Archive for Achievement Gap
In a recent column, George Will hints at a link between the academic achievement gap and out-of-wedlock birth rate among blacks. An excerpt (emphasis added):
“Because changes in laws and mores have lowered barriers, the black middle class has been able to leave inner cities, which have become, [Nathan] Glazer says, ‘concentrations of the poor, the poorly educated, the unemployed and unemployable.’ High out-of-wedlock birthrates mean a constantly renewed cohort of adolescent males without male parenting, which means disorderly neighborhoods and schools. Glazer thinks it is possible that for some young black men, ‘acting white’ — trying to excel in school — is considered ‘a betrayal of their group culture.’ This severely limits opportunities in an increasingly service-based economy where working with people matters more than working with things in manufacturing.”
(Back in my day, black kids ragged on other black kids for “talking proper,” that is, speaking standard English.)
Will comments on the newly released Educational Testing Service report, “The Black-White Achievement Gap: When Progress Stopped.” (PDF) According to the report, whatever progress was made in narrowing the gap occurred in the 1970s and 1980s. Did the rising illegitimacy rate play a role in the present lack of progress?
Will lists the problems associated with family instability, which includes poverty, and quotes from the report:
“It is very hard to imagine progress resuming in reducing the education attainment and achievement gap without turning these family trends around — i.e., increasing marriage rates, and getting fathers back into the business of nurturing children…It is similarly difficult to envision direct policy levers” that will make it happen.
Considering that an individual’s decision to have a child without the benefit of marriage and a stable home life is not subject to government interference, how does the government go about “fixing” the high illegitimacy rate among black Americans? I argue that the government can’t fix the problem. But it wouldn’t be its big, old bloated self if it didn’t try.
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From “Big Gaps In Two Big Gap Studies” at Minding the Campus:
“Last week both the Chronicle of Higher Education (‘Reports Highlight Disparities in Graduation Rates Among White and Minority Students’) and Inside Higher Ed (‘Gaps Are Not Inevitable’) reported on two large studies by The Education Trust of the graduation rate gap between white and African-American students and between whites and Hispanics. Even aside from the fact that the Asian gap was apparently not studied, there is a Big Gap in both gap studies.
“Noting in its press release that ‘60 percent of whites but only 49 percent of Latinos and 40 percent of African Americans who start college hold bachelor’s degrees six years later,” The Education Trust said their studies “dig beneath national college-graduation averages and examine disaggregated six-year graduation rates at hundreds of the nation’s public and private institutions.’ That deep digging produced evidence — hold your hat!—that minorities do better at some institutions than others.
We identify public and private four-year institutions that appear to serve their black and white students equally well—that is, where both groups graduate at similar rates. We also identify public and private institutions that have a lot of work to do to catch up: Their graduation rate gaps are among the largest in the country.
“Exactly why that is true is never explained — unless you regard quoting statements such as UNC-Greensboro Vice Provost Alan Boyette’s explanation that minority success “is part of our mission. We don’t just want to provide access, we want our students to succeed” as an explanation.
“Both studies, however, reflect the belief that the explanation lies with the institutions, not with the students.”
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I’ve argued that one reason racial preferences exist is the academic achievement gaps between the races. The government has been trying for years to close the gap, or at least to narrow it. School choice has been floated as one possible solution to narrowing the gap. In Florida, school choice gets credit for narrowing the reading achievement gap among 4th and 8th graders.
According to the Heritage Foundation, minority students in the Sunshine State made progress, based on the 2009 reading results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Hispanic students exceed or tie the statewide average of all students in 30 states, and black students exceed or tie the statewide average for students in eight states. An excerpt:
In 1998, Florida’s black students fell far behind even the lowest statewide averages. Now these students have pulled even with some states, and they have the momentum.
How did Florida do it? Florida’s success has resulted from the commonsense reforms that were implemented during Jeb Bush’s tenure as governor.
One of the key reforms involved increasing parental control in education. Florida families enjoy more educational options than those in any other state. Florida lawmakers have created one of the nation’s strongest charter-school laws, a voucher program for special-needs students, and the nation’s largest tax-credit program. Florida also leads the nation in online education options.
