DATE: Saturday, April 19, 1997              TAG: 9704190325

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B3   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY DENISE WATSON, STAFF WRITER

DATELINE: NORFOLK                           LENGTH:   49 lines

EDUCATORS GATHER TO DISCUSS RACIAL DISPARITIES

Robert Covert asked the classroom of teachers to study him: his corduroy jeans, the string of colored beads intertwined in the shaggy beard that fell to his chest.

``What do you conjure up when you look at someone like me?'' the University of Virginia professor asked during a teachers conference at Norfolk State University on Friday.

The responses poured:

``The Grateful Dead.''

``How I looked in college.''

``You spend a lot of time in the woods.''

Covert challenged them: ``Come on, no one has thought, `What is that white guy doing at a conference about African-American students?' ''

Some admitted they did. The exercise underlined a chord running through the conference - everyone carries prejudices and pre-conceived notions that can hamper the education of students, particularly many black students.

George Mason University, U.Va. and NSU sponsored the 10th annual ``African-American Student in Today's Schools'' conference, attended by more than 200 educators, to help teachers learn ways to close the achievement gap between white and black students.

Standing-room-only workshops ranged from the basics to the ``realities'' of education - how many school practices have lead to some educational disparities between poor and rich, and white and black students.

Donna Ford, an associate professor at U.Va., said she's traveled the country and too often sees ``disparate treatment'': bright minority and poor students not being referred to gifted education classes. The ``blacker'' the district, the more likely the schools will have fewer advanced placement classes and more remedial programs.

She said the basis of measuring student success, often by standardized tests, is unreliable.

``If you know that black and poor children consistently score lower on certain tests, why do we continue to use those tests?'' Ford questioned. ``Why haven't we found an alternative? The number one answer is that it is an objective measure. But there's no such thing as an objective measure.''

Keynote speaker Michael Mallory, executive director of the Ron Brown Scholars Program in Charlottesville, a scholarship program for black students, said earlier in the conference that raising student achievement begins in the classroom. Teachers need to give their students ``confidence and comfort,'' they might not get elsewhere.

``When we make them comfortable enough to come into an academic environment and feel confident,'' Mallory said, ``they do well.''

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