Jay Holloway
If you think improving student achievement is a difficult task, yes it may be, but maybe not. We'll tell you how every child can succeed, next, on Black Issues Forum. [Music]

Jay Holloway
In March of 1997, Black Issues Forum attended the conference "Improving Minority and At-Risk Student Achievement: A Blueprint For Success" in Chapel Hill. This is Part 2 of this program. In this episode, we had a chance to talk with renown scholar and educator Dr. Asa Hilliard of Georgia. He's the author of many educational technology programs on how to improve student achievement, especially in the African-American community. We talked with Dr. Hilliard. And if you'd like to find out as to how students can achieve, regardless of your socioeconomic status, you'll want to stay tuned for this very important episode. Dr. Hilliard believes that it's never too early, and it's never too late. Tell us about the terminology "minority" and "at-risk" and what your views are on that, as far as labels are concerned.

Asa Hilliard
Well, I think children should be referred to by their names, their ethnic names, if we're talking about an African-American child, you should call them that; if you're talking about a Latino child, you should call them that, if you're talking about a child who is not specifically being referred to by their ethnic designation, but by the kind of performance that they have in school, then I prefer to call those "low-performing" children and that means that you are referring to the erformance. Now the problem with the term "minority" and "at-risk" is that people use "minority" not just for low-performing kids, but for their parents and anybody else who may be high-performing, so it's like an ethnic designation and it's an inappropriate ethnic designation and it's also a demeaning ethnic designation, as is "at risk." Some children are called "at-risk" children. Well, if you use the term "risk" I would say that the situation that some children are in is risky. But it's the situatio n and not the child. So the danger is that we begin to think of the child's identity as "at-risk" when in fact the child's identity is something entirely different. So I just opt for accuracy and also for not demeaning children. There's a real problem trying to take brain research and apply it in pedagogy. You know that many of the people who are really great teachers don't use that language of brain research at all. They don't even know about brain research. For example, the people who teach little children in poverty how to do algebra when they're three years old. And if you ask them how they do it, they won't try to explain how the brain is developing. They'll just say "I did this with manipulatives and that, and then I got the child to do." Same thing with people who take children who, let's take the time at turnaround. They don't turn around until high school, maybe. They've been academically behind, maybe three, four grade levels behind, and if I came to them and decided because of a theory about the brain that they couldn't perform, then many of the things that I've already seen in high school could not have happened. Like the Atlanta high school in the example that I gave where the physics and chemistry teacher sent seven kids to MIT in physics for majors, out of this high school that hadn't sent any before. Or, Michael Johnson's high school where he made no assumptions about children's low achievement in previous years, but he made a determination about where they would finish and how they would exit at the end of the high school years, which was with a Regents diploma. So I guess I've spent almost forty years researching the question of high-performing schools. The schools that get high performers, schools that are supposed to be low-performing because of income or because of some, maybe language differences or what have you, and the people who are able to achieve that don't make the assumption that there is any point at which a human being cannot learn. I've seen people thirty years old who could be taught to read, who have never read, who could be taught to read in thirty, forty hours of work, if you expose them to the right teaching approach.

Jay Holloway
This program is the only program in North Carolina statewide that targets African- Americans. You said in your speech that we need more public awareness of what, specifically, we in North Carolina should expect. What should African-American parents and community people expect about performance in kids in North Carolina?

Asa Hilliard
Well, I think that what you want to do is take examples of high achieving African-American students, in spite of poverty, and expose those examples to the state of South Carolina, so that teachers, children, parents, the public all know that somebody knows how to do that. Right now, many people think that that can't be done at all. And for that reason, if you don't think it can be done, then you don't put the energy out to make it happen. On the other hand, if you know that th ere are people here, there, and yonder, who are indeed taking the very same kids and raising their performance to levels of excellence, then that sets a new expectation in my mind for what any child can do. So I think that exposing the general public to those possibilities of what schools alone can do is an extremely important part of any overall strategy for school improvement.

Jay Holloway
Can you give us that example again from West Virginia?

