How many are you offering to adopt?
This makes more sense. However (even if it is circular) I have to insist that if the results are unequal, the opportunities never really were.
Well, sure. You play the guitar and I’ll accompany you on the Mighty Wurlitzer.
Oh I agree with you that opportunity includes as a major part a home environment that is conducive to good education. But that’s not something we can so easily “provide” like we can libraries and good schools.
Perhaps the best long term strategy would be to increase the flexibility of education and just get everyone into something that works for them. If all children at least end up learning something vocational they are (I’d guess) far more likely to end up in a position at least approaching middle class as adults, and that will provide far better opportunities for their children. I imagine something similar to what you see in many immigrant families, where the parents may be uneducated but they fully appreciate the value of education for their children. I don’t especially like this idea, because I think it’s very important for everyone to have a well-rounded academic education, but perhaps totally different curricula, offered as a choice, would produce a fairer society.
Things that affect educational achievement:
- Ability of parents to help with homework, study skills, etc.
- Amount of time available for parents to give said help
- Quality of nutrition, especially breakfast
- Access to books and learning materials
- Access to education enrichment (summer programs, camps, museum visits, etc.)
And so on. It’s a complex problem, but poverty is at the roots of it. No community has failed to learn when the economic opportunity is there. Poor countries, for example, do an astounding job of shaping up their education systems as soon as jobs come.
The lack of equality of result is not a way to determine whether we have equality of opportunity.
Looking at opportunity is how we determine if we have equality of opportunity.
A poor black kid from an unstable familty juxtaposed with wealthier and more priviliged white students who have stable and supportive families does not have equality of opportunity simply because the schooling situations are equivalent.
However a wealthy black child who comes from a stable family and attends the same schools as peers against which he competes academically does have equality of opportunity.
What has been observed for “results” is that no equalization of opportunity ever erases the difference. White students from poor, uneducated families still outperform black students from wealthy and educated families on SAT scores, for example.
What we have to strive for is to equalize opportunity. But we should not make the mistake of thinking outcomes are an a priori way of deciding opportunity has not been equalized.
Do we know for sure that poverty is the root? There often seems to be an unspoken assumption made that if there is a correlation between poverty and poor performance in schools, poverty must be solely a cause and poor performance solely an effect. I suspect this is because we’re reluctant to say that some people are basically poor because of some genuine failing on their part, rather than lack of opportunity to change that. Surely poverty is part of a cycle that includes culture and education, all as both causes and effects, with some element of bad luck and/or bad decision-making included in the the root causes, even if it was a couple of generations back?
Debating the definition of “opportunity” is not all that useful. With respect to the school system, on the surface, all the students, rich and poor, get equal treatment. Whether you call that equal opportunity or not is a personal choice.
We strip away the idea that academic differences come from the poor black students going to the “bad” inner city school and the rich white students going to the “good” suburban school. The gap here is pretty much all about home life, and it’s very significant.
For all of the educational discussions around improving inner city schools, and bemoaning their lack of resources compared to wealthier suburbs, it seems that the single biggest driver of success is home life. How does the government, local or Federal, improve the home lives of poor children? I hate the idea that these kids are doomed to academic failure by the circumstances of their birth.
This is the problem, and it starts from infancy: the cultural support of the parents.
I am from a stable, middle class, college educated family, and I cannot concieve of a parent who does not say “is that a kitty?”. The question stimulates the child’s curiosity and education, and it brings enormous emotional satisfaction to me as a parent when the kid learns a new word and says ‘kitty’ for the first time. And that’s what makes a kid become a good learner in school..
But if a child lives in a less supportive environment, where there is no culture of learning together with Mommy and Daddy, then no school will not be able to compensate for the family background.
It all depends on the kitty–and the parents.
Including some non-parents.
Raising the socio-economic status of those parents does not necessarily produce equality of outcomes either.
I think I better check with the mods before I start debating and producing cites.
Regards,
Shodan
The only measurable thing you’ve noted is a disparity, and the single biggest driver of this disparity looks to be a creative methodology that will, by design, improve one set of scores and depress the other set when judging performance in schools.
You have two groups:
- Black (or Economically Disadvantaged), and
- White
I feel silly pointing this out but it’s an increasingly silly thread.
I assume he misstated the groups.
