Education Week - September 16, 2015 - 12

BEYOND BIAS

Countering Stereotypes in School

Schools Nationwide Struggle to Root Out Disparities
for me, four minutes of work for the teacher,
but it's such a positive empowering experience for the teachers and students and families," Gerzon-Kessler said.
Monoco Elementary School's positive referrals are one small volley in the much larger
battle to overcome years of low achievement
and crippling discrimination that have
plagued the local school system.
Gerzon-Kessler and much of his staff
came to the school after local and federal
investigations from 2008 to 2012 exposed
widespread discrimination against the
Spanish-speaking community at Monoco
and throughout its parent system, the
Adams County 14 school district.
As a result of those probes, Colorado's
Adams 14 joined the ranks of some 1,400 districts across the country that are under compliance agreements with the U.S. Department
of Education's office for civil rights to correct
systemic discrimination based on race, sex,
disability, or other characteristics. And, like
many of those districts, Adams 14 has rewritten and redistributed its anti-discrimination
policy and started diversity training for teachers and other staff members.
In all those districts-and in thousands
of others with achievement gaps and discipline disparities that never garner federal
oversight-those working to overcome biases
have a steep uphill battle, and many will fail.
Even so, through emerging cognitive research and in-depth school observations, educators and experts are starting to understand
more about how unconscious biases undermine efforts to combat discrimination. And
as districts like Adams 14 rebuild their school
communities, they're also starting to understand how to prevent bias from hurting the
children they serve.

'Broken Culture'
If the federal investigation is any indication,
bias was pervasive in the Adams 14 system. In
a district where more than 80 percent of the
more than 7,500 students are Latino, and 60
percent are English-language learners, bilingual teachers and those who spoke accented
English were pushed out. Teachers were told
not to speak Spanish to students or parents.
In the high school, federal investigators
found a teacher "almost caused a riot" after
repeatedly removing Hispanic students from
the classroom and telling them to "go back
to Mexico." In several elementary schools,
Spanish-speaking students were forced to
throw out bilingual reading books. When one
kindergartner fell and hit his head on the
playground, he asked for help in Spanish,
and the teacher on duty told him he could do
so only in English. He went without medical care for hours before being taken to the
hospital for stitches.
"Our school culture got broken, and we're
still recovering from the traumas of the previous years," Gerzon-Kessler said.
The atmosphere was so toxic that in 2012,
when Patrick Sánchez, the current superintendent of Adams 14, arrived, he spent his
first six months in what he said amounted
to "districtwide therapy sessions," digging
through what had happened, who had been
hurt, and how to rebuild.
Educators here and nationwide are learning
to counter bias, they must reconsider how they
think about it.
Discussions of bias in education often
focus on explicit discrimination-or, as bias
researcher John B. Diamond puts it, "bad

Nathan W. Armes for Education Week

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

Test Yourself:
A Survey Tool
For Gauging Bias
How can you find a bias you don't
consciously know you have? And
can such a bias really affect your
behavior?
The Implicit Association Test,
developed more than a decade ago
by University of Washington social
psychologist Anthony Greenwald,
uses a person's reaction times to
measure how closely two concepts
are linked in the person's mind. A
participant quickly matches pairs of
pictures or words-for example, the
words "scientist" and "nurse" with
male and female names, or "highachieving" with black and white
faces. Over thousands of trials, teams
of researchers have found people
take longer to match items that run
counter to their own mental bias.
A recent meta-analysis of more
than 100 studies found the Implicit
Association Test can predict
interracial discriminatory behavior
better than personal reports of
conscious racist beliefs.
Interested in finding out how
you would score on an Implicit
Association Test? Try this short
online test adapted for Education
Week readers by Jordan Axt, a
postgraduate researcher at the
University of Virginia's Implicit Social
Cognition Laboratory. If you agree to
participate, your confidential answers
will also serve as data for Project
Implicit, an ongoing, international
research project aimed at gauging
levels of racial bias.
-SARAH D. SPARKS

12 | EDUCATION WEEK | September 16, 2015 | www.edweek.org

Ari Gerzon-Kessler, the principal of Monaco Elementary in Commerce City, Colo., hands
the phone to 1st grader Liam Winter, after telling the boy's mother that her son was
awarded a positive referral for excelling in school.

people doing bad things intentionally."
But ordinary, well-intentioned people who
believe themselves to be committed to equality can still maintain the bias that is "embedded in the system and the daily practices of a
school," said Diamond, an associate professor
of educational leadership and policy analysis
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
"There needs to be a shift in the way we
think and talk about it," he said.
An enormous increase in student data-
from tests, disciplinary records, school climate surveys, and the like-has increased
debates about the role of bias in such problems as gender gaps in science fields and
higher suspension rates for children of color.
But "documenting the disparities and being
aware of a problem in general doesn't mean
you can solve it," said Calvin K. Lai, a Harvard University psychologist who studies
ways to counter bias. In a 2014 evaluation
of 17 different anti-bias interventions, Lai
and his colleagues found that none reduced
explicit racial biases like the ones seen in
Adams 14, and fewer than half reduced unconscious, so-called "implicit" biases.
At the K-12 level, Lai said, many diversitytraining programs are "powered by good intentions, but ... not a lot of empirical evidence."
"There's this sense that people can be colorblind, gender-blind, and that's just not how
the mind works," Lai said. "Implicit bias is effortless and very fast."
People create mental shortcuts, based on
their experiences and what they hear from
others. The stronger the bias, the more time
it takes for someone to mentally separate an

ONLINE QUIZ:
www.edweek.org/go/bias-quiz

individual from stereotypes connected to the
person's race, gender, or other characteristics.
For example, a series of studies by University of California, Los Angeles, psychologist Phillip A. Goff found adults of different
races shown photos of young boys routinely
thought the black children were several
years older and less childlike, and that they
should be held more responsible for their
actions than white boys of the same age.

Moment of Discrimination
Goff calls these split-second biases "fast
traps," and research shows that the less
time a person has to make a decision, the
more likely that bias will influence his or
her choice.
In one five-year study of a wealthy but diverse suburban district, researchers found
school staff members were most likely to
act on an implicit bias when they had to
make a quick, subjective decision about
how to apply school rules and to whom.
That was true both for positive choices,
such as whom a teacher called on in class,
and negative ones, such as which of several
misbehaving children to chastise, found
Diamond and Amanda E. Lewis, an associate professor in African-American studies
and sociology at the University of Illinois
at Chicago.
"Race and gender influence whether a student's action is seen as silly or transgressive,
a minor annoyance or in need of intervention," Lewis and Diamond write in Despite
the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequity
Thrives in Good Schools, to be published in
October by the Oxford University Press.
The bigger the gap between the background and the personality of an adult
and that of the student, the more likely
the adult will subconsciously view the
student as representing a group, rather

http://www.edweek.org/go/bias-quiz http://www.edweek.org

Education Week - September 16, 2015

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