Conversation Starters: "Must Schools Fail?"

Monday

"Must Schools Fail?"

Richard Rothstein's 2004 article in the New York Review of Books takes on several recent books examining the famous achievement gap between white and black students. Three recurring questions frame these studies:

Where should one lay the blame for these differences (schools, families, and wider society being the usual suspects.)
To what extent is the achievement gap a race-defined gap, and to what extent is it a gap between rich and poor?
Given answers to 1 and 2, what is to be done?

While the essay does put forth several researchers' answers to #3, my interest tonight is more in the first two questions, so it will be data relevant to those that I reproduce below. No firm answers are forthcoming here, and the below is a somewhat rough assemblage of data, to be sure. But taken as a whole, they help to sketch out some of the challenges in the schooling, family life, and careers awaiting quite a few young Americans based on the skins and income levels they are born into.

(The following is a series of direct quotes)

Race-Specific Differences in Education and the Workforce

Only a minority of Americans, black or white, are college graduates (18 percent of blacks and 34 percent of whites in their late twenties have college degrees).
Male black workers with only high school educations earn on average 79 percent of what similarly educated whites do. If only high school graduates with similar test scores are compared, then black wages are 87 percent of white wages. These figures, however, understate the difference in annual earnings between white and black high school graduates because black high school graduates work fewer annual hours and annual weeks than do white high school graduates.
In the early 1990s, teams sponsored by the Urban Institute in Chicago and in Washington, D.C., trained applicants for jobs with nearly identical résumés to present themselves in the same way in their interviews. Black males were three times as likely to be rejected as white males. A recent study found that whites' applications were more successful than blacks' even when the whites had criminal records and the otherwise identical blacks did not.
Black median family income is now 62 percent of white income, up a little from 58 percent thirty years ago. But . . . the median net worth of black families is still only 8 percent of whites'. Part of the reason for this difference is that government and private lenders have discouraged or prohibited black families from buying homes in suburban communities where values have appreciated in the decades after World War II. Part of the reason, too, is that black middle-class adults are more likely than whites to be the first generation in their families to have risen to the middle class; many have low-income parents and other close relatives to help support, making it more difficult for them to save money.
Familiar claims about black students [found accurate by the authors under review]: They put pressure on one another not to "act white" by doing well in school. They do not work as hard in school as white students from economically similar families. Black students watch TV and socialize with friends more than whites do. More black students than whites come to class unprepared and are more disruptive. Black students spend much more time at after-school jobs. Many think grades are unimportant because they can go to college on athletic scholarships. When given the opportunity to take more academically challenging courses in high school, they frequently decline. Moreover, black parents supervise homework less frequently than white parents do, while black adolescents are exposed daily to skepticism about white-controlled institutions, such as schools. Black students also accept conventional notions that they have less academic ability and make less effort as a result.
No one can say how much of the gap in academic achievement between blacks and whites is caused by racially neutral class differences, how much is attributable to black culture, and how much of that cultural difference is itself a defensive reaction to continuing discrimination. The Thernstroms write that poverty (defined by current income), parents with little education, and residence in poor neighborhoods explain only about a third of the gap.

Class-Specific Differences in Early Childhood Development
Middle-class children today are encouraged from an early age to negotiate with their parents over what to wear or eat, to question adult statements if they seem implausible, and to interact with adults as equals. Money tends to be less frequently discussed in middle-class families, so it less frequently occurs to middle-class children that their ambitions might be blocked by a shortage of resources.

Working-class children have no such sense of entitlement. Most of them, black and white, speak to adults only when spoken to; they are not expected to express opinions that challenge what adults say. Money or lack of it is a frequent topic of conversation at home, and children become aware early of the limits to their futures.

Middle-class parents were more likely to encourage children to figure out problems for themselves; working-class parents were more likely to tell them what to do. Lareau's middle- and working-class parents both encouraged their children to read, and parents from both classes read aloud to their children when they were young; but middle-class parents were more likely to read themselves, thus showing the importance of reading by their own behavior. Moreover, Lareau's middle-class parents more frequently intervened in schools when they felt it in their children's interest to do so.

Labels: class, education, NYRB, race