Identifying ‘achievement gap’ just the beginning: "Cindy Kerr has seen firsthand how low expectations and prejudice can play out in the county’s public schools.
Several years ago, she attended a parent-teacher conference for a student who was having trouble in school.
The teacher asked if Kerr, who is white, was there because she was the school’s PTA president. He was ‘‘flabbergasted,” she said, to learn that the student who was having trouble was her nephew, the product of a mixed-race family.
‘‘From the way he dresses I thought he was one of them,” Kerr recalled the teacher saying.
‘‘One of them?” she asked.
‘‘A thug,” the teacher replied.
‘‘He didn’t know he [my nephew] came from a good family,” said Kerr, who is president of the county council of PTAs. ‘‘[My nephew] had been labeled and didn’t have the same expectations because he dressed different or looked different.”
The conversation was emblematic of the complex challenge the public school system faces in addressing the growing achievement gap between black and Latino students and their white and Asian classmates."
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