History shapes the work of superintendent and SRC chair
Through their schooling, Ackerman and Dungee Glenn got a vivid picture of educational inequity.
by Wendy Harris
Superintendent Arlene Ackerman (left) and School Reform Commission Chair Sandra Dungee Glenn prepare to call a recent SRC meeting to order.
Sandra Dungee Glenn remembers vividly the moment she first became aware of educational inequities.
She was in fourth grade, attending a creative writing class at the University of Pennsylvania with some of the brightest students from all over the city, White and Black, well-off and poor. She was in a group with a White girl from the Northeast who talked about her school’s cafeteria, gym, auditorium, and a science lab with rabbits and turtles.
Dungee Glenn’s school, all-Black Barry Elementary in West Philadelphia, had none of those things.
The nine-year-old was wide-eyed. “I thought, ‘Wow, they have schools like that?’” recalled the 51-year-old School Reform Commission chairwoman.
Superintendent Arlene Ackerman, 61, has stark memories of her own – different place, different time, pretty much the same story.
Her St. Louis elementary school was segregated, and she had to walk past the local chapter of the KKK to get there. Missouri’s idea of integration after Brown v. Board of Education was to bus both students and teachers from her school to a White one nearby and put them all together in an isolated wing of the building. The teachers didn’t go to faculty meetings, and the students never sat in class with their White schoolmates.
When Ackerman’s family moved to a suburb and she was one of 50 Black students in the mostly White high school, she, like Dungee Glenn, remembers her reaction at discovering what was there: a cornucopia of college-prep courses, work-study programs, new books that weren’t hand-me-downs, and the latest technical equipment.
“I never will forget the shock that I had when I walked in that school and saw all of these resources for students that weren’t present in my other school,” Ackerman recalled.
These experiences are why neither of these women think of racial disparities in test scores and other academic measures as an “achievement” gap so much as an “opportunity” gap. And they go a long way in explaining why both are determined to tackle the inequalities in educational outcomes among students of different races that persist in Philadelphia.
Three months after becoming superintendent, Ackerman had her staff present the SRC with a powerful statistical portrait on the “achievement gap” confronting African American and Latino students.
Dungee Glenn, for her part, has pressed the commission to look at racial equity issues since she was appointed in 2002.
In some ways, Dungee Glenn said, Philadelphia is still not that different from how it was when she went to school.
“What we [she and her schoolmates] had available to us to develop us was vastly different, and that’s the problem that I still see today,” she said. “We have children all over this city who bring great capacity to learn, the great innate intelligence to learn, but what they often lack is the opportunity to develop those talents and intelligence because of the environment where they are.”
Dungee Glenn was born in Philadelphia to middle-class parents who modeled the power that learning could provide. Her father operated a pharmacy, and her mother was an elementary school teacher. In Dungee Glenn’s mind, there was no question that she could achieve, and she did.
She was accepted to Masterman, but opted instead to go to Conwell Middle School in Kensington, which was being developed as an academic magnet for purposes of desegregation. “Since several of my friends had been accepted to Conwell, I talked my parents into letting me go there,” Dungee Glenn said.
Comments (1)
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 02/15/2010 - 11:57.
Guess what, ladies. There is a huge gap between the schools and facilities in rural and urban districts, as well as between schools in wealthy districts with parents who DONATE and FUND RAISE for school improvements and schools where the parents and kids burn down the town and businesses in riots and protests.
The issue is always going to exist....someone has better stuff than someone else. Did not stop W.E.B. DuBois from achieving academic excellence...but he had to WORK HARDER without ANY help.
The issue is attitude and responsibility of the parents, and consequently the kids. This is a generous nation. Wherever needs are legitimate and earned, they can be met by a private and a corporate sector whenever a taxpayer base cannot do it....but it takes WORK by the ADULTS, not just sympathy and victim sad stories of unjustified inequities.
If you do not believe it...how many ASIAN families are complaining about their social treatment when they came to America, or how they needed better schools to achieve....they take whatever the schools HAVE and MAKE it work....they are committed to education and taking advantage fully of any opportunity available...unlike the minority activism of the black and hispanic minority communities who have more kids, and less success. It is not about the books and the labs...it is about the will to do the work.
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