Study Indicates ‘Magnet’ Pupils Given Higher Grades at Gompers

A new study suggests that black and Latino students in Gompers Secondary School’s junior high school program generally receive lower grades than students in the school’s prestigious magnet program--even when they show the same ability on a standardized achievement test.

The study, conducted by a San Diego Unified School District researcher at the request of Gompers’ new principal, Marie Thornton, does not offer explanations for the results. But district officials said it should prompt teachers and administrators at the Southeast San Diego school to examine their grading practices.

“There’s a suggestion that there are differential grading practices,” said Betty Tomblin, the school district’s assistant director of evaluation services, who conducted the study. “It doesn’t suggest why.”

Bertha Pendleton, special assistant to Supt. Tom Payzant, said that Thornton and the staff will “want to examine further what some of those other data would seem to suggest to them.”

A member of a minority education group said that the results support black parents’ contention that some teachers at Gompers discriminate against their children. The parents have filed a complaint with the federal Office of Civil Rights alleging, among other claims, that teachers at Gompers and two other city schools give their children lower grades than whites in the same courses.

“It tells me that there is a problem there with teacher attitude and expectation,” said Betty Brown, vice-chairman of the Committee for the Education of Black Children, which advises Payzant. “You have some teachers that expect the lowest achievement from minority kids. Because their expectations are low, that coincides with them giving the kid a lower grade.”

But Pendleton responded that “I don’t know that it supports their claims. I think it suggests that that’s an area (staff members) might want to explore further.”

Added Don Morrison, a 20-year teacher at Gompers: “I just don’t see any teacher being . . . racially biased, who would ever do anything like this. The signs just aren’t there.”

Thornton, who started her first year at Gompers this September, did not return numerous telephone calls to her office Thursday.

An evaluation of Gompers last spring showed that the school had been resegregated and that minority students were underrepresented in the upper-level magnet courses. However, another study of the magnet students in July showed that minority and majority students receive similar grades from teachers.

Under Gompers’ “school within a school” program, 466 children from the neighborhood around Gompers attend a regular “comprehensive” junior high school for seventh- and eighth-graders. About 97% of them are minorities, mostly black and Latino.

Another 395 youngsters from the seventh and eighth grades throughout the city attend its “magnet” program, a voluntary program that attempts to attract white students to minority-area schools by offering specialized courses. Math, computer and science instruction are the specialties of the Gompers magnet, and about 51% of its students are white.

The study compared 282 regular school students with 374 magnet students, dividing them into ability groups by their scores on the district-wide Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills. It found that while 66% of the magnet students in the top ability group received grade point averages of 3.0 or higher out of a possible 4.0, only 21% of the comprehensive students did.

Conversely, while 36% of the comprehensive students in the top ability group received grade averages of 1.0 to 1.9, only 6% of the magnet students did.

In math, computer and science courses, students in the comprehensive junior high school generally received lower grades than both white and minority students in the magnet program. In computer courses, for example, top-ability comprehensive students earned a GPA of 1.9, while white and minority magnet students in the same ability grouping averaged 3.1

In a few cases, however, comprehensive school students bested or equaled magnet students. In science, for example, they achieved an average GPA of 2.7, while minority students in the magnet averaged 2.6.

Tomblin said she could not draw firm conclusions from the study because very few comprehensive school students scored in the top levels of the achievement tests, and very few magnet students scored at the bottom. Only 17 comprehensive school students scored in the top ability grouping, and just 15 magnet students scored in the bottom ability grouping.

School officials said that a variety of factors could explain the results. George Frey, assistant superintendent of the district’s community relations and integration services division, said that teachers’ low expectations for students could produce poor test results.

“I think that the expectations from parents and from staff could be better than what they are for all kids, but especially for the comprehensive kids,” he said.

Tomblin noted that the scores could be the result of differing standards of achievement among teachers. Generally, teachers do not teach in both the magnet and the comprehensive schools, Morrison said.

Other factors include parents’ involvement with their children’s schoolwork, students’ preparation in elementary school and their access to computers, officials said.