Failing students in Montgomery County high schools have made only meager improvements under new districtwide efforts to snag them before they drop out of school, again shining a spotlight on persistent academic disparities that exist between the county’s racial groups.
Of 1,516 students placedinto a program for students who previously failed classes critical to graduation, only 246, or 16 percent, earned an A or a B. Nearly one-third, or 496 of the students, re-failed the necessary course.
The program, implemented this year in each of the district’s 25 high schools, forces principals to provide alternatives to evening and Saturday classes by fitting repeated classes into the school’s schedule. If a student fails first-semester algebra, for example, he or she could take it again right away instead of fumbling through second-semester algebra and retaking the first semester the following year.
Black students make up 42 percent of students in the program, while Hispanic students make up 41 percent. Overall in the district, however, only 23 percent of students are black and 22 percent are Hispanic.
Poor performance within the program tilts toward Hispanic students, who in effect accounted for 46 percent of re-failures and only 37 percent of As and Bs. Rates for black students remained consistent with their overall population in the program: 43 percent of both failures and As and Bs.
“We do not say we have all the answers,” said Sharon Cox, a member of the school board. She asserted along with her board colleagues that efforts to help such a struggling population should not be abandoned for lack of success.
A report on the district’s achievement gap released earlier this year magnified the schools’ problems. It found black students were two and a half times more likely to drop out of school than whites; Hispanic students were 3 1/2 times more likely.
Black students were suspended from school at more than four times the rate of white students; Hispanic students at nearly three times the rate.
Before offering the remediation classes, “we really didn’t know who our kids were when we were talking about failures,” said William Gregory, principal at Sandy Spring’s Sherwood High School. “Our failures are individual kids now with individual needs. They’re our kids.”
