The Big Lies Against Cuba
Opinion and Analysis
March 2010

Despite President Obama‟s declaration of his administration‟s desire to “seek a
new beginning with Cuba”, and to “learn from history, not be trapped by it” in April of
last year, Cuba has remained under attack by the U.S.

In January, new US air security policies included Cuba on a list of countries
whose air passengers would get extra security screening as they enter US territory.
And Cuba remains on the State Department‟s list of „state sponsors of terrorism‟,
notwithstanding the lack of any evidence of Cuban involvement in acts of terrorism.
Cuba has vigorously protested all of these unconscionable attacks.

In fact, Cuba‟s policies of internationalism have arguably been the most
politically advanced in the world. From the direct military intervention to help in the
defeat of Apartheid in southern Africa in 1988 (Cuito Cuanavale, Angola) to direct
medical aide and solidarity with Haiti (before the earthquake). Since the earthquake,
western media has been suspiciously silent on the exceptional role Cuba has played in
support of Haiti with more than 900 health care providers on the ground, the largest and
most organized contingent on the island.

Yet, one of the most disturbing new attacks against Cuba occurred late last year
when a host of prominent African Americans signed on to a so-called “…Declaration of
African American Support for the Civil Rights Struggle in Cuba”.
This misguided “declaration” accuses the Cuban State of racism. It cites the
imprisonment of a Dr. Darsi Ferrer, an active critic of the Cuban government, as an
example of racism in Cuba.

Dr. Ferrer was reportedly accused of attempting to establish a private medical
clinic outside of Cuba‟s world-renowned medical system, by receiving illegally obtained
construction materials. Whatever the case, Dr. Ferrer‟s situation should immediately
bring to mind the 50 year history of attempts by the US to subvert the Cuban Revolution
through internal dissent and direct attack harkening back to the Bay of Pigs invasion
and so on.

Certainly the struggle against racism anywhere in the world is of paramount
importance to all of humanity. But can this attack against Cuba under the guise of
fighting racism really be justified? We think not.
Many African Americans may not know about some of the unique features of
Cuban history even though African Americans and Cubans have a deeply rooted history
of solidarity with each other.

For example, during Cuba‟s first War for Independence from Spain in 1868,
plantation and slave owner Carlos Manual de Cespedes freed and armed the slaves on
his plantation and called on them to join the struggle for Cuba‟s independence. The
Afro-Cuban General Antoneo Maceo emerged as one of Cuba‟s most renowned
revolutionary leaders of all time. As a result of this struggle, slavery was abolished in
Cuba by 1886.

What a contrast to US history where the maintenance of slavery was a pre-
condition of unity between the colonies in the American fight for independence from
Britain. Although more than 5,000 Blacks fought in the American Revolution, legalized
slavery continued for nearly another 100 years.

And the US has historically played a role in maintaining racism in Cuba. The US
intervention and occupation of Cuba starting in 1898 during Cuba‟s second War for
Independence (1895) and where more than half the fighters were Black, re-established
institutional racism in Cuba. Under the intermittent US occupations there, Afro-Cubans
and women, as well as the poor, were barred from voting, holding elective office,
owning businesses, land, and etc. Sound familiar?

Most Cuban historians and scholars agree that the Cuban Socialist Revolution in
1959 abolished legalized institutional racism in Cuba. Cuba‟s revolutionary constitution
outlawed racial discrimination while open and public debate and education since the
revolution have tackled Cuba‟s history as an Afro-Cuban nation. However, the legacy
of 500 years of slavery, racism, and all forms of discrimination is difficult to completely
eradicate in just 50 years, especially while also under the US led attacks and blockade
against Cuba.

Even so, the conditions of all Cubans have improved under the covenant of the
socialist revolution in Cuba which has provided free education, free health care, land
for poor farmers, reduced cost rent and utilities, the elimination of unemployment, and
so on.

Racism, institutionalized or otherwise has not been abolished any place in the
world. Yet Cuba, in our view, remains a hopeful beacon in the western hemisphere that
humane societies can be constructed that provide the basis for the elimination of all
forms of discrimination, exploitation, and oppression.

