Last month Evanston’s public grade schools released their 1988-89 enrollment figures and test scores, and folks there still don’t know how to react. On the one hand, some white residents fret over “white flight,” since black enrollment in several grade schools has climbed above 50 percent. On the other hand, many officials and parents worry because white students performed twice as well as blacks on standardized national tests–perpetuating a gap that has existed for as long as such test-score records have been kept.
“We do some regrouping or ability teaching,” says Clara Pate, principal of Oakton School, a grade school just a few blocks from the Chicago border whose black enrollment last year reached 74 percent. “We try to do individual instruction. It means more preparation on the teacher’s part. But we can have kids doing algebra next to a kid doing one plus one.”
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Few other school systems in the area can make that claim. Chicago’s parochial schools reserve the right to kick problem students out, so grouping kids by ability may not be as big an issue. And the archdiocese doesn’t publicize test scores, so it’s hard to tell how well parochial students are doing as a group. Most suburban school districts have very few low-income students, because few poor families can afford to live in most suburbs, so differences in achievement are not so great.
Even in schools with a majority of blacks, Evanston’s white students score high, thus destroying the myth that white students will suffer if they share the same school or classroom with blacks. Nonblack third-graders at Oakton, for example, score in the 83rd percentile for reading and 88th for math.
That was an appearance to be avoided for good reason. Evanston’s leaders have not always promoted integration in their neighborhoods or schools. For years, most blacks lived in a segregated west-side community; their children attended an overcrowded grade school.
“To white parents who worry about putting their children in Oakton because the school is 74 percent black, I say, ‘Look at our test scores,’” says Terri Shepard, Nachtrab’s PTA copresident, whose son David is president of the student council at Oakton. “The teachers push kids at Oakton. They say, ‘Come on, we know you can learn.’ My daughter came out of kindergarten reading–it wasn’t just a social experience. As a black parent, I’m concerned about the gap in black-white performance, but no parent should worry about sending his child to Oakton.”
Evanston does a little better than Chicago on salaries. Teachers start at $23,242 and can earn as much as $52,200. In addition, teachers work in cleaner, newer, less crowded classrooms, where they are hounded by fewer administrators and restricted by fewer petty rules and regulations. Considering how miserably Chicago treats its public-school teachers, it’s a wonder anyone teaches there at all. “I talk to teachers who come here from Chicago,” says Pate. “They say it’s like heaven here.”
