority students differently, it’s because he’s trying to encourage them.
After the meeting, O’Brien says the discussion felt uncomfortable at first.
“I was trying to be more measured. There’s a feeling of not wanting to offend,” he admits. As more people spoke up, he felt more at ease.
“It’s a difficult topic to discuss,” he says.
Staff writer Karen Rouse can be reached at 303-820-1684 or krouse@denverpost.com.
