Archive for Achievement Gap
Hypothetically speaking, if racial minorities are more likely to commit “expellable” offenses in school, doesn’t it follow that racial minorities will be expelled disproportionately to their numbers?
Let’s say whites and Asians with the aptitude to take Advanced Placement classes in fact take those classes, and blacks and Hispanics (assuming they have the aptitude – no “racist” plot needed) tend not to take those classes, doesn’t it follow the latter will be underrepresented in such classes?
Which would be more intellectually honest: to say disparities are caused by racial bias or by the choices and abilities of the individual?
Somewhere along the civil rights way, there emerged the perception that racial disparities were evidence of discrimination. Equality of outcome took precedence over equality of opportunity. It isn’t enough that every student has an equal opportunity to behave himself in school or equal access to Advanced Placement classes. Social engineers want the numbers to even out, regardless of individual choices. Racial disparities are embarrassing, and someone or something outside the free-thinking individual must serve as the scapegoat.
Equality of outcome became a civil right sometime after the civil rights movement. Things weren’t happening fast enough, so people had to pin the blame on something besides Jim Crow. But what’s more likely to narrow disparities: creating bigger and more expensive government programs, or encouraging the individual to work harder, better, and more efficiently?
Well, the individual has no place in the Big Government scheme, so don’t bother answering the question. The Department of Education is embarking on what it no doubt considers a bold new journey to narrow the achievement gap and other racial disparities. According the New York Times, the department will send select school districts and state-supported colleges letters, putting them on notice about potential “civil rights” investigations to determine whether minorities have equal access to Advanced Placement classes, why minorities have higher suspension rates than whites, etc.
(By the way, unequal access to AP classes would entail a high school barring a black student from enrolling in such classes or the College Board refusing to allow him to sit for the exam because he’s black. If a student is prepared to take a particular AP class, or he’s willing to do the necessary prep work, he may sign up for the class, regardless of his race. When I was in high school, for instance, I had the option to take AP biology, but the class conflicted with band class, and I preferred band over biology.)
Secretary Arne Duncan (pictured) indirectly accused the Bush administration of not being “as vigilant as it should have been in combating gender and racial discrimination and protecting the rights of individuals with disabilities,” but the new administration has stepped up the crusade for equal outcomes.
If the department’s investigation at a particular school finds that minorities on average don’t wish to enroll in Advanced Placement classes, is the inquiry over? If minorities commit more expulsion-worthy acts, would the agency recommend expelling fewer minorities despite behavior, or expelling more whites and Asians despite behavior? Why expel or suspend students at all? Ban expulsion and suspension, and viola! The disparity will vanish.
Under a traditional view, rights were tied to personal liberty, in which the individual was free from government coercion. Government segregation is a violation of his rights, for example, but scoring too low on a pencil-and-paper civil service test is not. Individuals have a constitutional right to equality before the law and to be free from discrimination based on the color of his skin. No one has a right to preferential treatment, perks, or equal outcomes.
All that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” jazz is just too minimalist for some.
Addendum: John Rosenberg at Discriminations asks, “So, who is discriminating against those black and Latino students? What discriminatory policies are the culprits? What do schools need to do to get themselves in ‘compliance’ with Secretary Duncan’s version of civil rights?
“Here’s a thought: why shouldn’t the Dept. of Education issue individual mandates, on the model of those proposed in health care, requiring black and Latino students to spend a specified number of hours per night doing homework and limiting the number of hours of television watching allowed? It could also use ’stimulus’ funds, or newly appropriated ‘jobs’ funds, to hire armies of truant officers (possibly using those hired for the Census) to monitor ‘compliance’ with the new edict?”
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Last week, the Boston Globe published an op-ed about a topic we’ve covered on the blog several times. Thomas Espenshade is an author of a Princeton University study that revealed students of Asian descent face discrimination at elite colleges and universities.
His research showed that a black student with 1150s and a white student with 1460s had the same chance of admission as an Asian student with 1600s, top scores. Download his 11-page Power Point presentation for a quick view (PDF).
(Incidentally, Espendshade called for a project to close the racial academic achievement gap between the races “with the same scale, urgency, and sense of importance as the original Manhattan Project.”)
