Sloane Citron on "The Last..." and a Diversity Stink-Bomb

Background: Menlo Park Elementary School District is an award-winning k-8 district, and feeds into the six-school Sequoia Union High School District; the local high school is Menlo-Atherton (colloquially known as M-A).  Menlo Park's middle school, Hillview,  is 70% Caucasian and only 3.5% of students are English Language Learners (ELLs).  M-A is 42% Caucasian, 19.1% are ELLs, and 85.3% finish high school; of those, only 62% complete the requirements for admission to the University of California system (those that do have a pretty impressive list of colleges attended). 

Sloane Citron, publisher of the glossy regional lifestyle magazine Gentry, published a rather sweet meditation on something every parent knows....the last time the youngest child does something.  In this case, it was the last "Back to School" night for the Citron family in the Menlo Park school district.  Next year, his son will be a freshman at M-A.

Only Mr. Citron dropped a stinkbomb in the middle of his essay.  Below the fold, his words and what others have said.   
 

Mr. Citron wrote:

The step to high school is a big one,  kind of like an actor moving from regional theater to a Broadway play.  I've seen the move to high school three times, and, while it normally manages to unfold well enough, there are  usually a few bumps along the path. 

Part of the change is, quite frankly, the student makeup. While Hillview is a fairly homogeneous place, Menlo-Atherton is diverse. While it's impolitic to say, I'm not sure the diversity is such a positive thing in a learning environment. While it is the reality of our society, from a learning standpoint, it is one more impediment to the challenge of teaching and learning. And, as a result, the children are sometimes pushed into environments where "real-world experience" is placed above the act of learning. In other words, the concept is real and honorable, but the result is sometimes less than satisfactory.*

Locals responded to Citron's rejection of diversity with outrage, in the local weekly paper's online forum (I am very surprised and disappointed Gentry published something like this, and an editor should know far better at that!... The reality is we live in a diverse world, and our children need to share and experience that as well. California is becoming more diverse, not less. And these are public schools, not elitist country clubs.) and a local group blog, Silicon Valley Moms Blog (This is not merely a "politically incorrect", this is the very definition of bigotry. Who do think your audience is? Is your readership trapped in a time warp that landed them in the segregated South?  As the publisher of a magazine based in Silicon Valley did you really think you could get away with spewing such nonsense?)

Mr. Citron replied to the outrage with his own rebuttal, in which he said (in part, go read the whole thing):

Here was my intent: M-A is might have several races, but it is not diverse in terms of the actions that I've seen. Each group tends to stick together, from lunch to parties to friends. Further, the school quit having school elections because everyone just voted along racial lines. And this "separate but equal" situation , in my opinion, hurts everyone. A huge amount of staff time and money is spent--and wasted- solving the issues brought on by the "two school" situation.

How wonderful if there could be two schools, one for the kids who are motivated (regardless of race, nationality, etc.) and a separate school--with proper teachers--who could try to move the unmotivated students into the motivated category. This is what I meant to imply, and obviously I did a poor job of it.

Mr. Citron isn't the only person noting that high-school students tend to self-segregate by race.  Beverly Daniel Tatum wrote Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? in 1998. Ruby Payne writes and lectures on the "hidden rules" of middle class culture that inhibit children of poverty from achieving success.

And there's another feature that affects M-A and how academically motivated its low-income students may be: there are other opportunities for the low SES, high-academic motivation students.  There are two high schools that serve the M-A catchment area whose mission is to get low-income kids into, and through, college:  Eastside College Prep,  and East Palo Alto Academy.   There's also  Summit Preparatory High School,  chartered by the Sequoia Union district.  While Summit's mission doesn't expressly address low SES students, it does have the mission of all graduates enrolling in college, and its enrollment is 30% Hispanic.  In addition, the five local private high schools also recruit and enroll high-achieving low SES students, to the limit of each school's scholarship budget.

What about that 19% of ELLs at M-A and the 14.7% drop-out rate?  Statistically, "Only 8 percent of the nation's teens are foreign born, but nearly 25 percent of teen school dropouts were born outside the United States, according to a Pew Hispanic Center analysis of data from the 2000 U.S. Census."

Are there gangs at M-A? Oh, probably.  Richard R. Ramos writes:

I believe there are many teachers who sincerely want to reach out to difficult students, such as gang members, but simply don’t know how, or where to begin. As problems persist, they are forced to remove the student and lose them to a system they know is not to their benefit. I am convinced that these teachers wonder to themselves how they can make a difference in these kids and help turn them from becoming another negative Latino student statistic. 

(aside: Ramos's suggestions for teachers: one two three four five six seven. This deserves its own post --later)

And Mr. Citron isn't the only one complaining about "unmotivated students" --  Mamacita wrote

Most teachers who leave the profession, leave because almost all of the attention, most of the perks, most of the privileges, and most of the allowances are given to the students who least deserve it: the disruptive kids.

Dennis Fermoyle complains about unmotivated students and enabling parents and students who whine  and the tiresomeness of unmotivated students. Mocha Mama may have herself been unmotivated...long ago. Coach Brown writes frequently (here and here, for example) about the frustration of teaching unmotivated students, and is glad the truancy rate is going down.  Elona Hartjes, who teaches "reluctant learners", found a way to silence the whining. MissProfe, who teaches in a private school, has students who "just won't engage". My neighbor, Middle School Teacher, has a whole category on "student motivation".

Mr. Citron, rather than segregating the "unmotivated students", maybe we should be doing a better job of educating them.  I'd like to introduce you to my friend   TMAO, who teaches in  a district very similar to Ravenswood (another district feeding into M-A)

TMAO believes very strongly that there's no such thing as a "student achievement gap", it's an educator achievement gap.  He writes:

If we acknowledge that there are twin problems in education, one being a so-called "narrowing" of opportunity for high achieving kids, and the other being an inability to provide huge numbers of primarily Black and Latino skills essential, foundational skills, I'm always going to advocate for our efforts to be directed toward solving the problem of how we get more kids learning at a level commensurate to their abilities and the requirements of future life. Always. I'm not denying the existence of the former problem, or that it is a problem, but that it's incumbent on us to fix problems of survival -- and yo, it's diplomas or jail in our cities -- before problems of enrichment.

In his response to the critics,  Mr. Citron wrote about his contributions to the community, closing with this comment:

I have done this all while being a minority of a minority- a traditional Jew in Menlo Park.

Mr. Citron has been generous to the community.  The concept of tikkun olam may be overused, but compassion is also a hallmark of Jewish virtue.  I wonder if Mr. Citron can find compassion for the students he wants to segregate--those who live in poverty, those who don't have parents at all, those whose parents work multiple jobs, those who have only a shaky grasp of English, those whose parents are themselves undereducated.

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* Gentry is published in a digital format; Mr. Citron's essay is on page 22.

Comments

[Jill Asher]

Check it out... Gentry is at it again... with another diversity doosy!

Silicon Valley Mom's Blog: WTF Gentry Magazine? Sloan Citron on Diversity