Put to the test: Most Blacks and Hispanics graduate with a local, not a Regents diploma
by TANANGACHI MFUNI, Special to the AmNews, 6/29/2005

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Tens of thousands of Black and Hispanic students will likely graduate from city high schools this year ill-equipped for the future.

The Department of Education (DOE) has revealed that in years past, 90 percent of Black and Hispanic students have received diplomas without meeting state requirements.

Instead of receiving Regents diplomas, which require students to pass a number of state-administered exams, most Black and Hispanic students graduate with the lesser local diplomas, issued by the city, that minimally require them to pass their classes.

"Most people don't know that there are, in essence, two different diplomas," said Council Member Eva Moskowitz (D-Manhattan), who heads the Education Committee, which released a report last month disclosing the department's figures.

The report states that in 2004, while only 10 percent of Black and Hispanic students graduated fulfilling the state's requirements, more than three times that number, or over 35 percent of their white and Asian peers, graduated having met the standards, which ask students to pass an English, Science, Math, Global Studies and U.S. History Regents exam with a score of 55 or better.

The gap between white and Asian students and Black and Hispanic students receiving Regents diplomas-which have come to signify college and work preparedness-raises serious questions as to whether city schools are adequately preparing these students for life after graduation.

Deshauna Allicock, a Black high school senior, attending a Bedford-Stuyvesant school, said urban schools simply don't prepare students for Regents exams.

"Do you know how many students take Regents over and over again?" she asks.
Allicock complains Regents preparation is not evenly paced throughout the year, and sometimes teachers overload students with tutorials during the eleventh hour. Allicock says students, frustrated and overwhelmed by test-driven learning, often "forget it."

However, it should be noted that the Regents diploma disparity Blacks and Hispanic students suffer is more than just a student/teacher problem, Allicock observes. It is a years-old crisis, one that also embroils the Department of Education and the Board of Regents. While all parties readily acknowledge the crisis, they refuse to take complete blame for the purple mammoth standing in the city's schoolrooms.
"Folks at the city and state department of education were asleep at the wheel," said Moskowitz, who is currently campaigning for Manhattan borough president. The council member faults Board of Regents and DOE, which recently boasted improved test scores among elementary students, as not doing enough to equip Black and Hispanic kids at the high school level-a fact the DOE's spokesperson doesn't completely dismiss.

"We concentrate a lot of our efforts in the early grades," agrees Stephen J. Morello, director of communications for the Department of Education, who argues that his department's focus has been on elementary and junior high students because if students aren't mastering basic literary and math skills in lower grades, the chances are slight that they'll even get through high school.

While Morello maintains the high school graduation rate has climbed 4 percent and that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel I. Klein over the past 3 years have made dramatic strides, critics contest that the department is a large bureaucracy not completely in touch with high schools' needs.

Yelena Ramauter, a counselor with Harlem Center for Education, a non-profit that places academic advisors in high schools around Manhattan, says big schools (or the more recent trend of housing several small high schools in the same building), large class sizes, uncertified teachers, and under-funded school budgets all conspire against Black and Hispanic high-schoolers.

"They put Black and Latino children between a rock and a hard place," said Ramauter, who says adverse conditions in high schools, unaddressed with or even created by the department, contribute to the poor rate at which Black and Hispanic students are graduating with state diplomas.

Adelaide Sanford, vice chancellor at large to the Board of Regents, agrees with Ramauter's assessment and says for the past decade the state board has mentioned all of the above to the city and has been working to rectify the problem she calls a "human rights" and a "national security" issue.

But quick solutions to the Regents disparity, such as eliminating the local diplomas all at once, are not at the top of the list to bridge the Regents diploma gap. Parties on all sides unanimously agree that putting a stop to local diplomas would mean massive failure and dropout rates for students.

The city itself has been gradually increasing the requirement of local diplomas, recently making it mandatory that all students take the Regents exams (but not necessarily pass them) in order to qualify for a local diploma.

Alternate suggestions to closing the Regents diploma gap have ranged from specific to general.
Among the suggestions included in Moskowitz's report are calls on the DOE to yearly publish the rates of Black and Hispanic students graduating with Regents diplomas in high school report cards, though the department argues it has already made these statistics known to the public.

Furthermore, others like Regents vice chancellor Sanford argue that even when statistics are available to the public, as shocking as the figures might be, they are often of no consequence because mainstream media outlets do not report them.

"There is no one to tell the story," said Sanford, who says people are apathetic about disparities that Blacks and Hispanics face, which ultimately extend outside the school doors: "When you look at the history, where has there been outrage about the atrocities that have happened to people of color?"
Additional recommendations Moskowitz has made were that each high school principal be held accountable for executing one to five year plans that would steadily increase the numbers of Black and Hispanic students graduating with state-issued diplomas from their schools citywide.

Meanwhile, the United Federation of Teachers has suggested that the city adopt a plan that would lure the most experienced teachers to the poorest performing schools, promising better pay as a way of increasing the number of Black and Hispanic students graduating with Regents diplomas.

As the state passes tougher Regents requirements-this June the board voted to increase the passing score of the regents exam from a 55 to 65, beginning for students entering ninth grade in 2008-tens of thousands of students continue to graduate.

One in ten of these students will be like Deshauna Allicock, who graduated from her Bed-Stuy school with a Regents diploma last Tuesday. Allicock feels confident, having met all the requirements of the Regents diploma, that she will be on equal footing when she meets with other first-year students at Hampton University, where she'll be starting this fall.

But the vast majority will not be like Allicock and will rush out of the labyrinth of the public education system into the more convoluted labyrinth of life- quite unprepared.