Do factors like school choice and “rigorous state standards and assessments” hold the key to reducing the achievement gap?
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An article in Education Week addressed school districts replacing race-based school assignment plans with income-based plans, in light of Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, which reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
Parents sued the district for assigning students based on race, a policy they said violated their rights to equal protection of the laws. Although the district claimed it used race only as a tie-breaker, the court declared the practice unconstitutional.
More school districts are opting to “integrate” schools based on income. An excerpt:
“Many experts believe the composition of a school’s student body affects achievement. If black and Hispanic students, who are more likely to be poor, go to the same schools as their better-off white peers, the thinking goes, they’ll all do better and aspire to higher education. But since the Supreme Court essentially blocked a race-conscious path to racial diversity, some integration advocates are looking to socioeconomic status to reach the same goal.
“Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a Washington-based research and public-policy organization, is a champion of socioeconomic integration of schools. He argues that educating students of different social and economic levels in the same classrooms is a powerful tool for increasing achievement.
“‘In most cases, low-income students in school districts with socioeconomic programs are doing better than low-income students in segregated school districts,’ he said in an interview.
“Socioeconomic integration is a better approach, Mr. Kahlenberg argues, than two of the four turnaround strategies—replacing principals and staff members and moving to charter school governance—that the U.S. Department of Education requires districts that receive federal economic-stimulus funds to choose from for low-performing schools.”
Kahlenberg echoes the idea that middle-class values rub off, that low-income parents will watch and learn from higher-income parents. He also believes children from low-income homes will learn better if surrounded by higher-income children. Is it true? Yes, according to “Does Segregation Still Matter? The Impact of Student Composition on Academic Achievement in High School.” (74 pages in PDF)
The researchers found that for all students in their study, regardless of race, social class, or academic background, they learn more on average attending schools with high social class students than low social class students.
While this may be the case, it must be balanced with liberty. For now, Americans are free to take up residence in any state and any neighborhood. Most want to send their children to the closest school. As the government coerces them to send children to schools outside the neighborhood, they either deal with it, move, send kids to private or parochial schools, or homeschool them.
There’s a limit to what the government can do about academic gaps among children and academic performance levels across schools. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) declared unconstitutional laws that established separate schools based on race. That a school is majority black in 2010 does not mean someone’s rights are being violated. Brown restricted the government from setting up separate schools based on race; it didn’t require the government to eliminate segregated schools. This is a major misunderstanding of the Brown case. Self-segregation is a different animal than government-mandated segregation.
Courts subsequently interpreted Brown to require the government to proactively eliminate segregated schools. When schools assign students based on race, they’re violating the spirit of Brown. Unfortunately, too many people fail to grasp the concept, including those with authority and power.
(Top image source: Andy Manis for Education Week)
Filed under: Achievement Gap, Socioeconomic AA | |2 Comments
Last year, the University of California’s (UC) Board of Regents voted to eliminate the requirement for applicants to take two SAT subject tests. Effective 2012, applicants with a GPA of 3.0 or higher who’ve completed at least 11 of 15 required college prep courses by their junior year and taken the ACT with Writing or SAT Reasoning (SAT-R) exam will be considered for admission.
The Center for Equal Opportunity’s Linda Chavez informs readers that UC has changed the standard again. “Now [the Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools] is taking aim at the SAT directly. What makes the action more suspicious is that BOARS’ own report notes that the SAT-R was developed specifically in response to testing principles it promulgated and that the new test ‘adds significant gains in predictive power of first year grades at UC.’ Nonetheless, BOARS is now recommending that students forgo the SAT in favor of the less-popular ACT. [emphasis added]
“Both tests have been accepted for more than 30 years and do a good job of predicting first-year grades. So why is BOARS now signaling preference for one test over another? After reading the report, it’s hard to come away without feeling that the real target is standardized testing in general…It’s not too far-fetched to wonder whether BOARS’ effort to discourage students from taking the SAT may be the first step in getting rid of standardized tests altogether.”
That’s exactly right, Ms. Chavez. When schools slouch toward eliminating standardized tests, it’s typically because racial minorities tend to score lower on standardized tests. When admissions officers assess applicants under an objective standard, the pattern is obvious; hence, racial preferences and a subjective eye to compensate for the deficiencies.