Ashaki Binta
For the “Cuban Working Group”
Black Left Unity Network
You may contact the working group at: cubaworkinggroup@gmail.com
And documents from the Cuba Working Group may be viewed at:
www.blackeducator.org/cubasolidarity.htm

Cuba Working Group
A Committee of the
Black Left Unity Network
Contact: cubaworkinggroup@gmail.com
View our documents at: www.blackeducator.org/cubasolidarity.htm
Press Release
Contact:
Ashaki Binta, Co-Convener 203-379-7711
March 1, 2010

National: The Black Left Unity Network (BLUN) announces the formation of it’s Cuba
Working Group (CWG) today. The CWG is a national network of activists and organ-
izers who are concerned about the ongoing attacks against the nation of Cuba despite
President Obama’s proclamations of improving relations with the Cuban state in the
Spring of 2009.

Most CWG members have traveled to Cuba and/or have been active in Cuban
Solidarity work for many years and are familiar with the difficult challenges faced by
the island over the last 50 years.

One of the latest attacks against Cuba was generated in the Black community
late last year when a prominent group of African Americans signed on to a declaration
originated by anti-Cuban activists in Latin America who accused the Cuban state of
racism.

Signers of the accusatory declaration include preeminent figures such as Dr.
Julianne Malveaux, Dr. Ron Walters, actress Ruby Dee, film maker Melvin Van
Peebles, Dr. Kathleen Neal Cleaver, and Dr. Cornel West among many others.
A list of 60 notable African Americans signed on to the document.

“Our consideration is that the accusation of racism against Cuba is disingenu-
ous and is in fact intended to weaken solidarity between the African American commu-
nity and Cuba which has historically been very strong.,” said Alberto Jones, a member
of the CWG and a native Cuban residing in Miami.

“A further consequence of this attack would then be to increase the unjustified
pressure on the Cuban state to abandon its socialist character and eliminate the cru-
cial gains of the 1959 Cuban Revolution in providing education, healthcare, affordable
housing, and a healthy cultural life for the Cuban people,” the group said.

According to the CWG, the US government’s historic blockade and ongoing
programs to foment internal dissent within Cuba contribute significantly to weakening
the island nation’s ability to improve and advance the political, social, economic, and
cultural gains of the revolution including the elimination of all forms of inequality and
lingering remnants of slavery.

Despite this, says the CWG, Cuba has abolished institutional racism and has
considerably improved the lives of all it’s citizens since the revolution including nearly
eliminating illiteracy and vastly improving infant mortality rates to levels lower than
those in the US, especially among African Americans. The Cuban nation has officially
acknowledged that more than 60 percent of its citizens are of African descent.

“We believe that those who are concerned about racism in Cuba should be in-
creasing pressure on the US government to end the blockade and other illegitimate
attacks against that country, rather than signing on to specious accusations that do
nothing to help the people of Cuba,” the group said.

The Black Left Unity Network (BLUN) was formed in May of 2008 to strengthen
and revitalize the Black Freedom Movement in the United States. The BLUN Cuba
Working Group was instituted in January this year to help educate the African Ameri-
can community about the importance of Revolutionary Cuba in the international fight
against all forms of discrimination, exploitation, and oppression and about Cuba’s
historic solidarity with the struggle for freedom of the African American people.

Uganda: Police Shoot Makobore High School Student Dead

http://allafrica.com/stories/200906230924.html

Rukungiri/Mbarara — A demonstration by students of Makobore High School in Rukungiri District over food rations took a tragic twist on Sunday after police shot dead 18-year-old Mark Mugyenyi, a Senior Four candidate.

Police said Mugyenyi sustained injuries in his abdomen as a result of bullets fired at him by two Special Police Constables (SPCs); Warren Butusi and Bernard Banyenzaki. Mugyenyi was rushed to the nearby Nyakibare Hospital, where he later died yesterday morning.

According to the headmaster, Mr Sephats Turyabahika, the two SPCs, had deployed at the school to guard the home of a teacher, Mr Geoffrey Mugisha, who also doubles as the Mess Master. Separate accounts indicate that Mr Mugisha’s troubles with the Senior Four students started when he caned their classmate who attempted to get double his daily lunch ration.