Asa Hilliard
Right. The West Virginia research-I gave two examples-the West Virginia research was very good because what it did was, in a report called Achieving Despite Diversity-because they were interested in this question, too-if a kid is poor, in the past that's associated with low achievement. Now does poverty cause low achievement? They've found that that's not true. That there are some schools that there's diversity of income, diversity of ethnicity, diversity of language, and tha in some schools the diversity makes a difference, and in other schools the diversity makes no difference at all. In the good schools, they achieve in spite of the diversity; in the poor schools, they don't achieve and blame diversity. So then, in this study, they went into detail about the differences between these two sets of schools. You know, and the high-achieving schools had very particular things that typified their performance, and the low ones were the exact opposite of that. I also talked abo t the, that you could do that with teachers, that there are some teachers for whom the background of the child means nothing. That the child will achieve, even if they come from a poor neighborhood, even if they come from African homes or Latino homes; it makes no difference to them whatsoever. And then there are other teachers, and they say, "No, the reason that the child can't succeed is because they are bilingual, because they have this cultural pattern, this poverty," and so forth, and what they foun in Tennessee, at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Sanders' and Rivers' study, they called it "Value Added Research." They found that if a child gets three good teachers in a row, he'll be 50 points ahead than a child who gets three poor teachers in a row. So what that tells you is that quality of teaching is what tells where the child is going to wind up. Not the brain of the child. You know, you can make that assumption that most children have more than enough brain power to do the simple th ings that schools ask for.

Jay Holloway
When you balance that with the child's point of view, that they are making a choice as to whether they want to succeed or not, how do you balance that with the external?

Asa Hilliard
Most good teachers can help a child to make that choice. Children walk into school, and if you put that weight on them, that they have to come with the desire to achieve, I think that kids already have that built in. They may not show it at the time; they may come in and look at a school system, a site, or a room, and they may make a decision that hard work won't do me any good. So I've got to act as if I don't care. But what I find is that good teachers can turn that kid on in no time at all, turn that child around, so I put the weight on the quality of instruction. And I do that because of what I've seen. No theory: this is testimony.

Jay Holloway
How do you define teaching excellence?

Asa Hilliard
Well, I define teaching excellence by outcomes, by whether the kids achieve or not, and they can do it in a number of ways. I don't have a recipe that every teacher has to follow. Because there's more than one recipe that will get you o the desired outcome, because my definition of excellent teaching is high student achievement.

Jay Holloway
You know the professional development end? We have the University of North Carolina here, which trains most of the state's teachers. And in your remarks today, you stated with a little bit of hesitancy about, that really, during the pre-service teaching , those teachers don't have a track record, they should be held just as much accountable I think-I can't say it exactly like you did. Do you want to comment on that?

Asa Hilliard
Well, I won't hesitate at all on that! I think that if you're teaching teachers to teach children, than you have to be a person that knows how to teach children. And frequently, that's not a requirement. And the best evidence for this I know is that I look at the places where teachers who have been trained come out and are able to imitate their models. That means where people who know how to raise the level of poor kids to the level of excellence. When they train teachers, t e way that they train teachers is quite different than the way that some of us in the University train teachers. In other words, they train teachers by having people who know how do it. Many of us, for example, one pattern in some universities is to kind of sit back in the back of the room and take notes while the person that's student teaching is teaching. Without ever demonstrating for the student teacher with children how to raise achievement. It's a little hard to be credible under those kinds of c ircumstances. I have no hesitation whatsoever in saying, especially in the clinical part of a teacher preparation program, not talking about courses in educational philosophy or history, but in methods. If you're teaching someone methods, then you ought to be able to demonstrate that those methods raise the performance of traditionally low-performing children to levels of excellence. And if you can't co that, than that probably ought not to be a person teaching teachers.

Jay Holloway
You brought up Ebonics, and you moved away from your text. Can you share something for our audience about that?

Asa Hilliard
Well, I just took that opportunity to say something about it because the whole Oakland Public Schools position was so grossly misrepresented. They falsified statements of Oakland by saying that Oakland wanted to teach Ebonics in the school; they ridiculed them because they said there was a genetic relationship between the language of African children and languages of Africa, and they did that because they don't understand what "genetic relationship" means. They thought it was b iology and DNA when it's not; it's linguistics. And, more than that, the commentary about the controversy was totally uninformed. Almost everybody who spoke about it were people who nothing about the position statement that Oakland-they had never seen the position statement-did not know anything about linguistics, did not know anything about good teaching methods, and so those are the people who were being interviewed, and the people who were involved, like Ernest Smith, the linguist who helped to design the program, Norma Lemoyne, the linguist who helped design the program, Anita DeFran-all those people, to my knowledge, still have not been heard from. Moreover, Carrie Street, who is one of the teachers in the program, who takes kids who speak Ebonics, and raises their achievement to levels of excellence, including teaching them standard English, which is the goal of the Oakland program-you never heard anything from her. You know, you heard from people who had a knee-jerk reaction, an emotional reaction, and uninformed reaction, so I felt like I had to say something about that.