We agree on the solution to the disparity problem. Watering down tests and lowering standards for racial minorities are not the way to go. The solution involves “improving the skills of those students who lag behind,” and that’s a tougher proposition, because it involves parents taking a tough stand and students finding and maintaining motivation. Holding someone to a different standard, especially based on his/her skin color, does not motivate.
Chavez reminds us that it’s illegal in California to grant preferences to and discriminate against individuals or groups on the basis of race in government hiring, contracting, and admissions. Since the law passed in 1996, the state government has attempted to get around it. In fact, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill last year that blatantly violated the law. (See Schwarzenegger Signs Racial Quota Bill) The bill directs state departments to award government contracts to the lowest responsible bidder subcontracting 15 percent of the work to minority-owned businesses and five percent to female-owned businesses. The contractor who fails to do so will be rejected, even if he’s the lowest bidder.
Always lowering standards, never raising. Few people seem concerned about this hair-trigger reaction in academia and in the workplace. To pro-preferences folks, the offense lies not in the thing, but in speaking against the thing. Backward.
Chavez wraps up on a good note:
“What [UC Berkeley and UCLA] failed to notice is that black and Latino enrollment system-wide is up over the levels when racial preferences were common,” Chavez writes. “The students now enrolled under more race-neutral standards are doing just fine, graduating in higher percentages than they were when racial preferences admitted many students to campuses where they couldn’t compete with their peers because their grades and test scores were substantially lower.”
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Remember the Berkeley High School (BHS) science labs controversy? The school’s Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students, proposed to eliminate before- and after-school science labs and divert resources to narrowing the intractable racial academic achievement gap.
(Also see Berkeley High May Drop “White” Science Labs)
BHS has the widest racial academic achievement gap in California, but parents and guardians of students at BHS circulated a petition that asserted such “devastating cuts would force science teachers to eliminate many of the labs that enrich the experience for students by having them ‘do science.’ These cuts would result in the reduction in coverage of the state standards and the inability to effectively use instructional strategies that support student learning. This flies in the face of the current push for equity and the 2020 Vision. To close the achievement gap, students require more instruction, not less; more time with qualified instructors, not less.”
The school district compromised. From Berkeleyside:
“Under the plan, proposed by superintendent Bill Huyett…AP and IB science labs are preserved, and other science courses will provide optional labs in either 0 or 7th period, as happens this year.
“The plan that passed provides 1.4 full-time equivalents (FTEs) for two before or after school labs for AP and IB science courses, and a single FTE for the optional labs for other science courses. The lead teachers in the BHS science department are working to get an honors designation for all students who take these labs, so that students’ increased efforts and understanding are reflected on their transcripts.”
In other words, the school retains some labs, and loses some.
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Parents with children in Walthall County Schools in Tylertown, Mississippi, may request transfers for their children. Last year, about 250 whites and 50 blacks exercised the option and transferred their children from predominantly black Tylertown High School to predominantly white Salem Attendance Center. (Source)
Based on the numbers, it seems more white parents than black parents don’t like Tylertown. Now why is that? Why would parents want to pull a child out of one school and place him in another? Let’s speculate. Salem may be closer to where the white transferees live. The teachers at Salem are probably better qualified. Salem may rank higher academically than Tylertown. Salem’s environment may be safer and more conducive to learning. White students may feel more comfortable at Salem. Whatever the reason, requesting a transfer from Tylertown to Salem isn’t illegal or unethical.
But you wouldn’t know that from reading and listening to news stories. There mere fact that whites are leaving a predominantly black school in greater numbers than blacks is enough to brand the acts racist.
I frequently wonder about this phenomenon, the dreaded fear of a majority black school. They are to be avoided like the plague, even if it means hauling children to schools outside their neighborhoods. The implication is that black students can’t learn among their own. White students must be present, or we’re headed back to the days of Jim Crow.
I am patiently waiting for black parents to start raising a ruckus over Chicken Little pronouncements about majority black schools.