Refusing to take beating on the chin, the student mobilised his colleagues who ganged around their teacher, asking him to apologise to them for the humiliation and also tell the cooks to give them more food.

The Senior Four class at Makobore has 80 students.

Mr Turyabahika said Mr Mugisha declined to apologise or issue the order to the cooks, prompting the students to try and attack him. “When we realised danger, we asked for Police protection and withdrew our usual guards,” he said. But even the presence of the SPCs did not, according to Mr Turyabahika, stop the angry students from raiding their teacher’s home, saying they wanted to discipline him.

Students who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being reprimanded by the school authorities, said the Police fired several bullets, some of which caught Mugyenyi in the abdomen. Mr Turyabahika quoted the guards saying the students were trying to disarm them. He added that after the first shots, the students continued to descend on the two Policemen shouting, “their bullets are about to get finished”.

Daily Monitor was unable to get comprehensive, independent accounts from Senior Four students who participated in the riot but one of the students, who said he witnessed the fracas, said some aspects of the headmaster’s account were false.

The Police spokesperson for western region, Ms Polly Namaye, apologised for the shooting and said the two SPCs had already been arrested. She said investigations were ongoing to get the true account of what happened but warned students against acts of hooliganism.

Test Results Show Persistent Racial Gap in School Achievement

Students pass through a metal detector to get into their school.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/education/29scores.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The achievement gap between white and minority students has not narrowed in recent years, despite the focus of the No Child Left Behind law on improving black and Hispanic scores, according to results of a federal test considered to be the nation’s best measure of long-term trends in math and reading proficiency.

Black and Hispanic elementary, middle and high school students all scored much higher on the federal test, administered last year, than did their counterparts decades back. But nearly four decades of scores on the same test show that their most important academic gains came not in recent years, but during the desegregation efforts of the 1970s and 1980s.

Between 2004 and last year, scores for young minority students increased, but so did those of white students, leaving the achievement gap stubbornly wide, despite President Bush’s frequent assertions that the No Child law was having a dramatic effect.

“There’s not much indication that N.C.L.B. is causing the kind of change we were all hoping for,” said G. Gage Kingsbury, a testing expert who is a director at the Northwest Evaluation Association in Portland. “Trends after the law took effect mimic trends we were seeing before. But in terms of watershed change, that doesn’t seem to be happening.” Overall, America’s education system does not seem to be making more than incremental progress either. The scores of 17-year-old students were the same as those of teenagers who took the test in the early 1970’s. The scores of 9- and 13-year-old students, however, averaged across all groups, were up modestly in reading, and considerably higher in math, since 2004, the last time the test was administered. And they were quite a bit higher than those of students of the same age a generation back. Still, their progress disappeared as they got older.

The results will stoke debate about how to rewrite the No Child law when the Obama administration brings it up for reauthorization later this year. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said he would like to strengthen national academic standards, tighten requirements that high-quality teachers be distributed equally across schools in affluent and poor neighborhoods, and make other tweaks. “We still have a lot more work to do,” Mr. Duncan said of the latest scores. But the long-term assessment results could invigorate those who challenge the law’s accountability model itself.

“We saw stronger gains and more progress in narrowing achievement gaps before No Child took effect,” said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at Berkeley. “The punch that centralized accountability packs seems to be weakening. We’re lifting the basic skills of young kids but this policy is not lifting 21st-century skills for the new economy.”

The math and reading test, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress: Trends in Academic Progress, was given to a nationally representative sample of 26,000 students last year. It was the 12th time since 1971 that the Department of Education administered a comparable test to students ages 9, 13 and 17. The scores, released on Tuesday in Washington, allow for comparisons of student achievement every few years back to the Vietnam and Watergate years.

The results point to the long-term crisis in many of the nation’s high schools, and could lead to proposals for more federal attention to them in the rewrite of the No Child law, which requires states to administer annual tests in grades three to eight, but only once in high school.

Margaret Spellings, Mr. Duncan’s predecessor under President Bush, called the results a vindication of the No Child law.

