In the last posting, this blog made the case: parental income affects – at least as
correlational studies show – how well their children will do economically as
adults years later. Rich parents tend to
have children that will be rich; mid-range income parents will see their
children follow suit; and the same can be said for low income parents and their
children. So, one can conclude, class is
a factor in determining success.
How about
race? Does race have an effect, and if
so, how much? Before attempting to
answer this question, one should consider:
why ask? One asks because if race
does affect success rates and one supports the federalist value, regulated
equality, then that affect should be subject to some regulation. But this question of race and its effect is
not so easy to answer.
Muddling the
effort is how the economy – and the nation’s history – has posed so many
obstacles to various minorities. Of
course, that disadvantage has been pre-eminent among African-Americans. Their history in this nation has been a long
string of horrendous mistreatment with slavery, Jim Crow policies, institutional
discrimination, deprivation of decent schooling and lack of life-fulfilling
employment opportunities.
And to support such treatment, among
the white majority there has been the common belief that blacks are inferior,
especially in terms of intelligence.
Given that backdrop, how does one, who believes in federalist values, think
or act on the findings of Abigail and Stephen Thernstrom?[1] They demonstrate the challenge that exists in
figuring out what is affecting student success when race is a factor.
First, it is no surprise, given the above
outlined history of injustice, that African-Americans, as a demographic group,
do not do well when it comes to schooling, key to success. Of course, there are exceptions of note, but
compared to other demographic groups, e.g., whites, Hispanics, Asians, etc.,
African-Americans rank low. But, then
again, they rank low in income and wealth.
Does that mean the income/wealth factor cause blacks to rank so low in
education? That is, is it race or income
that is affecting school performance?
What happens when black kids are
compared with white kids, for example, when income is controlled? That is, how do higher income black kids compare
to higher income white kids? By higher
income, of course the reference is to their parents’ incomes. And how about mid-range income kids and lower
income kids from the two demographic groups?
In terms of higher income kids, here
is a summary statement by the Thernstroms:
The majority of African-American
students are stuck in inferior big-city schools. But [collected] data … suggest a more
sobering conclusion. Increased movement
of black families into suburban communities [where higher income families live]
– as desirable as that is – will not solve the problem of black academic
underperformance. It’s not that black
kids in suburbia don’t do better than their urban peers [of lower income
parents]. They do. But suburban whites also outperform urban
whites, and the gap – the difference in scores between the two racial groups –
remains almost unchanged.[2]
In general, among income brackets, the gains whites make as they
go up in those brackets, blacks only experience thirty-three percent of those
gains. Or as those writers state it:
The data available to us were not in
a form to permit an analysis that would reveal exactly how great the overlap is
[among socioeconomic variables[3]], but a
number of sophisticated studies of the black-white achievement gap have found
that controlling for all the standard measures of socioeconomic status [like
residential location] together cuts the black-white gap by only about
one-third.[4]
This then is a riddle. Why don’t African-Americans students experience,
as compared to white students, the same upshot in school performance when
income and residency has experienced an “upgrade” from lower income levels and
inner-city living conditions? This
posting leaves the reader with this question; next posting will further report
on the Thernstroms’ findings.
[1] Abigail Thernstrom and Stephen Thernstrom, No Excuses:
Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2003).
[2] Ibid., 128.
These determinations are based on National Assessment of Educational
Progress (NAEP) testing scores and that deserves further comment, perhaps in
another posting.
[3] Variables include parental education attainment, urban-suburban-rural
residencies, religious affiliation, age, and the like.
[4] Abigail Thernstrom and Stephen Thernstrom, No Excuses:
Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, 129.
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