I have not seen any research to support this. Do you have any cites? A great deal of effort has gone into normalizing opportunity, and to the best of my knowledge, has failed to close the black-white academic performance gap 100% of the time even though it seems intuitive that all we have to do is “mandate equality of opportunity.”
I have seen mountains of research supporting the opposite view: Equality of opportunity does not generate equality of outcome, at least with respect to SIRE groups.
I point out again as an example that wealthy black students from educated parents underperform on the SAT relative to poor white students with uneducated parents. Do you have some sort of opportunity-based explanation to advance why those two groups have disparate outcomes?
Better nurturing (including opportunity) will improve any outcome, of course. If I am a crappy basketball player and I get great coaching, I’ll be a better player than if I get crummy training and opportunity to learn basketball. But even if we give every group identical nurturing, women still would not perform equally with men on the basketball court (to take two example groups). The gap would remain despite “equality of opportunity.”
I don’t have a cite aside from the fact that we’ve spent decades of time and billions of dollars trying to solve the problem (whatever it is) with no success to speak of. So there must be underlying factors that aren’t being addressed with current methodology.
Until you can make every family in America exactly the same, providing the same “opportunity” that many seem to think is the solution, then the only way to ensure all children have the exact same level playing field is to imprision them on that playing field, locked away from outside influences, and given the exact same everything from the time they’re old enough to walk until they turn 18. That way, educators can guarentee that if any child fails it isn’t due to a lack of the same opportunity and background that every other child has.
There may well be underlying non-“nurture” factors to academic performance, but we’re not allowed to discuss them, much less conduct any serious research into the matter.
Much better. The ED group, the Black group, and the White group should be three distinct sets. The ED group is (I’m assuming) comprised of poor people, so there are no poor people in the Black or White groups. This end of the economic spectrum under-performs all other groups.
The White group is, by your own suggestion and by Google saying median income for Montclair is about $95K, “affluent”, and the Black group, by your own suggestion, much less so. Affluent people tend to aim higher and achieve higher than Proficiency and this shows in the high Advanced percentages. But, a percentage of the Black group is also Advanced. Maybe they’re wealthy too - I wouldn’t know.
From this, people are saying “poor whites outperform wealthy blacks” which is not something I see supported by this data. Academic failure is not supported by the data either - a couple of quick checks told me that most young kids of all types in Montclair demonstrate proficiency in Math, for example, and the high school graduation rate is pretty high.
And so, I think what’s left is that black middle class people won’t achieve the numbers white affluent people will as they pertain to education. But you could leave the colors out of this entirely and probably get the same result.
Actually, affluent blacks won’t achieve the numbers that midlle class whites achieve…
You are incorrect about what the data are that support my contention about wealthy blacks underperforming poverty-stricken whites.
Start with this article from the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.
From that article:
*"But there is a major flaw in the thesis that income differences explain the racial gap. Consider these three observable facts from The College Board’s 2005 data on the SAT:
• Whites from families with incomes of less than $10,000 had a mean SAT score of 993. This is 129 points higher than the national mean for all blacks.
• Whites from families with incomes below $10,000 had a mean SAT test score that was 61 points higher than blacks whose families had incomes of between $80,000 and $100,000.
• Blacks from families with incomes of more than $100,000 had a mean SAT score that was 85 points below the mean score for whites from all income levels, 139 points below the mean score of whites from families at the same income level, and 10 points below the average score of white students from families whose income was less than $10,000."*
There is a great deal of other, similar, data. Much of it has been presented elsewhere in other GD forums.
I find there is a great deal of knee-jerk buy-in into the hypothesis that an opportunity gap creates the black-white academic performance gap, or that the gap is explained by poverty or culture. For this reason, I suggest looking into actual studies and data instead of making assumptions.
I would remind everyone that the tpic of this threads is:
If anyone wants to rehash all the tired discussions about who is smarter or why it seems to be so, there are a multitude of threads out there to which to take those discussions.
The question, here, is what can be done to increase opportunity for social mobility. (And simply saying, “It can’t happen; they’re too dumb” is not a valid contribution to such a discussion.)
The only conclusion we can draw with that data alone is that income isn’t the sole determinant of SAT scores. How can we say culture isn’t related, based on that data? One hypothesis could be that black and white children identify more with the cultures of people of the same race, which has the result of bringing all children closer to the pre-existing average scores for their race.
An alternative hypothesis besides “It’s about CULTURE!!” is that parental income doesn’t explain all the variance because inherited socioeconomic status matters just as much (if not more).
Pople seem to be glossing over the fact that desegregation happened within Baby Boomers lifetimes. It wasn’t just that black kids and white kids were educated separately. They were given educations that were quantitatively different.