“It’s not an accident that we’re seeing the most improvement where N.C.L.B. has focused most vigorously,” Ms. Spellings said. “The law focuses on math and reading in grades three through eight — it’s not about high schools. So these results are affirming of our accountability type approach.”

She said the results were especially encouraging because of the sweeping demographic changes that have overtaken American schools during the decades since the first long-term assessment was administered. In 1971, for instance, 84 percent of the 9-year-olds who took the test were white, 14 percent were black, 2 percent were classified as “other,” and Hispanics were not even broken out as a separate category. Last year, 56 percent of 9-year-olds who took the test were white, 16 percent were black, 20 percent were Hispanic, and 7 percent were classified as “other.”

“Schools are poorer, more diverse, our work is more challenging,” Ms. Spellings said.

Freeman Hrabowski, the president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who has written about raising successful African-American children, said the persistence of the achievement gap should lead policymakers to redouble efforts to increase time spent with low-performing students.

“Where we see the gap narrowing, that’s because there’s been an emphasis on supplemental education, on after-school programs that encourage students to read more and do more math problems,” Dr. Hrabowski said. “Where there are programs that encourage that additional work, students of color do the work and their performance improves and the gap narrows.”

But he said that educators and parents pushing children to higher achievement often find themselves swimming against a tide of popular culture.

“Even middle-class students are unfortunately influenced by the culture that says it’s simply not cool for students to be smart,” he said. “And that is a factor here in these math and reading scores.”

Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents more than 60 metropolitan school systems, said that much of the progress among the nation’s minority students has been the result of hard work by urban educators, not only since the No Child law took effect but for decades before.

“N.C.L.B. did not invent the concept of the achievement gap —much of the desegregation work in the 70’s and 80’s was in fact about giving poor, Hispanic and African-American kids access to better resources and curriculum,” Mr. Casserly said. “You do see from these results that in that period, the gains were steeper. It wasn’t being called an achievement gap, but that was what that was about.”

We knew about the ‘gladiator’ battles at Corcoran penitentiary in California and Rikers Island prison in New York, but we would have never guessed similar things were happening in a high school.  I guess they’re preparing the youth for the prisons…

Troubled students forced to fight in cage

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090319/ap_on_re_us/school_cage_fights

This is a real sad article.  In this shameful policy children who have parents who are delinquent on paying their lunch bills at school are openly degraded and singled out.  Surely this happens in many ways throughout our entire society; poor people are disrespected and shamed, but to do this to children like this is truly an abomination.  Now there are three other states who have followed suit, so this is bigger than just a school in New Mexico.  Can anyone think of a better way to make the pursuit of educaion more difficult than shaming a child for being poor in front of their classmates? 

New Mexico Schools Adopt ‘Cheese Sandwich Policy’ for Children Without Lunch Money

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,499909,00.html

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. —  A cold cheese sandwich, fruit and a milk carton might not seem like much of a meal — but that’s what’s on the menu for students in New Mexico’s largest school district without their lunch money.

Faced with mounting unpaid lunch charges in the economic downturn, Albuquerque Public Schools last month instituted a “cheese sandwich policy,” serving the alternative meals to children whose parents fail to pick up their lunch tab.

Such policies have become a necessity for schools seeking to keep budgets in the black while ensuring children don’t go hungry. School districts including those in Chula Vista, Calif., Hillsborough County, Fla., and Lynnwood, Wash., have also taken to serving cheese sandwiches to lunch debtors.

Critics argue the cold meals are a form of punishment for children whose parents can’t afford to pay.

“We’ve heard stories from moms coming in saying their child was pulled out of the lunch line and given a cheese sandwich,” said Nancy Pope, director of the New Mexico Collaborative to End Hunger. “One woman said her daughter never wants to go back to school.”

Some Albuquerque parents have tearfully pleaded with school board members to stop singling out their children because they’re poor, while others have flooded talk radio shows thanking the district for imposing a policy that commands parental responsibility.

Second-grader Danessa Vigil said she will never eat sliced cheese again. She had to eat cheese sandwiches because her mother couldn’t afford to give her lunch money while her application for free lunch was being processed.