Jay Holloway
You mentioned the term "savage inequalities." We need models of success. Can you comment on that?

Asa Hilliard
Well, Savage Inequalities is the title of the book by Jonathan Kozol. And it's based on his observations in schools. He visited schools where poor children are served, visited their homes, visited their neighborhoods. And then he visited schools where wealthy children were served. And he made a comparison between the way the two groups are treated. And such things as _____ Township High School, which I think at that time was paying $9000 plus per year per child. And then he compared that with DeSalbo High School in Chicago, which was paying about $5,000 per year per child, almost half of what was being paid in the wealthy suburbs. Yet both student populations would be held responsible for the same output on the achievement tests. One school has microscopes, the other school has none. One school has an Olympic-sized swimming pool; the other does not. One has a great library, the other does not. And he called that "savage inequalities." And that is what accounts for the lo wer achievement of many students is that they have less in poorer schools that they do in wealthy schools.

Jay Holloway
In your educational video, Every Child Can Succeed, you basically state you know why every child can succeed. Can you outline those salient points for our audience?

Asa Hilliard
Well, most of it is just common sense, and one of the things I object to is mystifying the process through which you get kids to succeed. As if it took something extraordinary like the space program to get African children to succeed. That what we saw in the schools of excellence that were-in fact, we had staff, could be black, white staff and so forth; schools where there were all black kids, sometimes mixed, sometimes all white kids, but poor, that's what they all had in comm on, we found that there were just a handful of things that those schools did that other schools that were not successful didn't do. We had school leadership by the principal, so that everyone was on a collective mission in the school; on the same page, so to speak. We had instructional leadership, which meant that the principal managed to focus the attention of faculty and him or herself on, most of the time on things that had to do with teaching and learning, as opposed to the administrative matters that generally preoccupy most of a principal's time, at least that they are very careful in monitoring student achievement. That they monitor so well that they can always tell you in an instant where every kid is, how they started, what they're doing now. They have staff development. That means that they have a time after school where the faculty sits down and problem-solves and figures out how to raise student achievement. And everybody doesn't have to have the same recipe, but they all have to be committed to the recipe that they create. That they have a professional climate and culture, have parent involvement and school discipline, and things like that. That's kind of a checklist, but it doesn't really help to have the checklist unless you actually see a site where you can see how this plays out. So there's no substitute for being exposed to the winning schools, you know the ones that don't fail.

Jay Holloway
Do you know of any in North Carolina?

Asa Hilliard
I don't happen to know of any in North Carolina, but it wouldn't take me long. I would find them. I would be my paycheck they are in every major city and probably in some rural areas. They're always around. It doesn't take long to find them.

Jay Holloway
How effective, today, is instructional television and educational video, and all this other technology out there?

Asa Hilliard
Oh man, it's awesome! I have a computer at home. Nobody has ever taught me how to use it. Everything is on that screen. It says, you know, "Now put the disk in here, do this that and the other." And what is it I want to learn? Maybe I want to learn WordPerfect. There's a lesson on WordPerfect. It comes right up on the screen! I haven't seen the teacher yet! But I've learned WordPerfect. I've learned the spreadsheets and all of that. So that's just one example of the t chnology. And the same thing is true of , let's take television. There are places kids can go on TV they could never go in person. And so I made a big thing about exposing kids to this whole wider world. And right now one of the things with poor kids is that they are on the cartoons and the game shows and all these other things; they are not on the E-TV, and that's because they are not guided. Because some of the best educational materials come across public television. But no one is going to use it- ot no one, but most people are not going to use it-unless they are guided through it. So yeah, no, you cannot minimize the potential impact of technology. So my comment was only meant to say that if for some reason that we don't have it, still a piece of chalk and a blackboard. The man I asked to stand up in that room? Watch him teach. See what he's got? He's got a piece of chalk and a blackboard. That's his technology. So you can get it either way, and if I have my choice, of course I want the tec nology too. But if I don't have it, I don't want anybody saying, "Well I'm crippled. I can't do anything." Because that's simply not true. I'm not sure that it's a technical issue, so much as it is an information issue. For example, I'm a historian. Now, the deeper I go into history, the more I understand my need for technology. See what I'm saying? It may be that for, let's say, literature, that what, if you have someone who is teaching literature, but who is not steeped in literature, not immerse in it, not really well-grounded in it, I don't think it's the knowledge or absence of knowledge of the technology that's the problem. You can-most of the technology that that person is going to need-you can teach them fairly quickly. You can teach them how to do distance learning. All it means for me to do distance learning is I got to show up at some place and the technician will put my image out into two or three different classrooms. But I got to have something to say. You see, so the more I have o say, the more I can see ways to use technology to do it. So I really think it's the deeper grounding in their field that makes people technology-ready, more than the techniques of technology. I know I can't keep up, but you can, because you're in it all the day. So if I come back a year from now and if I have something to say, in a very short period of time you are going to orient me as to what happened within that last year and what else you can do that we couldn't do before, but if I don't bring to you something that's worthy of going out over the air, then all the techniques in the world won't help me.

