Recently, Elk Grove has experienced great strides in academics with the class of 2013 experiencing one of the most impressive growths on standardized testing from the Explore tests measured in eighth grade to the ACT taken in junior year, marking them as one of the most skillful class the school has ever had. Despite this, a prevalent achievement gap remains between Hispanic students and their white and non-Hispanic peers.
“I would be surprised if you could find a high school in significance size that had a significant minority population that didn’t have an achievement gap,” Associate Principal of Instruction Glenn Simon said.
According to the National Education Association, there are numerous factors that contribute to the achievement gap, a disparity in academic performance. Aside from standardized tests, the gap also shows up in grades, course selection, dropout rates and college-completion rates among other success measures.
Two important factors that determine a student’s level of success and contributes to the achievement gap are parents’ level of education and socioeconomic factors, according to data from ACT and AP tests.
However, according to Dr. Lourdes Ferrer, a Hispanic Academic Achievement and Parental Involvement Specialist, the causes of the achievement gap are much deeper than that.
“The reason for the lack of academic achievement is first how we think of ourselves,” Ferrer said. “There are also challenges that many Latino students face at school, home and the community, so there is not one single thing we can fix that is going to make anything better.”
Rather, she said that if there should be any meaningful changes, administrators should be aware of their Hispanic population where at Elk Grove, Hispanics make up 31.3 percent of the student body compared to 24.9 percent in the district and 23.6 percent in the state.
“I think what the administration can do is become aware of how fast this group is growing because they’re not going away,” Ferrer said.
Even more, Ferrer said that ignoring these numbers could have long-lasting negative repercussions on the economy.
“If we don’t get more Hispanic students to achieve academic success, we are going to be affecting a national economic security because of the numbers alone,” she said. “Hispanics will shape the future of America.”
Furthermore, Ferrer advocates the importance of deepening the understanding of the Hispanic culture.
“They [administrators] don’t understand our clothing or understand the challenges that we face or understand the things that we go through,” Ferrer said. “So, administration should go through some training that will allow them to understand the culture and the challenges that Hispanic students face because you cannot help me if you don’t understand me.”
She also urges that outreach programs should be implemented as well as providing more attention to younger Hispanic students.
“Sometimes by the time they get to high school, it’s already a little bit late,” Ferrer said. “If you’re a Latino junior or senior, it is already a little bit late [for help] because you’re already two or three years behind because the average 17-year-old Latino reads and does mathematics at the same level as white students who are in the eighth grade.”
Ideally, Ferrer said, administrators should pay attention to ISAT and Explore tests. This is, coincidentally, exactly what Elk Grove does.
“Our Hispanic students do not perform as well on tests as well as our white students, and that’s true from the first day they walk into our school,” Simon said. “It’s not something that we do; it’s something that just happens before we get the students. We can’t control that; all that we can do is do our best to help them catch up while we have them.”
And according to Simon, Elk Grove does this better than most high schools in the area. For instance, in the class of 2013, the average composite score for the 108 Hispanic juniors who took the ACT last April was 18.6, which marked a 5.3 point growth during their time in Elk Grove.
Compared to other schools in the district with a significant Hispanic population, in the past 10 years, Rolling Meadows and Wheeling have never surpassed a 4.5 and 5.0 point growth respectively.
“So again in my mind, if you are a Hispanic student, you are much better off in Elk Grove than you are at Meadows or Wheeling,” Simon said.
The key, Simon said, is the skills-aligned curriculum.
“The most important thing is that we have a curriculum aligned to schools and that’s not something we do for Hispanic kids or at-risk kids, this is something we do for everybody,” Simon said.
The skills-aligned curriculum has already experienced notable success in math where the student success rate consists of 52.4 percent of Hispanics meeting standards on the Prairie State Achievement Examinations (PSAE) compared to the 70.0 percent of white students, according to the Illinois State Board of Education. Though a gap prevails, it is still a higher percentage of Hispanics who met standards at Elk Grove, compared to the 33.6 percent of Hispanics who meet standards to the 51.7 percent of white students who met it on the state level.
“Definitely, I think that the reason why our math scores are so far beyond where the state is because of the work that the teachers have put into redesigning the math curriculum to be focused on critical skills,” Simon said. “We haven’t done that on the reading level because the reading tests are actually harder to define than the math tests, but the math projects.
started a little bit earlier than the reading projects did.”
Last year, only 31.9 percent of Hispanics met standards on the PSAE reading tests compared to 56.4 percent of white students, producing a notable achievement gap.
Furthermore, in perspective, for the class of 2013 of the 430 students who took both the Explore and the ACT, 251 of whom are white and 114 are Hispanic, the achievement gap expands somewhat at Elk Grove from a 2.81 entry gap on the Explore to about 4.69 points on the ACT composite.
However, while Simon does note that administration is aware of the gap, he reiterates that they do not focus on grouping students by ethnicities. Rather, they focus on targeting and helping students by the type of skills they have.
“The fact that you’re Hispanic may influence some things,” Simon said. “But when we’re looking at you we think that ‘All right, you know how to do quadratic equations, but you don’t know how to multiply polynomials; you know how to get the main idea, but you don’t know how to do inferences. So it’s not a matter of meeting a student’s need if you’re Hispanic; it’s a matter of meeting needs of skills that you don’t have.”
Senior Ilse Perez feels that this type of mentality has benefited her during her career at Elk
Grove.
“I do think that our school is doing enough for Hispanics,” Perez said. “They provide us with the same material as the rest of my peers, and they allow us to choose how much we want to achieve.”
Though aside from the skills-aligned curriculum, the school does offer outreach programs to help Hispanic students achieve.
“We have a curriculum that is every day focused on skills, but that’s 80 percent of it,” Simon said. “We engage our Hispanic community. We have a Latino parents council that is very active that is not just focused on Latino events they are focused on kids doing well in school. We have hired a Latino outreach coordinator and his job is to work with Latino families and to try to make sure their kids are successful in school.”
Latino Parent Liaison Enrique Ramirez, whose job is to be a medium between teachers and administration and Hispanic students and their family agrees that programs that the school has implemented has been a boon to closing the achievement gap.
“I believe that what the school offers to these students has been a good thing,” Ramirez said. “-I didn’t have these opportunities when I was in school, and I wish I did cause it’s really helpful, and closing this gap is important.”
By: Julianne Micoleta
