DISADVANTAGES BEGET DISADVANTAGES

The last posting made the point that the historical treatment of African-Americans in this country has posed that group many disadvantages.  To anyone who is familiar with the social/political history of the US, they might react by thinking, “what else is new?”  But what many seem to overlook are the logical consequences of such treatment.  That previous posting left the reader with a riddle.

          The riddle is:  Why is it that African-American students do not benefit in terms of their school performance, to the degree other racial or ethnic kids benefit, by being children of higher income parents?  Yes, they do benefit, but only to a roughly thirty percent level as compared with white children.  They also don’t benefit to the degree Hispanic or Asian children do.  This has led researchers to point out cultural factors as the possible reasons for this shortfall.  In turn, these reports have been highly controversial.

          To begin, distasteful information, if true, needs to be addressed.  Now, one can argue that even if true, it is misplaced, not directly related to the problem at hand, or taken out of context.  But if correlational studies point out a relationship between or among certain factors and when there are ample historical reasons for those factors to be related, policy-makers, wanting to address the related problem, cannot ignore the apparent causal factors.

          Here is what Abigail and Stephen Thernstrom report:

Today most social scientists agree that growing up in a single-parent, female-headed family “is almost always associated with lower educational attainment and more behavioral and psychological problems.”  Those behavioral and psychological problems, the data indicate, include getting into trouble both in school and with the law, dropping out of school, and early pregnancy, as well as depressed academic performance.

          We can expect large racial differences in all of these things, because racial differences in family structure are huge.  Currently, only 37 percent of black children live with two parents, as compared with 77 percent of whites, 65 percent of Hispanics, and 81 percent of Asian Americans.[1]

Also, the Thernstroms report that African-American households have on average three children; while white households have one.  Young black women, 18-years-old or less, have children at a two and a half times more rate then white women of that age and 50 percent more often than Hispanic young women.  Yes, historical disadvantages or, better stated, injustices have their consequences, and many are not direct, but indirect.

Indirect in that they set up the social conditions, seen around the world, that take on such behavior patterns that produce these types of results.  They are not exclusive to African-Americans.  But are the Thernstroms correct; are their numbers duplicated elsewhere?  One commentator who received some criticism – or controversy – was Don Lemon, a TV news opinion show host on CNN.

He reported the negative version of the above numbers; i.e., African-American households have children out of wedlock at a greater than a 72 percent rate.  Just to report what seems to be a related fact, Dom Lemon is an African-American.  This caused a fire-“shower” of criticism.  Noting the controversy, the online news site, Politifact, looked into this claim.

Using data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2010, that online site reported the rates of births in non-marital situations as follows:  Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, 17%; non-Hispanic whites, 29%; Hispanics, 53%; American Indian and Native Alaskans, 73%; and non-Hispanic blacks, 73%.[2]  But “out of wedlock” does not necessarily mean single-parent.

The 2011 Census Bureau with the Annie E. Casey Foundation looked at data that narrowed the above purview.  They looked at “children in single-parent families” – kids under 18 in households with single parents (with perhaps a cohabiting adult).  They found the following:  non-Hispanic whites, 23%; Hispanics, 42 percent; American Indian and Native Alaskans, 53%; non-Hispanics blacks, 67%.  While these numbers are slightly lower, they follow the same pattern.

Of interest to this writer is the comparison between Hispanic and non-Hispanic blacks.  As groups they share some historical factors.  Hispanics are mostly immigrants from lesser developed countries, they initially lack English skills, and their political/economic background are less than ideal when measured against democratic standards.  But their background does not begin to compare with the disadvantages, blacks have faced in American society. 

This writer has had first-hand experience with this, given he is a first generation American from immigrant Hispanic parents.  He along with his parents did have it tough during his early years, but by the time he went to school he can honestly say he did not face any discriminatory treatment.  Perhaps he was fortunate, but from what he saw African-Americans had to go through (a drive through the South of the 1950s was eye-opening); there was no comparison.  And look at the numbers, Hispanics rank high in these two charts.  Conclusion, tough socioeconomic conditions have their consequences.

And to the extent they do, a federated society with its governmental/political institution has a responsibility to issue those policies that effectively address the entailed disadvantages.  The reason Lemon got in “trouble” was he seemed to put the whole onus on blacks and did not address the systemic factors hard enough.

The system – the polity – needs to regulate the economic/political realities these disadvantaged populations have imposed upon discriminated groups.  And no institution needs this type of regulation more than the educational institution, the key to economic success.  One place to start, where it is relevant, is the civics curriculum.

This writer is not an expert in this area; he is an expert in the field of curricular studies, especially civics curriculum.  He is open to being convinced he is wrong in the above argument.  The readers of this blog are invited to express any disagreement with what he expressed in this posting.  For example, the argument does not yet explain the underperformance of blacks within higher income households, but if the above is true, it does provide a context for this issue.[3]

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[1] Abigail Thernstrom and Stephen Thernstrom, No Excuses:  Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (New York, NY:  Simon & Schuster, 2003), 132.

[2] “CNN’s Don Lemon Says More Than 72 Percent of African-American Births Are Out of Wedlock,” Politifact, July 29, 2013, accessed November 7, 2018, https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jul/29/don-lemon/cnns-don-lemon-says-more-72-percent-african-americ/ .

[3] This issue will be taken up in a future posting.

RACE AS A FACTOR IN SCHOOL ACHIEVEMENT

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.

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[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.