According to the op-ed, Princeton spokesperson Emily Aronson said “no particular factor is assigned a fixed weight and there is no formula for weighing the various aspects of the application.”
The op-ed’s author, Boston College teacher Kara Miller, shares this bit of news: “A few years ago, however, when I worked as a reader for Yale’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions, it became immediately clear to me that Asians – who constitute 5 percent of the US population – faced an uphill slog. They tended to get excellent scores, take advantage of AP offerings, and shine in extracurricular activities. Frequently, they also had hard-knock stories: families that had immigrated to America under difficult circumstances, parents working as kitchen assistants and store clerks, and households in which no English was spoken….But would Yale be willing to make 50 percent of its freshman class Asian? Probably not.”
Do colleges and universities keep Asian admittees below a certain percentage?
“There are a lot of poor Asians, immigrant kids,” University of Oregon physics professor Stephen Hsu told Miller. “But generally that story doesn’t do as much as it would for a non-Asian student. Statistically, it’s true that Asians generally have to get higher scores than others to get in.”
Americans of Asian descent typically aren’t as vocal about discrimination or nearly as successful spreading collective guilt as other minorities. Perhaps op-eds like this, along with Espenshade’s research, will change that.
States like California banned discrimination and preferences in government-supported colleges and universities. Consequently, Asians account for about 40 percent of students at these schools, Miller notes, although they account for 13 percent of the state’s population. It’s possible that in states where preferences are permitted, colleges and universities redline Asians so the student body can reflect the population.
If any group should support bans on preferences and discrimination, it should be formerly oppressed minorities. These bans protect all individuals, regardless of race, from being judged by their race. The government’s intent to benefit these minorities is irrelevant. The authority to treat people differently based on race is a proverbial double-edged sword.
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The inimitable economist Thomas Sowell has written an article on Berkeley High School’s proposal to eliminate science labs to divert funds to closing the racial academic achievement gap.
“This is a proposal to redistribute money from science to social work, by providing every student with advisors on note-taking, time management and other learning skills…The point is to close educational gaps among groups, or at least go on record as trying. As with most equalization crusades, whether in education or in the economy, it is about equalizing downward, by lowering those at the top. ‘Fairness’ strikes again!
…
“In keeping with the rhetoric of the prevailing ideology, our education professor refers to ‘privileged’ parents and ‘privileged’ children who want to ‘forestall any progress toward equity.’…In the language of the politically correct, achievement is equated with privilege. Such verbal sleight of hand evades the question whether individuals’ own priorities and efforts affect outcomes, whether in education or in other endeavors. No need to look at empirical evidence when a clever phrase can take that whole question off the table.” [emphasis added]
Truly maddening. The professor accused parents who stress education of trying to keep others down. As Sowell notes, somewhere along the way, achievement became a synonym for privileged. Only in a PC-saturated, Alice-in-Wonderland kind of world is such a thing possible. People of Japanese descent in Canada and the U.S. tend to have higher incomes than other minorities and even whites. Given past discrimination against this ethnic group, does the privileged accusation make sense? Of course not.
“Achievement by overcoming obstacles is a special threat to the left’s vision of the world, and so must be magically transformed into privilege through rhetoric…Those with that vision do not want to even discuss evidence that students from different groups spend different amounts of time on homework and different amounts of time on social activities.” [emphasis added]
Sowell appeals to common sense–rather than wrong-headed social engineering schemes to take from one group and give to another–when discussing how individuals can improve academic performance: change attitudes, priorities, and behavior.
George Leef at the Phi Beta Cons blog writes:
“Welcome to the world of the education experts, where families that encourage children to work hard in school are ‘privileged’ as though they were our equivalent of European nobility, and where the primary educational goal is ‘equity’ among designated groups rather than assisting all pupils to progress to the best of their ability.”
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Thomas Espenshade, author of a study that showed students of Asian descent are discriminated against at elite colleges and universities, thinks he’s come up with a bold new plan to close the racial achievement gap.
Calling it a project “with the same scale, urgency, and sense of importance as the original Manhattan Project,” Espenshade proposes to monitor the lives of up to 50,000 children from birth to age eighteen to try to determine what causes the racial gap and how parents, schools, neighborhoods, and the government can work together to close it. (Source)
Good luck with that.