If your parents were given inferior educations, don’t you think you’d be disadvantaged against someone whose parents were given a superior education? Even if their income levels were the same, wouldn’t you expect to inherit your parents’ disadvantage?
I had never heard of Massive Resistance until I moved to Virginia. Imagine not being allowed to attend school for six years. And then being expected to perform on the same playing field as kids who’d been educated in private academies. If my parents had grown up in certain areas of Virginia, they would have been impacted by this. It would have no doubt had a devastating effect on their children and probably their grandchildren.
So you can blame culture all you want. But seems to me it would be appropriate for us to wait until the generation born and raised as second-class citizens all died off before concluding that culture MUST be the explanation for racial disparities. It took 300 years to fuck over black people. It’s going to take more than a few decades before we start to see even stevens. That seems like a given to me.
I agree culture is not an explanation, There is no data supporting a cultural explanation.
There is also no data supporting the notion that parental education accounts for the gap or that past persecution makes any difference. I have cited in other threads studies showing black students from families with parents who have graduate degrees still underperform white students whose parents have high school or less degrees.
All sorts of things can be done to improve the performance of any given kid. But erasing gaps in average performance between any two arbitrarily defined groups can only happen if there is no average difference in maximum potential of the two groups.
We should vigorously track down every potental barrier to closing the gap and seek to ameliorate it. I am not sure we do ourselves any favors advancing explanations that do not hold up to scrutiny.
Especially now that epigenetics is entering the picture. Poor treatment of your grandparents can still affect you due to markers on your genes. We don’t know how that shapes out, either. I have hope that this will fill in the gap that leads people to have incorrect and explanations (and thus no solutions) for this problem. I think a lot of it is just not finding any of the current explanations to be sufficient.
Still, parents who are poorly educated still is a part of culture. Even if the parents promote education highly, it’s not going to be the same culture as that of highly educated people who promote education. And this is something we can try to do something about. Promote having highly educated people in these kids lives, to help offset the effects of the parents’ lack of education. But that will only work if you can get the parents to accept it.
And yes, I similarly feel that time will work wonders on this problem, but that’s no reason not to do what we can now. It may all be futile, but I don’t think we’ll make anything worse. Waiting until we have perfect information is never a practical way to deal with a problem. We’ll never have it.
And yet Americans who self-identify as black, and who have at least one parent with a graduate degree, tend to be out-performed academically by other groups where neither parent graduated from college. Which looks more like regression to the mean rather than inheriting an advantage or disadvantage.
In this thread we have data offered as evidence of a problem, and I’m not convinced there is one.
The OP mentioned Social Mobility. In an affluent town with an excellent school system and no one in question being economically disadvantaged, no. I’m not worried.
The OP says that the specific disparity in black and white scores does not equalize over time; it isn’t mentioned if the gap in scores widens over time but I suspect it would have been noted. So the black group starts off behind the white group and finishes behind the white group; I’m guessing the amount of disparity doesn’t move very much.
Your quote is saying that a black group will never achieve the success rate of a white group, to which I thought “or the range of job opportunities, or equitable pay, or the measure of respect normally afforded the average white people who complete advanced degrees, because they’re not white and some people won’t get past that.” All kinds of gaps exist. An older child or young adult who spots these inequalities has suspicions, is no longer receptive to “reach for the stars” and “you can be anything” and so forth, and there’s another gap widening between those those who give a shit about academic achievement and those who don’t. That is measurable too, I think, but we don’t have that yet.
My concern is this: being a place with only two races of significant numbers, all nicely mixed together but still not entirely equal in circumstances, try to avoid opportunities to measure them against each other. If you insist on measuring them against each other, have reasonable expectations. And if you insist on the measuring and the meeting of some arbitrary and lofty goal, purely in civic-minded interest, at least try not to go off half-cocked when you find it wasn’t met.
I meant to address this point earlier, but failed to do so. AIUI, the individual groups in the NCLB report card are not mutually exclusive except where they must be exclusive.. They track Male/Female, Various Races, Economic Disadvantage, as well as Disabled, Limited English and Migrant status. I expect this means that the Male/Female and Various Race categories include, ED, Disabled, Limited English students, etc.
It’s difficult to say, because the raw numbers change pretty dramatically, where you may have a base 10% Partial in 3rd grade, that may become 25% in High School, so the disparity may go from 3-20% in 3rd grade to 15-40% in High School, is that worse or better, or the same?
What would be reasonable? I don’t like the idea of accepting poor academic performance from a group of children, saying it’s reasonable for them to have bad grades because of who they are.
I think it’s important to understand the drivers of this problem, and where it’s reasonable, push the right buttons to get things moving the right direction. It may take more than a few decades, but if understanding the problem can help shave a couple of decades from that time, it’s worth it.
