Can student mentoring and cultural-competency training for teachers help boost graduation rates? by Scott Elliott COLUMBUS - Donna Ford has spent a career studying urban education and specifically the “achievement gap,” the stubborn divide between the test performance and graduation rates of white students and their African-American and Latino classmates.
Ford, a Vanderbilt University professor, grew up in Cleveland and graduated from East Cleveland’s Shaw High School in 1979. She wants Ohio’s latest effort to narrow its own achievement gap—one of the nation’s worst—to succeed.
But even though Ford likes some of the elements of the state’s new $20 million initiative to close the gap, she questions whether they will prove effective in making a sustained and measurable difference in student achievement.
Concepts like connecting 9th-grade black boys with mentors and training mostly white teachers to bridge a cultural divide with often lower income black and Latino students are good ideas, Ford says.
But will pairing a young boy with a mentor make a difference if the mentor lacks the right background and experience? Will two days of teacher training in “cultural competencies” be enough to make a difference in the classroom?
Probably not, Ford asserts.
“As much as I love black children, I might not be an appropriate mentor even with all my training,” she says. “Mentors are usually most effective when there is a small age difference and similar interests. How can [an older adult] talk about the experience of what it is like to be a young black male? And training that amounts to just two days for a teacher on a college campus? Stop right there. I do not think it’s possible in two days to infuse the care, concern and information they need.”
To make a difference, Ford says daily or weekly instruction and support would be best, but monthly sessions are probably the minimum amount that would make a difference.
In March, Gov. Ted Strickland named former state Sen. C.J. Prentiss, a Democrat from Cleveland, as his special advisor to work on closing the achievement gap and the legislature set aside $20 million to fund her initiatives.
Prentiss says she has challenged universities that are competing for the contract to create the teacher training program to come up with new and creative ways to help teachers craft curriculum that will be more relevant to students.
"We want the kids to have the ‘a-ha’ factor —‘this makes sense’—rather than have them disengaged,” she says
On the 2005 National Assessment of Education Progress, the gap between Ohio’s white and African-American students’ scores widened at 4th and 8th grade, while for the nation as a whole, the gap shrank. The state’s graduation gap between white and African-Americans is stark—80.5 percent of white students graduated while 50.7 percent of African-Americans did in 2002-03, according to a study by Education Week.
This fall, Prentiss has begun to roll out a multi-faceted program focused primarily on 9th grade African-American boys, though white at-risk youth are eligible. The program is largely based on Prentiss' own research and does not model any other achievement gap effort. The goal: to prevent students from dropping out at an age when many of them begin drifting from Ohio’s urban schools.
“Our data show that’s the time when they say ‘I’m out of here’ if there's not immediate intervention,” Prentiss says.
A 2004 study by Johns Hopkins University supports that claim. It showed the major factor that raised the risk of dropping out for African-American boys was failed classes in 9th grade.
Thirty high schools in 12 urban districts will participate in Ohio’s effort, including Ford’s alma mater Shaw. Each will receive funding to hire a “linkage coordinator,” a specialist who will seek to provide mentors for 9th-graders, training for teachers, support for parents. The overarching goal is to instill a new way of thinking about school for students who are at risk of dropping out.
Similar approaches are being discussed and tried in different ways in North Carolina, Maryland and other states that also have tried to attack the achievement gap. For example, in the summer of 2006, Ford and her Vanderbilt colleague Gilman Whiting ran a two-week Summer Scholar Identity Institute designed to help teenage black boys in Nashville develop pride in personal profiles as high academic achievers.
The key, Prentiss says, is putting caring adults in the lives of kids.
“One thing that jumps out continuously with these kids when you talk to them is they don’t think anyone cares what happens to them,” she says.
But Prentiss’s effort cannot alone erase the gap, says Eric Gordon, the new chief academic officer for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. Cleveland is seeking to fit in the state’s effort with its on-going achievement gap programs, like Saturday school with testing coaches and an awareness campaign to teach parents about the importance of the Ohio Graduation Test.
“It has to be something we think about holistically as an organization,” Gordon says. “I don't think the Prentiss program alone has the ability to do that. We have to treat this as a way to help us systemically embed change. If we treat it as a grant, it will fail.”
Fitting a statewide initiative into local efforts isn’t always a smooth process. Consider Columbus. That district initially opted out of the Prentiss program, although it is reconsidering how it can mesh the state’s goals with its own efforts to close the achievement gap.
Jeff Warner, a spokesman for Columbus schools, says the Prentiss-led initiative nearly came too late for that district, although it is now in talks to try to find a way to participate with Prentiss this year. Columbus is on a tight budget and fiscal priorities for the school year are set. Its achievement gap efforts are focused on mentoring for 8th graders, not 9th graders.
Still, district officials are reconsidering how Columbus might combine its program with the state’s, rather than decline the money, Warner says.
“Our budget is really tight. We’re running at the end of our levy cycle right now,” he notes. “It was too late in the game to shift directions. We think there is merit to this, but we have many things underway ourselves.”
Prentiss says she has two years to demonstrate to the legislature that this approach can significantly impact the graduation rate and persuade lawmakers to put more money behind it. The Ohio Department of Education is coming up with ways to evaluate its effectiveness and Prentiss says she hopes to keep conversation going as the elements come together about what is working and what is not.
But she believes she has the right pieces in place.
“All the data is out there,” she says. “You can’t get around these facts. Teachers are critical. You’ve got to relate to kids and build relationships. Parents have to be involved. There have to be mentors. You find pieces of this out there but they’re all in separate silos. We’re trying to connect them.”

Scott Elliott is an education reporter for Dayton Daily News.