Espenshade’s research shows the extent of lowered standards for blacks in higher education. For instance, black students admitted to elite colleges and universities receive the equivalent of a 310 SAT-point boost. Talk about a thumb on the scale. Hispanics receive a 130-point boost. Standards for black applicants whose ancestors were American slaves are lowered more than those for blacks of multiracial background or who are first- or second-generation immigrants.
Regarding the mismatch theory — the idea that black students admitted under preferences are ill-matched to colleges and universities they attend — Espenshade says blacks admitted under preferences are more likely to graduate, go to grad school, and have higher lifetime incomes, but they tend to graduate at the low end of the class as selectivity rises.
“On balance, we conclude that a higher graduation rate and the other advantages of attending a more selective institution more than outweigh the potential disadvantages of lower class rank at graduation.”
I wonder if blacks graduating at the bottom of their classes would agree. Let’s say most would agree. Fine, but we must call the thing by its name. It isn’t “affirmative action”; it’s lowering the bar. If black Americans don’t have a problem with that, okay. But don’t use a euphemism and pretend it’s something else.
Finally, Espenshade announces what most already know: racial preferences exist because of the achievement gap between the races. But for lowered standards, elite schools (and probably non-elites, too) would see fewer blacks on campus.
“What we see at selective colleges and universities is just the tip of the iceberg,” he writes. “It is symptomatic of a much broader societal phenomenon. Racial gaps in academic skills and knowledge begin to develop soon after birth. They are reflected initially in children’s inventories of vocabulary words and later in tests of math and reading. By the time of kindergarten entry, black children lag about one year behind whites. Gaps continue to grow throughout the elementary and secondary school years in a pattern of cumulative advantage and disadvantage.”
Espenshade notes the far-reaching implications of the gap, as it manifests itself in high school and extends to the workforce. The “Manhattan Project” solution to the problem isn’t nearly as bold or as innovative as he believes it is. It’s just another grandiose and expensive-sounding proposal that tip-toes around a factor that exacerbates disparities between the races: illegitimacy. Or more precisely, fatherlessness.
I concur with Roger Clegg’s comment on the article (emphases added):
“Earlier this year, the National Center for Health Statistics came out with its latest numbers on illegitimacy (final data for 2006). By population subgroup, the percentage of children born out of wedlock is 70.7 percent for non-Hispanic blacks, 64.6 percent for American Indians/Alaska Natives, 49.9 percent for Hispanics, 26.6 percent for non-Hispanic whites, and 16.5 percent for Asians/Pacific Islanders. Notice any connection between those numbers and how academically competitive the members of the group are likely to be come college admissions time?
“The fact is that kids who grow up in two-parent homes are much more likely to get the support and help they need to perform well academically. Conversely, illegitimacy correlates with just about any social problem you can name (poverty, crime, dropping out of school, substance abuse, etc.), and it — not discrimination — is the principal cause of racial disparities in all these areas. See my National Review Online column here.
“And you will not be surprised to hear that I do not believe this problem will be solved by giving racial preferences in college admissions to middle- and upper-class African Americans.
“This is a cultural and moral problem, and I don’t have a proposed silver bullet to solve it. I would say only that, while there may be a limited role for government, most of the heavy lifting will probably have to be done by the little platoons.
“(BTW, please don’t bother arguing that illegitimacy is caused by racism. The percentage of out-of-wedlock births for African Americans has actually gotten much, much higher as discrimination has diminished.)”
John Rosenberg at Discriminations has more.
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A teacher named Patrick Welsh, frustrated by his all-black class’s performance on a test, asked, “Why don’t you guys study like the kids from Africa?” (Source)
Bold, yes? That’s what frustration can do to you. One student said, “It’s because they have fathers who kick their butts and make them study.” Another said, “You ask the class, just ask how many of us have our fathers living with us.”
According to Welsh, no one raised his/her hand.
Speculating about why racial preferences exist isn’t brain surgery. Whether arguing for compensatory justice or skin deep-only diversity, the truth is that in 2009, racial preferences exist because generally, blacks score lower on standardized tests than everyone else.
Embarrassed and probably feeling a little guilty, people use all kind of justifications for lowering standards to accommodate blacks. Before we can begin to tackle the issue, however, we must understand that family structure impacts performance.
