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Closing Race Gap In W.Va. Schools

Despite the serious challenges facing public schools in West Virginia, education officials often seem to spend as much time patting themselves on the back as discussing needs for reform. But when education comes up at a conference Friday in Charleston, there is likely to be very little of that.

The “Equity in Minority Education Summit” will discuss gaps between white and minority students in both the K-12 and higher education systems. It is being sponsored by the state Conference of the NAACP and the state’s Herbert Henderson Office of Minority Affairs.

Minority students have not been relegated to separate, segregated schools for many years. White, black, Hispanic, Asian, American Indian and other minority students sit in the same classrooms and work with the same teachers.

But there is a major gap in achievement as measured in several ways. One of them is reading, as shown in the table above. According to results of the most recent round of standardized testing, black students in West Virginia public schools are substantially behind their white classmates in reading. The same gap can be seen in mathematics and science, as well as in other measures of school success such as graduation rates.

More needs to be done to help all students in public schools, of course. Take a look at the table for confirmation of that.

Closing that gap between races will be one of the topics for discussion at the Friday conference. It will be far from the first time the challenge has been pondered.

For many years, statistics have shown white students seem to have more success in school than blacks and Hispanics. Students of Asian ancestry tend to do better than the other groups. That is a pattern prevailing throughout the state, including the Northern Panhandle.

The gap persists not because educators have not been trying to close it. They have, but clearly, whatever they are doing is not working as well as it should.

New ways of ensuring all students in Mountain State schools succeed need to be found. West Virginians will sink or swim as a group, not as individual races.

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