“Every time I eat it, it makes me feel like I want to throw up,” the 7-year-old said.

Her mother, Darlene Vigil, said there are days she can’t spare lunch money for her two daughters.

“Some parents don’t have even $1 sometimes,” the 27-year-old single mother said. “If they do, it’s for something else, like milk at home. There are some families that just don’t have it and that’s the reason they’re not paying.”

The School Nutrition Association recently surveyed nutrition directors from 38 states and found more than half of school districts have seen an increase in the number of students charging meals, while 79 percent saw an increase in the number of free lunches served over the last year.

In New Mexico, nearly 204,000 low-income students — about three-fifths of public school students — received free or reduced-price lunches at the beginning of the school year, according to the state Public Education Department.

“What you are seeing is families struggling and having a really hard time, and school districts are struggling as well,” said Crystal FitzSimons of the national Food Research and Action Center.

In Albuquerque, unpaid lunch charges hovered around $55,000 in 2006. That jumped to $130,000 at the end of the 2007-08 school year. It was $140,000 through the first five months of this school year.

Charges were on pace to reach $300,000 by the end of the year. Mary Swift, director of Albuquerque’s food and nutrition services, said her department had no way to absorb that debt as it had in the past.

“We can’t use any federal lunch program money to pay what they call bad debt. It has to come out of the general budget and of course that takes it from some other department,” Swift said.

With the new policy, the school district has collected just over $50,000 from parents since the beginning of the year. It also identified 2,000 students eligible to receive free or reduced-price lunches, and more children in the lunch program means more federal dollars for the district.

School officials said the policy was under consideration for some time and parents were notified last fall. Families with unpaid charges are reminded with an automated phone call each night and notes are sent home with children once a week.

Swift added that the cheese sandwiches — about 80 of the 46,000 meals the district serves daily — can be considered a “courtesy meal,” rather than an alternate meal.

Some districts, she noted, don’t allow children without money to eat anything.

Albuquerque Public Schools “has historically gone above and beyond as far as treating children with dignity and respect and trying to do what’s best with for the child and I think this is just another example,” Swift said.

Other States Look To Albuquerque’s Cheese Sandwich Policy

http://www.koat.com/news/18790892/detail.html

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Officials for Albuquerque Public Schools say their controversial cheese sandwich policy is paying off.

Since starting the alternative lunch program, which serves a cold cheese sandwich to students whose parents fail to pay their lunch bill, APS has collected $91,000.

Now other states are following the Duke City’s lead. In fact, school districts in three other states have begun serving cheese sandwiches to lunch debtors.

Critics argue the policy is a form of punishment for children whose parents can’t afford to pay.

APS officals hope the program would not only help pay off the $140,000 that had accumulated in lunch debts, but also encourage parents to apply for the free or reduced lunch program.

This author makes some good points about how no politicians in Washington send their kids to public schools, but fails miserably when she sees the solution in attacking teachers’ unions.  Instead why don’t we ask for more funding for these schools, but no, her solution is to get rid of these teachers that are ‘protected’ by unions even though they’re ‘incompetent.’  You can replace all the teachers you want, but without a committment for equal education for all that is truly pursued (i.e. by inundating the education system with money – that we could take from our expenditures on imperialist wars) we will never have equal education.  We need to pursue the Cuban model, with free education for all through college.  Education is a right, not a privilege. 

Racism persists in public schools

Students walk through a metal detector in an impoverished Washington D.C. high school.

http://www.goerie.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081217/OPINION09/312179988/-1/OPINION

Nothing dramatizes the two-tier public-education system quite like the announcement by the First Couple that their daughters, 10 and 7, will attend Sidwell Friends, perhaps the elitist of the elite private schools in Washington, tuition $30,000 a year.

“Sidwell,” the parents joke, “is where Episcopalians teach Jews how to be Quakers.” The Obamas called Sidwell, as the locals refer to it, the “best fit” of security and comfort for their children. No doubt. Few begrudge the Parents in Chief seeking the best education money can buy. It’s easier than choosing a puppy.