We’ll see.
I’m not entirely sure what you are getting at. What does “creative methodology” mean, and how does it improve some scores and depress others?
I’ll throw in some more background on the groups. From a racial categorization standpoint, the vast majority of the town’s population is either White or Black, perhaps 5-10% of the population would be categorized as Asian or Hispanic. In the school report cards available here they provide breakouts by race, so one can see the scores of the White students, the Black students and the “Economically Disadvantaged” students.
It’s fair to criticize me including the ED group in the post, it just struck me at the time that the scores of the Black group mirrored the scores of the ED group, even though they are not strictly the same. It also agreed with the general state of the town, where the Black population is generally much less wealthy than the White population.
“Poverty” is not an explanation for the black-white performance gap.
Wealthy black students underperform poor white ones, on average.
Within every school system, if one groups by SES (socio-economic status), the same outcomes will be observed that the OP references, and blacks will be the worst-performing SIRE group within each SES category.
It is correct that poverty in general correlates with academic performance in general. So poor kids from all SIRE groups do crummier than rich kids from all SIRE groups. Whether this is cause or effect is not, I think, the issue the OP wants to address. The OP wants to uncover reasons for the gap, which exists at all levels of SES, and is so profound that wealthy blacks underperform poor whites.
In the US, this gap narrowed on certain scores (SAT being the broadest example) for a number of years, but has not closed beyond that point for about 15 years or so. No interventions of any kind–and there have been remarkable efforts–have made any further progress.
Putative non-genetic explanations for this gap include “sterotype threats” (see research by Claude Steele); poor parenting in early years; low teacher expectations; and a variety of other cultural/nurture explanations (a grandparent effect, e.g., for well-to-do black families whose children still underperform).
For those interested in pursuing some of these sorts of explanations for the black-white academic gap further, I recommend Jencks’ and Phillips’ book “The Black White Test Score Gap.” It is now 15 years old, so some of the reasearch is outdated and none of the expectation that scores would continue to narrow have actually been realized, unfortunately. But there is a wealth of discussion there. For the “stereotype threat” see the research of Claude Steele, who advanced this notion quite vigorously during his career as a professor at Stanford.
Monstro, thank you for these article links.
The issue of segregation within a given school, and the complexity of deciding whether or not “tracking” (putting students in different tracks according to their perceived ability in order to improve performance) is a good idea or not is one of the things we have to deal with in trying to improve school systems.
As pointed out early in your first article one of the dilemmas is that “… heterogenous classes appear to bene fit low ability students, but may
depress the achievement of average and high achieving students.” IOW, lumping everyone together helps the crappy students and hinders the best-performing ones.
A second dilemma is addressed on P 21ff:
“Although this paper shows the high association between social segregation, inequality of opportunity and ability tracking, we cannot really provide a causal relation. The fundamental reason is that we cannot control for unobserved ability levels. For instance, it could be that there is no social bias in the track assignment after controlling for the cognitive ability of the students.”
I do not think I can extend that part of the discussion further without running afoul of the Moderator’s request earlier in this thread, but anyone interested can turn to that part of your cite.
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to be education researchers. The idea that tracking is bad has a long history but the research shows that tracking is good for the academic achievement of higher ability kids, does not affect other kids negatively academically and helps the self esteem of slow and average ability kids. Cite Cite
It seems like every few years someone will notice that tracked classrooms are differently composed ethnically, ascribe that fact to racism and try to get tracking eliminated. Then the parents of bored gifted kids will kick up a fuss and it gets reinstalled.
The fact is that different cultures treat school differently and so perform differently. Cite
Create an education system where all children are taken from their parents at age, say, two. They are all kept in identical facilities, taught identical information, fed identical food, and kept completely isolated from society or their parents until they graduate 16 years later.
If you want equality of outcome, the only way to achieve it is to mandate equality of opportunity - and that’s the only way to make that happen. Of course, nobody is suggesting such things, because for the most part people don’t want equality, they want preference.
The concern, of course, is that the black kids would get shunted off into the vocational track while the white kids stay on the college track. The amusing thing is that, if this were to happen, the black kids would likely have higher-paying jobs waiting for them than the white kids.
“Yeah, we’re going to have to rip it all out and re-pipe it in copper…”
vs.
“Do you want fries with that?”