“My students knew intuitively that the reason they were lagging academically had nothing to do with race, which is the too-handy explanation for the achievement gap in Alexandria,” Welsh writes in the Washington Post. “And it wasn’t because the school system had failed them. They knew that excuses about a lack of resources and access just didn’t wash at the new, state-of-the-art, $100 million T.C. Williams, where every student is given a laptop and where there is open enrollment in Advanced Placement and honors courses. Rather, it was because their parents just weren’t there for them — at least not in the same way that parents of kids who were doing well tended to be.”
The kids admit what academics try to avoid. Children with no father in the home perceive the lack of discipline and respectful fear an authoritative male instills. I agree with Welsh to a certain extent. He believes focusing on race is too simple, and that family support and involvement are important. And focusing on race can stigmatize black students, but it can’t be ignored. Three quarters of black babies in the U.S. are born into fatherless homes. Black students disproportionately are without residential fathers. For better or for worse, race must be part of the discussion.
It’s not the children’s fault. The blame rests solely on the parents. It will take a sub-cultural shift away from a 75 percent out-of-wedlock pregnancy rate toward stable, two-parent (preferably married) homes to improve the condition of these chidlren. As the article notes, school superintendents “have little control” over these issues.
What can the government do about fatherlessness? Practically speaking, nothing. Individuals must turn the tide.
Addendum: The Center for Equal Opportunity’s Roger Clegg blogs:
“Of course, [Patrick Welsh is] not alone, and there are more and more nonconservatives who are coming around to this view. Problem is, the problem isn’t getting any better. And it is still the case that this problem is unique among social pathologies, in that — unlike crime, drug abuse, dropping out of school, etc. — there remain a nontrivial number of folks who don’t see the problem as a problem at all.”
John Rosenberg of Discriminations echoes my view about the role race plays in this scenario, again, for better or for worse:
“The color of a father’s skin does not cause his absence from his family, nor does the color of a mother’s skin determine how strict she is about homework. Still, Welsh goes overboard in attempting to dissociate race altogether from the dysfunctional educational behavior he observes, if for no other reason than that there the percentage of black children in single-parent families is three times higher than whites. It is true that damaged families, not race, stack the deck against black kids raised in single families, but it is not true that their difficulty ‘has nothing to do with race.’”
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So implies Thelma Jackson, a consultant and former educational advisory board member from Olympia, Washington.
The gap is blamed on everything from racism and bias to under-funding and racial isolation (implying that blacks can’t be properly educated unless they’re with whites). Why not teacher sick days? (Source)
Jackson’s 40-page report traces the city’s integration efforts during the civil rights movement and acknowledges that Tacoma’s desegregation process was relatively smooth. Part of the problem now, which is only hinted at, is that half the students in government schools in Tacoma are racial minorities. That doesn’t bode well for the idealistic and overly ambitious goal of racial balance.
At present, Americans have the right to live wherever they can afford (and not afford, unfortunately), and parents with the means and/or determination move to neighborhoods with better government schools, or opt to homeschool or pay for private schools. A social engineer’s desire for racially balanced government schools won’t happen anytime soon, unless the government begins coercing people to live in certain neighborhoods.
Barring that scenario, folks like Jackson want school districts to take a “comprehensive approach” to closing the gap, which includes raising the quality of teachers, and placing more black students in programs like Advanced Placement and the “Highly Capable” program by making “necessary changes to eliminate the gross disproportionality that currently exists for African American students.”
What sort of changes is Jackson referring to? Let’s speculate: lowering standards for black students. Lowering standards for ALL students would render such programs useless.
I’m not certain why the News Tribune article linked to in this post focuses on teacher absenteeism’s purported relationship to the gap. Perhaps the paper considers it a novel idea. According to the report, which doesn’t analyze the relationship, if any, between absenteeism and the gap:
“[O]n any given day, hundreds, if not thousands, of students in Tacoma schools are without a qualified teacher and/or substitute due to chronic absenteeism. This occurs mostly on Mondays and Fridays and before and after holidays (specific data is available from Human Resources). With no teaching there can be no learning. It is apparent that student learning cannot happen under these conditions. According to Education Trust, if districts took the simple step of assuring that African American and other low-performing students had teachers of the same quality as other children, about half of the achievement gap would disappear.”
