Barbara J. Shircliffe

Accountability in a Postdesegregation Era: The Continuing Significance of Racial Segregation in Florida’s Schools:

In the wake of both the end of court-ordered school desegregation and the growing popularity of accountability as a mechanism to maximize student achievement, the authors explore the association between racial segregation and the percentage of students passing high-stakes tests in Florida’s schools. Results suggest that segregation matters in predicting school-level performance on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test after control for other known and purported predictors of standardized test performance. Also, these results suggest that neither recent efforts by the state of Florida to equalize the funding of education nor current efforts involving high-stakes testing will close the Black-White achievement gap without consideration of the racial distribution of students across schools.

Desegregation and the Historically Black High School: The Establishment of Howard W. Blake in Tampa, Florida

This article examines a grassroots movement among African-Americans to reestablish Howard W. Blake High School, named for a historically black high school closed during the desegregation process in Tampa, Florida. The establishment of Blake High School was contentious, involving negotiations by multiple and conflicting interests—school officials, black leaders, alumni of the historically black high schools that had existed prior to desegregation, the federal judge overseeing the 1971 desegregation order, and civil rights leaders. Analyzing the debates over Blakes status as a magnet, its location, and its attendance zone, this article highlights the paradox of desegregation for African-American communities in Tampa. This case reveals the tension between the desire for community schooling and the consequences of resegregation.

Introduction Schools as Imagined Communities

We often envision schools as communities. Some of us picture a little red schoolhouse where all the children in the neighborhood came to learn and play together. Others have memories of a school down the road they could not attend because they were shipped off to other neighborhoods far away. And, finally, there are those who remember a school that denied them access and made no other educational provisions. This last type of memory makes imagining schools as communities problematic. At first glance we would like to see a school as a place where children, teachers, and parents gather with a shared sense of purpose. The image of everyone working together has been an ideal. In an 1899 lecture, John Dewey said, “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy” (emphasis added). In the midst of industrialization and the growth of bureaucracies within schools, Dewey was trying to justify humanitarian treatment of children by reference to supposedly bygone communal values.1

Confronting the “Acid Test”: Educators’ Perspectives on Expanding Access to Advanced Placement at a Diverse Florida High School

This study examines educators’ perspectives on accountability mandates designed to expand access to the College Boards Advanced Placement (AP) classes to traditionally underserved students at a diverse suburban high school in Florida, Palm Crest High School. Consistent with Elmore (1979), district and site-based administrators focused on the “forward mapping,” of implementation and identified teacher “gatekeeping” as well as parental expectations as chief barriers to opening up AP enrollment. Teachers, however, found implementation problematic—accountability levers had contradictory provisions and overall neglect nonacademic barriers to college access for low-income African American and Hispanic students. The current value-added model of incorporating student exam performance as a key component of teacher evaluations complicates the advocacy associated with increasing low-SES students’ participation in AP classes as educators strive to maintain high pass rates amid open-enrollment policies. We argue for increased support systems to enhance students’ preparedness for taking college-level courses while in high school, leading to increased college attendance and degree completion.

Maintaining Pedagogical Integrity of a Computer Mediated Course Delivery in Social Foundations

Transforming a face to face course to a computer mediated format in social foundations (interdisciplinary field in education), while maintaining pedagogical integrity, involves strategic collaboration between instructional technologists and content area experts. This type of planned partnership requires open dialogue and a mutual respect for prior knowledge, expertise and experiences within a multi-disciplinarity context. A.D.D.I.E. [Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation] (Branson, R. K., Rayner, G. T., Cox, J. L., Furman, J. P., King, F. J., & Hannum, W. H., 1975; Clark, 1995) proved a critical means to document the opportunities and challenges that exist among individuals of various disciplinary perspectives, pursuing the same goal of transforming a traditionally delivered classroom course into one that is entirely online. Examining the negotiation of pedagogical techniques and technology choices to maintain integrity may enlighten other collaborative efforts. For this purpose, the course transformation process through which experienced social foundations instructors partnered with an instructional designer to conceptualize, develop, produce, implement and evaluate the conversion of a face-toface graduate course in Historical Foundations of American Education, to a computer-mediated format is described.

Promoting Diversity through Multilevel Activism: An Organizational Approach

Barbara J. Shircliffe is Associate Professor of social foundations in the Department of Psychological and Social Foundations in the College of Education at the University of South Florida. Her research in educational history focuses on Southern school segregation and desegregation; oral history; and school policy. She is currently writing a book on the desegregation of Southern school teachers.