Controversial consultants and the superintendent who hired them are gone, but St. Paul Public Schools leaders say they are no less committed to closing gaps in achievement between whites and students of color.
The district in June ended what’s expected to be its last consulting contract with Pacific Educational Group, first hired in 2010 to improve outcomes for nonwhite students by changing the minds of a largely white staff.
PEG may not have transformed the district as hoped, but district leaders say the training has created a foundation that other racial-equity programs can build on.
Myla Pope, assistant director for equity, was teaching at John A. Johnson Elementary when the district set about talking openly about race.
An African-American woman, she said she had felt isolated in a school with a predominantly white staff. When, she says, she heard colleagues say they could tell a child was on a special-education plan just by his black-sounding name, she didn’t know how to challenge them.
That changed with PEG’s arrival.
“It gave me a means to have that conversation instead of just shutting down, going to my classroom, shutting my door and never speaking to that teacher again,” Pope said.
More than 4,000 district employees have completed Beyond Diversity, PEG’s two-day training program that forces white teachers to confront societal advantages inherent to their skin color.
The district will continue to pay PEG licensing fees to use their materials — about $40,000 this school year — but district employees now lead the training, which takes place just before the start of each school year.
Besides Beyond Diversity, new teachers spend two additional days on curriculum and instruction models, using iPads in the classroom, and teaching special-education and English language learners.
Racial equity was a hallmark of Valeria Silva’s more than six years as superintendent, which included the school board’s passage in 2013 of a racial equity policy that blamed “institutional racism” for the low performance of students of color.
Despite the spotlight, the district has made little measurable progress.
Graduation rates have improved, and the district’s gifted elementary school is no longer predominantly white.
But district data shows a lack of progress, at best, on racial disparities in suspensions, absences from school, and who gets referred for special-education services. And gaps on math and reading performance have worsened.
On the spring 2011 state tests, 24 percent of black students and 68 percent of whites scored proficient or better. This year, just 18 percent of black students and 66 percent of white students met the state’s expectations.
In reading, the black-white proficiency gap this spring was 49 percentage points, up from 46 points in 2013.
The community’s appetite for progress on racial equity doesn’t seem to have waned.
After the school board fired Silva last year, a large survey conducted as part of the search for her replacement found “a deep understanding of racial equity” to be the No. 1 priority for board members, non-school staff and community members.
“There is great interest and desire from a far majority of staff and leaders in this district that the work is still important,” Joe Gothard, who started as superintendent in July, said in a recent interview.
Gothard said he intends to create a “culture of belief” in which all students and staff members feel they have something to contribute.
Closing achievement gaps, he said, “absolutely can be done.”
TRAINING WORTHWHILE? YES AND NO
A prerequisite for teachers to obtain tenure, Beyond Diversity has district employees speaking the same language around race, chief operating officer Jackie Turner said.
Several schools are building on that foundation with additional professional development programs, such as Innocent Classroom, which seeks to build teachers’ empathy for their students.
Julie Dums, 48, a social worker at The Heights Community School, said Beyond Diversity “planted the seed.” On the job and in daily life, she says, she’s constantly aware of her privilege as a white woman.
Innocent Classroom showed her how to focus on “what is the child really trying to tell me,” she said, rather than on his or her negative behavior.
“I think today I’m a completely different person than I was before the two trainings,” Dums said.
Joachim Huber, who teaches fifth grade at Farnsworth, said Beyond Diversity didn’t do much for her.
Huber, who is white and has taught for three decades, said she sets high expectations for all students. For that reason, she said, children of color have performed well in her classes.
“I didn’t do it by paying attention to race,” she said.
Diana Salinas, who teaches third grade at Ben Mays and is African-American, said Beyond Diversity got the conversation started, but two days of training wasn’t enough.
“We tried to make sure that in every meeting we’re speaking with honesty, and I feel like that’s hard for teachers to do because they don’t want to sound racist,” she said.
English teacher Liana Lingofelt, 39, said PEG cared only to address the problems of African-Americans, even though her school’s Latino and Native American students were struggling too.
A Korean-American adopted by a white couple, Lingofelt briefly served on Highland Park High School’s equity team. She said the district’s focus on race was a good idea, but it never took hold at her school because of a lack of commitment from school leadership and ineffective training by PEG.
Across the district, many white staff members have pushed back against PEG’s message that because they are white, they are “racist.”
Staff at Bruce Vento Elementary were shocked when during school-level training they were presented with a Ku Klux Klan image and asked, “When do you wear the hood?”
Critics such as Aaron Benner, a former teacher now suing the district, have blamed PEG for breeding in African-American students a feeling that they can do whatever they want without consequence because the district wants to reduce its disparities in suspensions.
“Because there was such a backlash against PEG, it’s given people a free pass to say this work was fraudulent,” Lingofelt said. “People were using that as an excuse to not look at the issue of race.”
ADMINISTRATION SEES PROGRESS
Michelle Bierman, who led the district’s Office of Equity, fielded much of the criticism over PEG’s training. She said the mini-controversies were a distraction from the work.
Only a “small percentage” of staffers get upset during Beyond Diversity training because they take the message too personally or don’t go in with an open mind, Bierman said. The program, she says, has given district employees permission to speak openly about race.
“People seem relieved to be able to talk about race with a language that people don’t walk away feeling bad,” she said.
Bierman moved to an assistant principal position over a year ago, and the equity office was folded into the Office for Teaching and Learning. She said she recommended that change in order to better connect the training to daily classroom practices.
Teachers had complained that the foundational training gave them no suggestions for better serving students of color.
Meanwhile, Bierman said PEG and the school district have been intentional about bringing greater diversity into training sessions, including Native and Asian-Americans speakers.
Hans Ott, assistant superintendent of teaching and learning, said district surveys have found more teachers are using culturally relevant and responsive material with students — 82 percent compared with 60 percent in 2014-15.
And teachers of color have been given a greater voice in the district, he said.
“New staff members, especially the staff members of color, feel very welcome into the district and are saying, ‘This is different from where I’ve been working elsewhere,’” he said.