Unfortunately, most Americans don’t have that kind of opportunity or that kind of money, particularly in Washington, where the public schools are, to put it kindly, lousy. These schools are distinguished for the lowest performance rates of any school district in the nation despite spending $13,000 per pupil, third-highest in the country.

No congressman sends his children to public schools in the nation’s capital. More than a quarter of the teachers in the public schools send their children to private schools. The Obamas noted that their friends, many of whom will become colleagues on the White House staff, send their daughters to private schools. Joe Biden’s grandchildren will go to school with the Obama girls. Chelsea Clinton went to Sidwell and then on to Stanford and Oxford. President Carter sent his daughter Amy to a public school for a while, but soon reconsidered and sent her to Sidwell and then to Brown. Private-school education doesn’t determine acceptance to an elite college, but it makes it easier.

Though Washington has several good charter schools, which are funded with public money and run independently of the public-school bureaucracy, their capacity is limited. (The Obama girls would likely have made the cut.) My grandsons attend one, and there’s a long waiting list. Charters are not burdened with platinum-plated union contracts and “teacher tenure” designed to protect the incompetents.

Reforms are vehemently opposed by the American Federation of Teachers, the big umbrella union with lots of clout. Beholden as he is to the unions, the president-elect is not likely to offend them. He has emphatically opposed vouchers because they “might benefit some kids at the top; what you’re going to do is leave a lot of kids at the bottom.” Unlike his own kids, who have already fled.

Few parents (and grandparents) I’ve talked to envy the Obamas for their presidential privileges — the servants and limousines and the big Boeing 747 — but they truly envy their ability to educate their children in a good school. Michelle Obama insists that her daughters will make their own beds and won’t rely on the servants, and good for her. But neither will they get a glimpse of how most of the children in Washington, the majority of whom are black, suffer from an inferior education. That’s a vividly drawn line dividing childhood friendships.

The public schools were segregated by race when I grew up in Washington. They’re segregated just as rigidly today by economic class, as schools are in many cities, and the result is all but the same — public schools for blacks, private schools for whites. I once took my son out of a public school because his American history teacher was absent more days than she was on the job; in one conversation, she couldn’t identify the fourth president of the United States without consulting her lesson plan, and was not embarrassed for it. She was protected, as incompetent teachers are protected today, by union-backed tenure.

Michelle Rhee, the tough new chancellor of the Washington schools who gets more grief than thanks for trying to do something about the quality of education, offered teachers who agree to give up tenure considerably higher pay. Most declined. They know what we know — that few could pass merit muster.

In the bad old days, Southerners often said they would be happy to send their children to school with the likes of the children of Ralph Bunche, the secretary-general of the United Nations and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, but not with the children the elite private schools wouldn’t take. Such thinking was, of course, racist. Nobody would say such a thing today. But many poor black (and white) children get a public-school education in the ghettos that wouldn’t prepare them for Sidwell Friends even if their parents could afford it.

Administrative and economic racism, which President Bush called “the bigotry of low expectations,” dooms these children, and perpetuates prejudice, as well. Racism, like that rose by any other name, still smells — but it’s not sweet.

The capitalist justice system is more than happy to get its hands on youngsters, beginning a process that is referred to in this article and is known as the “school-to-prison pipeline.”  Schools should be anything BUT a pipeline to prisons, but in a capitalist economy with fewer jobs the less desireables need to be routed towards their “spot” in this society.  There is nothing coincidental about these racist implementations of the law.  Poor minorities are singled out for arrest and “get tough” approaches, while students with more of a ‘chance’ are given another shot at life.  This is not unique to Hartford, and is played out all across America and the world.  No capitalist justice system operates in a uniform manner, as they are all riddled with prejudice, loopholes and selective implimentation.   A capitalist justice system exists to protect a rich, ruling minority and as such it cannot exist in any other way than is described in this article.

Minority Students Arrested More In East, West Hartford

http://www.courant.com/news/local/hc-aclu1117.artnov17,0,2984775.story

By JODIE MOZDZER and VANESSA DE LA TORRE | The Hartford Courant

November 17, 2008

Poverty, School Failure Lead To Teen Pregnancy

MARY PATRICE ERDMANS

September 16, 2008

http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/editorials/hc-erdmans0916.artsep16,0,4165876.story

This article highlights the lie that somehow we all have equal chances to make it in this society.  Depending on how well your parents are educated, how much money your parents make and what race you are you have different chances at scoring well on the SAT and getting into those great colleges.  True equality is what we must strive for, and one of the most important areas to pursue with regard to equality is educational equality.  Cuba has made much larger strides towards an equal educational system than America has.

