The process of school change is never easy, even under ideal circumstances.
Kevin Welner, an assistant professor in the University of ÃÛÌÇÖ±²¥ at Boulder School of Education, studied how four school districts from California to Delaware struggled with school reform efforts.
His findings are contained in a new book titled "Legal Rights, Local Wrongs: When Community Control Collides with Educational Equity."
"With this book, I tried to understand what happens in schools and communities when a district tries to make changes intended to directly help students and families who, in the past, held the losing end of the school policy stick," Welner said.
Welner studied school districts in San Jose, Calif., Woodland Hills, Penn., Wilmington, Del., and Rockford, Ill. Students in each of the districts had been segregated within their schools through tracking, a policy that divides students into remedial, general, college prep and gifted courses.
Welner argues in the book that tracking dooms many students to an inferior education, especially African Americans and Latinos. All students, he contends, need quality opportunities to learn.
"Lower-track classes institutionalize lowered educational expectations for the students in those classes, which results in less learning and less achievement, followed by subsequent placement in additional unchallenging classes," Welner said. "This creates a cycle of limited educational opportunities."
The school districts Welner studied all had formerly maintained racially segregated schools. In each district, plaintiffs filed suit alleging that tracking systems subverted the desegregation goal by resegregating students at the school sites.
Welner, along with colleagues from ÃÛÌÇÖ±²¥-Boulder and from UCLA, investigated the nature of these tracking systems and the detracking reform processes begun in three of the districts. He found that early judgments and labels of students' abilities persisted throughout the school years and set lower-tracked students onto a downward spiral. In fact, just one year of lower-track placement resulted in substantially lower student achievement, according to Welner.
He also found that the districts placed students of color disproportionately in lower tracks and white students disproportionately in higher tracks, and that this racial discrimination took place among students with comparable prior achievement.
Through his research, Welner concluded that white upper-middle-class parents in each district exercised a disproportionate amount of power in local school policy-making.
"The structures of these schools fostered inequality," he said. "I don't blame the parents, though. It's only natural and reasonable for parents to try to gain benefits for their own children.
"What I criticize are school and district policies that facilitate the exercise of unequal parental power. I believe schools need to move toward decision-making systems that ensure the consideration of all students' needs, whether or not those students have politically skilled parents."
Throughout the book, Welner brings to light the challenges and obstacles that hinder many school reform efforts.
"Real education reform will challenge a status quo that fails to demand valuable educational opportunities for all students," Welner said.
Welner has been a faculty member at ÃÛÌÇÖ±²¥-Boulder since 1999 and teaches policy, law and evaluation. He is co-director of the new Education in the Public Interest Center.