Post's Jay Mathews writes about Joe Hawkins

Expert suggests putting all black students in IB

I don’t know anyone who cares more or knows more about Montgomery County public schools then Joseph Hawkins, a senior study director at the Westat research company.
He tried in 2000 to start a charter school in the county to challenge low-income minority kids. The Board of Education said no, concerned, among other things, that the charter’s plan to have all students in the International Baccalaureate diploma program was too strenuous.
Hawkins still wants more rigorous classes for the students least likely to be in them. In a recent post on the Rockville Patch blog, he suggested the following: At the eight county schools that offer IB classes, black students must go for the full IB diploma, which requires six three-to-five-hour exams and a 4,000-word research paper. His reasons are interesting.
As an adult, Hawkins wrote, he became friends with his middle school basketball coach, Skip Grant. They ran together. Hawkins asked Grant how to get faster.
“I thought he would give me some really complex training program,” Hawkins wrote, “but instead his advice was two words: ‘Train fast.’ In short, you can’t really improve your real race times unless you practice running faster.”
Hawkins is an expert on school statistics. He said he often thought of Grant’s advice when people asked him how schools can close achievement gaps “between their black and white students, their Latino and white students and their poor and rich students.”
“Now I know it sounds simple,” he wrote, “but to close gaps, schools must make the students who are behind (e.g., black students) run faster. And if they do not, then gaps remain.” He said he italicized the word “make” because “it does come down to a requirement. There is no negotiating excellence and better outcomes.”
In his e-mail exchanges with me, Hawkins usually has numbers to illustrate his point. In the Rockville Patch piece, he wrote that in 2011, there were 796 black seniors at the county’s eight IB high schools: Bethesda-Chevy Chase, Einstein, Kennedy, Richard Montgomery, Rockville, Seneca Valley, Springbrook and Watkins Mill. Only 40 black seniors at those schools were candidates for the IB diploma, which is 5 percent.
“That is not even close to good enough,” he wrote.... Jay Mathews article continues at this link.