Meanwhile, at the same school, classes of 10 or 15 mostly white, mostly affluent students do college-level work in well-equipped advanced-placement classes to which they are admitted on the basis of a test that rules out all but the elite few.

It is a standard brand of academic segregation, one that can be found in most public high schools. But at Berkeley High, for the past three months, there has been yet another kind of class, this one designed to close the gap between students who succeed academically and students at academic risk: In borrowed classrooms, hastily recruited, energetic teachers convene small, no-nonsense gatherings of mostly African-American ninth-graders, each accompanied by a volunteer tutor, all of them focused on raising the academic achievement of kids who have long been left behind.

Where did this extraordinary concentration of energy and resources come from? The answer is PCAD: Parents of Children of African Descent. Near the end of this year's first semester, these parents discovered that fully half of Berkeley High's black ninth-graders (one-third of the 875-student freshman class) were already failing English, math and/or history. While acknowledging the history and prevalence, locally and nationally, of the "achievement gap" between white students and students of color, PCAD refused to accept that fate for one more generation of Berkeley High children.

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Armed with research that reflects a history of high dropout and flunk-out rates among Berkeley High's African-American students, and African-American male students in particular -- statistics mirrored in schools across the nation -- PCAD appealed to the school's new principal, Frank Lynch, for his help in breaking that pattern. Lynch asked the parents to come up with a plan, and they spent their Christmas break doing exactly that.

Although most of the PCAD organizers did not themselves have children who were failing, their first step was to recruit into their group parents and grandparents who did, so that their input could be incorporated into the PCAD plan.

"On January 30, 2001 a new semester will start at Berkeley High School. At that time, without our intervention, approximately 250 freshmen students will go off track for graduation," begins the 20-page "intervention plan" that PCAD issued on Jan. 14. "The fact that large numbers of students have been failing at Berkeley High School for years does not change the fact that we are facing a crisis that demands urgent and appropriate action ...

"The effects of our failure to aggressively bridge the achievement gap are long-term, deep, and harmful to all of us, whether we are the affected student, parent, classmate, or neighbor ... We cannot wait another semester."

PCAD's sense of urgency is inspired by a disheartening national trend as well as local disappointment. Calling the racial achievement gap "the most important educational challenge for the United States," a 1999 national study by the College Board found only 17 percent of black and 24 percent of Latino high school seniors to be proficient in reading, 4 percent of black students to be proficient in both math and science and no black students and 1 percent of Latinos to be advanced in those subjects.

Closer to home, a recently completed four-year study of Berkeley High by the UC-Berkeley-sponsored Diversity Project found student achievement to be lowest among low-income African-American and Latino students and highest among affluent whites. In 1998, white Berkeley High students scored in the top 15th percentile nationally; black students scored in the bottom 40th. And while many white seniors went off to Ivy League colleges, six out of 10 black male students had dropped out, flunked out or otherwise disappeared before their senior year.

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