That whites may not want their children attending schools with blacks isn’t the issue. Who cares? Parents may take advantage of transfer policies as they see fit. If the Walthall County School District granted transfers only to white students, however, the actions clearly would be discriminatory. Obviously, that isn’t the case.
Whatever black parents in Walthall County may think, it doesn’t matter, anyway. A federal judge ruled that parents in the district exercising transfer options have created “racially identifiable” schools, a bad thing. The judge also found that the district’s elementary schools “were concentrating white students into certain classrooms, a practice some school officials have defended as necessary to avoid white flight from the county.”
Are teachers (white and black?) separating students based on the color of their skin or on each student’s ability? The likely reason for the concentration is the academic achievement gap. Higher achievers are grouped in higher-level classes, which typically results in a racial imbalance. It may seem wrong or racist or illegal, but it isn’t.
At any rate, the judge ordered students who transferred from Tylertown to return. One word: homeschooling. Don’t be surprised if the government tries to ban it.
The district’s transfer policy was race-neutral. After the judge’s ruling, the district has two options: stop transfers altogether, or begin approving and denying transfers based on race.
And we’re back where we started. Progress!
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Interesting piece of news: the University of Pennsylvania’s Black Law Student Association (BLSA) held a panel discussion last week titled, “Revisiting Race and Remedies: Should the Government Play A Role in Eliminating Racial Disparities in Education and Employment?“
A search for mainstream media news articles about the panel turned up nothing. Of the four panelists, John Derbyshire has written about the discussion (online, at least). Derbyshire is a believer in human biodiversity (HBD); that is, there are biological differences between races that “can’t be legislated out of existence; nor can they be ‘eliminated’ by social or political action.”
HBD is controversial, and it’s quite amazing that the organizers invited Derbyshire to participate. Physical differences between the races are obvious and readily admitted, but mental differences, well, we’re not supposed to acknowledge or talk about those. But people like Derbyshire, “racial realists,” do talk and write about the topic. At National Review Online’s The Corner blog, he said this about the event:
“It wasn’t actually very exciting. The main point of the thing was indeed to chew over Amy Wax’s new book. The argument of the book, very briefly, is that what can be done in law, politics, and social engineering to make amends for slavery and Jim Crow has been done, and the rest is up to African Americans themselves.”
On his web site, Derbyshire posted his remarks that the government should not play a role in eliminating disparities between the races, because it can’t. He says the differences are “natural” and “intractable.”
You can imagine how his presentation went over. Derbyshire said his 10-minute remarks were “followed by a sort of stunned silence, into which Madame Moderator [preferences proponent Dr. Camille Zubrinsky Charles] interjected the remark that ‘Mr. Derbyshire is here as a private guest of Prof. Wax, not at the invitation of the BLSA.’ This was not true. BLSA invited me, and I have the email trail to prove it. To his credit, David Williams, the BLSA officer who’d invited me, came up afterwards and apologized for the immoderate demeanor of our ‘moderator.’”
Impressive, but Williams’s apology would have had a greater impact if uttered during the discussion.
Part of the reason racial preferences exist is disparities between preferred minorities (blacks, Hispanics, American Indians) and whites and non-preferred minorities (certain Asians) exist. Racial preferences (euphemistically called affirmative action) are designed to artificially narrow the disparities.
As painful as some topics may be to publicly air, they need to be aired. Let’s assume for a moment that biology (genetics) is the basis for racial differences, and the differences are intractable. Do the biological component and intractability justify lowering standards for blacks, or should the government strive to achieve and put into practice race-neutral standards for all, despite differences between racial groups?
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As you may recall, the One Florida Initiative was a reaction to Ward Connerly’s campaign to end government racial preferences in the state 10 years ago. Former Governor Jeb Bush issued an executive order to bar race-based preferences in government hiring, contracting, and admissions.
(Hiring, contracting, and admitting individuals without regard to race seems a reasonable way to eliminate racial discrimination. In fact, civil service tests were implemented to prevent political favoritism or assessments based on other than qualifications. Unfortunately, the country has moved backward. The reality is that the government favors certain applicants based on the color of their skin.)
To avoid backlash from the civil rights industry, Bush created the Talented 20 program as part of One Florida, which guarantees admissions to Florida students graduating in the top 20 percent of their high schools.