Jay Holloway
One last comment. You mentioned that it's never too early, and it's never too late. Can you expound on that a little bit?

Asa Hilliard
All I was trying to do is that I think some people have misinterpreted the developmentally appropriate position; the position on developmental appropriateness, which I support, by the way-I don't think that you want to tell a three year old that they've got to jump six feet on the track, you know, because obviously that's something that they are incapable of doing, but there is also a body of belief that says young children should play and they should not do any academic, what we call academic work. But for many young children, academic work is something that they play at. And you'll see this-when I said that three-year-olds can be taught algebra with manipulatives, they're not under stress at all, and the fact that we don't give it to them represents the notion that we have a profound underestimation of the capabilities of children, so when we say, "Don't rush them," or "Don't push them," that goes along with an idea of limits that the child, that the child is limited by certain kinds of things, and that limit is set entirely too low. What kids can do is much more. They are literally geniuses at the age of three, four, five, six, and they can do an awful lot of good things. What you want is a manipulatives-you know, those little packages-and what you want to get them to do is classify, put things in order, classification is one of the algebraic functions, putting things in order, what comes first, what comes next, what comes next, and then topology, you know, which is kind of a spatial representation of things. You know, so that you put things in spatial relationship to each other. So if you can do space, if you can do seriation, and you can do classification, that's algebra. And then we have them do algebraic multiplication, addition, subtraction, division, with objects, rather with paper and pencil. They love it. They love it. They don't feel stressed at all. Not only do they love it; they crave it. Their brain is hungry to do this stuff.

Jay Holloway
We talked with vice chairman of the State Board of Education, Dr. Frezell R. Robinson, who has been on this board for more than twenty years. Out of the past two or three decades, you've been involved, how have you seen the different approaches in terms of specifically improving the achievements of African-American students.

Frezell Robinson
Well, I think in the main, when I came onto the Board in 1973, we were in a different era than that which we find ourselves today. I think in the main, at that time, we were not competing, young people were not competing with the same kinds of societal forces for which are out there today, with the intensity with which they are. And therefore, I think, youngsters as a group performed, maybe, better in some ways because of the fact that we did not have these competing forces Nevertheless I would have to say that I have seen, what I believe to be some significant changes for the good to take place within the public school system of North Carolina. We are reaching out to a larger number of persons and I think the schools have taken on increasingly greater responsibilities to try to work with, what we call, the whole child, as it were. So, in general, I would say that I think the public schools are doing a good job. We've got to do an even better job. And it has been a joy for me to be identified and associated with the public school system in North Carolina.

Jay Holloway
Well, we know that it is all of our responsibility's to improve student achievement. The student, the parent, the community, people like you and I. But what about the policies and the funding. It all helps improve student learning and student achievement. We spoke with the chairman of the Legislative Black Caucus, Senator Martin, and here is what he had to say.

Senator Martin
The important thing to remember again, as speakers have brought out, is the fact that regardless of what one's race might be, regardless of what one's economic status might be, or sociological status might be, none of that matters except that that is predictive, that the child is not going to get the type of attention that he needs, and that is what we need to turn around in this state and throughout the nation. Examples have been given of individual schools that have taken on tremendous tasks against overwhelming odds where there were situations where families might have been, say 90% of the families in the school might have been well below the poverty line, single parents, unwed parents, divorced parents, whatever the case might be. Communities that might be drug infested but yet because of the dedication of the schools, the system, the teachers and the willingness and the dedication to do something about it, people tackle the problem and they end up with some of the highest a chieving schools in the entire nation. There is no reason we can't do that in North Carolina. We just have to take our head out of the sand and attack the problem, we can do it.

Jay Holloway
We certainly hope after watching tonight's program you've been motivated to join in on the action and help contribute to improving student learning and student achievement here in North Carolina. As all of our speakers have stated, it is really never to early, it is never too late. All of our students in North Carolina can achieve and can do well. It is up to you and I to hold them to high expectations. We certainly hope you enjoyed this issue of Black Issues Forum. I'm Jay Holloway. Thank you for watching.