Great quote from article:

“McQuillan also said he was troubled by enduring gaps in performance between white and minority students.”

Students in Brooklyn wait to pass through a metal detector.

SAT Scores Show That Income, Study Of Arts, Language Give Edge

http://www.courant.com/news/education/hc-ctsat0827.artaug27,0,5481068.story

Some of the best SAT scores in Connecticut are posted by students who study Chinese or Latin, participate in the arts, take honors courses, come from wealthy families, and — at least when it comes to math — hold citizenship from another country, according to scores for the class of 2008 released Tuesday.

The data, released by the College Board, which produces the college-entrance exam, detailed the performance of 1.5 million students nationwide who graduated from high school this year, including 36,085 in Connecticut.

As a whole, Connecticut students scored slightly above the national average in reading, slightly below it in math, and well above it in writing. But gaps by race and income persisted, troubling education officials.

The average scores for state public school students rose three points in math, one point in reading and three points in writing over last year.
Seventy-six percent of public school students in Connecticut took the test, the third-highest of any state and well above the national average for public school students, 39 percent. That may be in part because of regional differences, according to the state Department of Education, which noted that the ACT college entrance exam is more popular in the Midwest.

In a written statement, state Education Commissioner Mark K. McQuillan said he was pleased by the strong scores and high participation rate, which he said indicated a large number of students who aspire to attend college. But McQuillan also said he was troubled by enduring gaps in performance between white and minority students.

“We need to find better ways to prepare our black and Hispanic students for college and new ways to engage them in learning,” McQuillan said. “This begins with guaranteed access to the PSAT, better preparatory courses for the SAT and a new look at how high schools are structured to meet the needs of all students.”

State education officials are working on proposals to reshape the state’s high schools by increasing the number of credits and specific courses required for graduation and emphasizing more personalized classrooms to engage students.

Connecticut students — in public and private schools — averaged 509 on reading, 513 on math, and 513 on writing on the exam, which has a maximum score of 800 in each category. The national average, by contrast, was 502 on reading, 515 on math, and 494 on writing. The state’s strong writing performance may reflect Connecticut long history of including writing on its standardized tests, something that many other states have not done until recently.Scores in Connecticut correlated strongly with family income and parents’ education levels, as well as other measures including involvement in the arts and foreign language study.

SAT scores have long been correlated along racial lines, reflecting gaps that also appear in Connecticut’s own standardized tests. Critics have pointed to disparities in scores among minority and low-income students in questioning the SAT’s validity.

With the exception of Asian students, minority students in Connecticut’s class of 2008 trailed their white counterparts. White students scored, on average, 529 in reading, 533 in math, and 533 in writing, and Asian students scored 523 in reading, 586 in math, and 536 in writing.

Black students averaged 419 in reading, 407 in math, and 420 in writing. Puerto Rican, Mexican and other Hispanic students also posted lower scores than white or Asian students, averaging below 500 in each category.

The wealthiest students, whose families earned more than $200,000, had an average score more than 140 points higher in each section than the poorest test takers, whose family income was less than $20,000.

The income gap was visible even between students whose families fell into the second-highest income bracket — $160,000 to $200,000 — and those whose families earned more than $200,000; on average, the higher-income students scored more than 25 points higher in each category.

However, that represented a limited sample of the students; only 56 percent of the test-takers provided information about their family income.

U.S. citizens outperformed students who are citizens of other countries in reading and writing, but not in math; the average score for an American student was 509, while students who are citizens of other countries averaged 545.

Students who participated in acting, music, studio art or photography scored well above students who weren’t involved in the arts. And students who took more than four years of foreign language posted higher average scores on all sections than those with fewer years. Those who took Chinese and Latin, in particular, posted the highest average scores among students taking languages.