Controversial study points out racial disparity in the Alexandria, VA city's schools; administrators object.

When Leslie Auceda was in the sixth grade, her mother arrived at George Washington Middle School for a parent-teacher conference ready to learn about the progress her daughter was making in school. But she did not speak English, so she waited; after an hour and a half of waiting, Leslie’s mother surmised that the teachers were giving preference to the English-speaking parents. So she gave up and walked out — never to return to another parent-teacher conference.

As Leslie moved toward graduation, she said, she had a growing suspicion that she was receiving different treatment than her white classmates.

"When we would sign up for classes every year, I noticed the counselors would recommend that the white students take honors classes but the Hispanic students and black students were told to take regular classes," said Auceda, who graduated from T.C. Williams High School earlier this year and now attends Northern Virginia Community College. "The counselors would say that the classes were too hard for me, and that I wasn’t up to the challenge."

Auceda’s story is one of the many voices contained in a controversial report issued last month charging that Alexandria City Public Schools has a "two-track system" — one in which a privileged white minority receives an education that sets them on a path for college while black and Latino students are marginalized or ignored. The report, titled "Obstacles to Opportunity," was issued by George Mason University Sociology professor Tony Roshan Samara, the Advancement Project and Tenants and Workers United. Much of the commentary in the report was based on a survey of Alexandria public-school students — some of which were conducted on city-issued laptop computers during class time.
But administration officials bristled at the conclusions in the study, charging that the report’s authors did not consult them during their analysis and released a final draft to the public before offering them an advance copy.

Director of Secondary Programs Margaret May Walsh penned an official response shortly after the report’s release, issuing a point-by-point refutation of the study’s findings and alleging that the authors used selective citations of a student survey to make sweeping conclusions. Much of her criticism was aimed at the survey, which she said had "validity issues" because of the way questions were formatted and ordered.

"To use the results of this survey as the basis for the commentary in the report is highly suspect and would not pass the lowest benchmarks for university research," Walsh wrote. "The decision to use this survey should be problematic to the authors and to their sponsors."

THE DEBATE OVER race and education has its roots in the old system of segregation that once separated whites and blacks into different schools — a phenomenon that the Supreme Court found unconstitutional in the 1954 landmark decision in Brown v. Board. In Virginia, leaders such as Sen. Harry Byrd led a "massive resistance" effort to oppose desegregation. But Alexandria’s schools were eventually integrated in the 1960s, and in 1971 T.C. Williams High School centralized all of the city’s public-school population into one building — a racial mixing pot famously portrayed in the Disney movie "Remember the Titans."

But the real-life story did not have a Disney ending. Racial gaps continue to plague the school system, and "Obstacles to Opportunity" documents some of lingering disparities in test scores, discipline practices and counseling directives. Using standardized test score data from the Virginia Department of Education, the report’s authors show that white students in Alexandria outperform other students statewide while black and Latino students consistently scored lower than their counterparts in other parts of the commonwealth. One prominent criticism the report levels at the school system is the heavily white makeup of the Talented and Gifted program, which teaches higher level thinking processes at an accelerated pace in an environment conducive to risk-taking and exploration of new ideas.

Advancement Project

Obstacles to Opportunity Report