Harvard Blamed for Race Gap

A member of the Cambridge Public School Committee claimed at a meeting last night that the city’s schools do not get enough aid from Harvard and MIT in attempting to close the achievement gap.

The committee’s roundtable­—which brought together school officials, teachers, and parents­­—was intended to serve as a preliminary to a three-part forum about the achievement gap and ways to close it in the district.

The achievement gap, a nationally-seen disparity in the test scores of white and minority students, has been a problem in the Cambridge Public Schools system.

On the 2005-2006 Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) test, only three percent of African American students scored in the advanced level on the 10th grade English language arts exam, while 30 percent of white students scored in this range. Only seven percent of African American students scored in the advanced level on the mathematics exam, while 42 percent of white students did.

School Committee member Nancy Walser, who proposed the series of public forums, said that in the wake of the No Child Left Behind legislation, signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2002, the definition of the achievement gap has expanded to include the score differential between students with limited English proficiency and native speakers and the divide between students who receive free and reduced lunch and those who do not. Because there are new categories, closing the achievement gap has become more complicated.

“What achievement gap are we looking at now and what is the achievement gap? How are we going to look at the data and figure out if we’re making progress or not?” Walser asked during the meeting. “That is a really major question that we have to talk about some more.”

After discussing the various permutations of the achievement gap, School Committee member Richard Harding said he felt that the district did not get enough financial support from Harvard and MIT to close the achievement gap.

“People always say ‘How could that be with Harvard and MIT here?’” he said. “I really need to know what the hell are they doing for us.”

But Cambridge Mayor Kenneth E. Reeves ’72 said he felt that the lack of support resulted from problems in the city’s management structure and not from the institutions’ unwillingness to help.

“Cambridge has never been able to sit down and in some simple way say ‘Give us this,’” he said. “That is structurally a deficit that we’ve got to fix.”

—Staff writer Laura A. Moore can be reached at lamoore@fas.harvard.edu.