If we weren’t talking about race, and we were simply comparing kids whose families have been middle class for three generations versus kids whose families have just now reached the middle class, would we be arguing about pervasive cultural differences? Or would we only be talking about socioeconomic differences, just in a subtle form?
I’d like to see a study that controls for inherited socioeconomic status. If we found that black kids from first-generation middle class families perform similarly/more similarly to white kids from first-generation middle class families, this would be a whole lot more insightful with regards to the importance of culture than comparing “newly” middle-class black kids with third-generation middle-class white kids would be.
I would like to compare the variability between white and black kids’ performances. Are the standard deviations similar, or does one find that the spread around the mean is a lot bigger for one group versus the other. If there is a confounding variable (like inherited socioeconomic status), this could explain the difference.
Oh, and for some examples of inherited socioeconomic status:
You have two families. Both incomes are similarly middle class.
One family is third-generation middle class. Both parents are college-degreed (mother is teacher, father is an adjunct professor/freelance writer/carpenter), as are two grandparents. Downpayment on the house was a wedding gift by a upper middle-class relative. The children spend the summers with an aunt and uncle, who are art dealers and don’t have kids. Summer camp tuition is waived because an old family friend is the camp director. Everyone encourages the kids to learn French during the school year so that when they go to Paris next summer (grandma’s picking up the tab), they’ll be able to speak the language.
Another family is first-generation middle class. The father is assistant manager at a department store. The mother is a nurse. Neither of their parents are college educated. They rent a house, with plans to buy it as soon as their cars have been paid off. Their kids spend the summers bouncing between vacation bible school, grandma’s, and their babysitter’s. Their grandmother takes them to the library all the time, because they like to read and she wants to see them do well in school. The kids want to go to basketball camp next summer. Basketball will get them into college, everyone says. And it will keep them out of trouble.
Sure, we’re talking about cultural differences…inasmuch as class carries with it cultural capital like well-connected family friends and French lessons. But is there anything culturally “broken” with the second family? No.
Many of the young adults of today were raised upper middle-class. If they continue slaving away in minimum-wage service positions, they will be raising their own families on working-class and lower middle class wages. But their children won’t be truly working class/lower middle-class. They will have the cultural capital of the well-to-do, yet (presumably) attend schools with kids lacking that advantage. So frustratingly, the white/black gap may continue to exist for another generation. I hope we won’t still be scratching our heads.
I don’t disagree with much of what you say, except that I would call almost all of that either culture or wealth. Most of what you talk about are cultural values. Perhaps there is a smaller consideration, which you touched upon, that could be somewhere between culture and wealth, and that’s having contacts willing to do you favours.
No, I don’t think there’s anything culturally broken with either family, but these are not, of course, real families with test results to compare. As far as we know, those two families might achieve exactly the same results at school. They both seem to demonstrate that they value academic success as well as other useful skills.
In case there’s any misunderstanding, I’m not referring simply to “black” or “white” culture here. In fact I’m not referring to any specific culture, since it’s just a hypothesis based on the premise that wealth doesn’t seem to explain everything.
I don’t think opportunity, which contacts represent, constitute a small anything. A contact can be the difference between having a summer of valuable enrichment activities versus none. A contact can get a kid into an accelerated classroom or reading group, or have disciplinary action scrubbed from a kid’s record. A contact is no small thing at all.
They may very well perform the same in the classroom, but I doubt they would. For the same reason I doubt poor and middle-class children would perform the same.
But I gave you a study that controls for “inherited socioeconomic status.”
The JBHE article controls for family income and concludes that even poor white children outscore wealthy black children. Elsewhere I have cited similar SAT data showing white children from uneducated parents (high school or below) outscore black children from educated parents (college graduate and above).
These are very large studies with tens of thousands of students. They have been reproduced over and over again. And within any educational system, if one controls for socioeconomic status, the broad average performance always yields the same rank order, with SIRE groups of blacks and hispanics performing the most poorly.
Yet we continue to cling to this canard that the disparity is caused by a difference in socioeconomic status and that if we could just adjust for that, we’d fix the dispartiy. No we will not, and solutions based upon a false premise have very little chance of succeeding.
It is not socioeconomic status that drives the gap in scholastic performance.
Period.
Nor (for the same reason) is there any substance to the notion that the problem is multigenerational success versus first generation prosperity. White children from families who have never succeeded (poor, uneducated whites) will outscore black children from families who just finished succeeding (wealthy and educated). Where is the multigenerational explanation given that fact?
We can choose as a society and a message board to not look at any facts that are uncomfortable, but promoting false ones is not helpful either. SCOTUS is about to drive another stake into race-based AA on the premise that every group is inherently equal and therefore society should only look at opportunity and not color for academic and workplace preferences. That will be a sobering day for those of us who want to see some sort of reasonable SIRE-based proportionate representation across our society.