Half the gap would disappear? First time I’ve heard that. Just about everything Jackson recommends for closing the academic achievement gap between blacks and everyone else has been tried before.
The gap still exists.
Solutions?
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The ever-present academic gap between the races is one of the main reasons racial preferences exist in 2009. Redressing past injustice and promoting equality are mere platitudes to placate the masses. Reams have been written about the gap—how to close it, narrow it, downplay it, or ignore it. But it’s still with us, seemingly intractable.
USA Today reports on SAT score disparities between people of different races, sex, and income levels. No surprises. The average score gap between Asians and blacks was by far the largest: 347 points. Students of Asian decent averaged 1623; whites 1581; Mexicans 1362; Puerto Ricans 1345; Indians or Alaskan natives 1448; and blacks 1276. The national average was 1509.
One question I rarely see/hear asked is this: Why do students of Mexican descent, likely from low-income families and whose first language may or may not be English, consistently outscore native-born blacks?
According to the report, female test takers averaged 27 points lower than males. Test takers who reported family incomes of over $200,000 and year and higher scored higher on the SAT than those who reported family incomes of less than $20,000. While it’s true that higher-earning families can afford to send children to better schools and SAT preparation programs, that’s not the end of the story. Lower income whites and Asians on average outscore wealthier blacks.
What will it take to close or significantly narrow the academic achievement gap?
College Board president Gaston Caperton said, “As a country we must do better at providing students of every background equal access to education, equal access to the best teachers, and equal access to the best counseling.”
“Equal access” is a euphemism for more money and more preferences. Millions of dollars have been poured into schools and prep programs, and the gap remains. Children are bused across town and are admitted and denied entrance to schools based on the color of their skin in an attempt to achieve a magical balance of races that will close the achievement gap, and the gap remains. Crying racism generates sympathy and government funds, but the gap remains.
What people are only now starting to talk about publicly is how family structure, or the lack thereof, affects the gap, which shows itself beyond school in employment, rate of imprisonment, etc.
An intact family is one where the children’s parents are married to each other and living under the same roof. Studies have shown that children in these kind of families are better off than children raised by one parent, typically the mother. Fatherless children are more likely to end up having babies out-of-wedlock, drop out of school, use drugs, commit crimes, spend time in prison, and on and on. The rate of out-of-wedlock pregnancy among blacks is a whopping 75 percent. It’s higher in some urban areas.
When it comes to closing the gap between the races, there is no magic fairy dust. People are intuitively aware that money is not the solution, and neither are guilt-tripping and lowering standards. It’s going to take honesty and hard work to even make a dent in the gap.
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Achievement gaps between the races are not only embarrassing to educational institutions. They’re also frustrating to those obsessed with skin deep-only diversity. That’s why some schools blatantly lower admission standards for black students, while others take a subtler approach by using proxies for race.
According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Boston College, DePaul University, and Tufts University, to name a few, are using “noncognitive” criteria to admit more preferred minority students. (Americans of Asian descent are not included in this category.) An excerpt:
“Using recently developed evaluation systems, these schools and others are aiming to quantify so-called noncognitive traits such as leadership, resilience and creativity. Colleges say such assessments are boosting the admissions chances for some students who might not have qualified based solely on grades and traditional test scores.”
Noncognitive criteria are, plain and simple, proxies for race. Because blacks and Hispanics tend to score lower on standardized tests than whites and Asians, schools want to place less emphasis on such tests. The question is, why would measuring so-called “leadership, resilience and creativity” result in more racial diversity? Why not less?
Northeastern University created the Torch Scholars Program to determine who has “leadership potential or [has] overcome adversity.” Again, how would this increase the presence of black students on campus? The answer will stun you.
Obviously, the admissions folks are applying noncognitive assessments like leadership more heavily to minority applicants. Stunned yet? Michael Rosman, general counsel for the Center for Individual Rights, told the WSJ that schools “can’t apply them in a discriminatory fashion or adopt them solely for the purpose of increasing minorities in their classes.”
But isn’t that exactly what’s happening? Noncognitive assessments are race proxies for colleges and universities that want to add more style to their discriminatory practices.
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