Bush’s avoidance tactic failed , because the NAACP complained about the program, concerned that Talented 20 would reduce the numbers of black students. The program would benefit all students, not just blacks, therefore…
The Orlando Sentinel published a story last week about One Florida’s “mixed results.” An excerpt:
In 1999, a bit more than 20 percent of the state’s high-school graduates were black, as were 17.5 percent of university freshmen. By 2008, the last year for which a racial breakdown is available, blacks accounted for 19.5 percent of high-school graduates — but only 14.9 percent of university freshmen.
Similarly, in 1999, Hispanics made up 14.7 percent of high-school graduates and 13.8 percent of university freshmen. By 2008, Hispanics were 21.4 percent of graduates and 19.1 percent of the freshmen class, a wider gap.
By contrast, white and Asian students were overrepresented among college freshmen in 1999 — and still were in 2008, according to the Sentinel’s analysis. For example, white students comprised roughly 60 percent of high-school graduates and university freshmen in 1999; by 2008, they were 54 percent of high-school graduates — and 58 percent of university freshmen.
According to the article, the number of high school graduates increased faster than freshman enrollment. As a result, graduates face more competition. Preferred minority enrollment dropped every year. Therefore, the argument goes, Florida must admit more under-qualified preferred minorities in place of more qualified whites and non-preferred minority Asians.
As I’ve said and written many times, the academic achievement gap is not evidence of racism, structural or otherwise, and provides no justification for discriminating against individuals based on the color of their skin. The focus should be on the other end: encouraging parents and students before school age and at the grade school level to work harder and value education in practice, not just conversation.
Lowering standards for preferred minority underperformance is a sort of perverse reward, don’t you think?
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Remember when “civil rights violation” meant being refused admission/employment or blocked from the polling place or hit upside the head for exercising your right to peaceably assemble, just because you’re black?
Those days seem quaint now. If anything negative happens to you (preferred minorities only) in 2010, as a consequence of your performance, behavior, and choices, it’s a civil rights violation. Denied a job because you scored too low on an employment test? Civil rights violation. Expelled from school because you’re an habitually bad boy who starts fights, despite expulsion warnings? Civil rights violation.
The existence of racial disparities means somebody, somewhere, is doing a whole lot of discriminating. Move over, Selma. There’s a new billy club-swinging hick sheriff in town, and his name is…disparate impact.
“Education Secretary Arne Duncan, like many liberals, seems afflicted by Sixties Nostalgia Syndrome, a longing for the high drama and moral clarity of the civil rights era,” columnist George Will writes in the Washington Post. “Speaking this month in Alabama at Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge to commemorate the 45th anniversary of the “Bloody Sunday” march, Duncan vowed to unleash on public schools legions of lawyers wielding Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They supposedly will rectify what he considers civil rights violations, such as too many white students in high school Advanced Placement classes.”
Will recounts Duncan’s remarks about disparities between the races in schools and how the Obama administration plans to rectify this insidious inequity. No longer is the movement about ensuring liberty for individuals, but demanding equal outcomes for groups.
“No policy denies minority or low-income students ‘access’ to AP classes,” Will writes. “The pertinent lesson of the 1960s is the futility of casting today’s problems of social class, as Duncan does, in the anachronistic categories of the civil rights era. In 1966, the seismic Coleman Report concluded: ‘Schools are remarkably similar in the way they relate to the achievement of their pupils when the socioeconomic background of the students is taken into account.” (Emphasis added.) … Plainly put, the best predictor of a school’s performance is family performance — qualities of the families from which the students come. Subsequent research suggests that about 90 percent of the differences among the proficiency of schools can be explained by five factors: days absent from school, hours spent watching television, pages read for homework, the quantity and quality of reading matter in the home — and the presence of two parents in the home.”
Since the government can’t force people to marry before having children or maintain an intact family for the benefit of the children, it falls back on the so-called civil rights violation tactic. If a preferred minority is not performing well in school, even if family structure plays a role in his under-performance, the government drags in 1960s-era civil rights comparisons and invokes images of violent resistance against black Americans fighting to be treated as first-class citizens.
At the very least, the children will learn a big word: hyperbole.
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