Conversation Starters

Statistics recorded from "What Happened to Brown?", a review by Kathleen Sullivan in the New York Review of Books:

• White students make up two thirds of the American school-age population, but on average they attend schools that are 80 percent white.
• Fewer than 10 percent of black students attend schools whose students are mostly white.
• Only 10 percent of white students attend schools in which minority students predominate.
• The students in some school systems, like the Mott Haven elementary schools in the Bronx, are over 99 percent black or from other minorities.

Labels: education, NYRB, race

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:

1. Where should one lay the blame for these differences (schools, families, and wider society being the usual suspects.)
2. To what extent is the achievement gap a race-defined gap, and to what extent is it a gap between rich and poor?
3. 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.

Labels: class, education, NYRB, race

College Attendance:

• At the turn of the century fewer than a quarter-million Americans, or about 2 percent of the population between eighteen and twenty-four, attended college.
• By the end of World War II, that figure had risen to over two million.
• In 1975, it stood at nearly ten million, or one third of the young adult population.
• Today, the United States leads the world by a considerable margin in the percentage of citizens (27 percent or 79 million) who are college graduates.

Role of Higher Education:

• The antebellum college was typically an arm of the local church—an academy for ministers, missionaries, and, more generally, literate Christians—that remained true to the purpose of the oldest American college, Harvard, which had been founded in dread "lest the churches of New England be left with an illiterate ministry...when our present ministers shall lie in the dust."
• By the mid-nineteenth century, the need for expert training in up-to-date agricultural and industrial methods was becoming an urgent matter in the expanding nation, and, with the 1862 Morrill Act, Congress provided federal land grants to the loyal states (30,000 acres for each of its senators and representatives) for the purpose of establishing colleges "where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific or classical studies, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts." Eventually these "land-grant" colleges evolved into the system of state universities.
• By the end of the nineteenth century, the professionalized university had absorbed schools of medicine and law that had typically begun independently, and was acquiring teacher-training schools, along with schools of engineering, business, and other professions. It was on its way to becoming the loose network of activities that Clark Kerr, president of the University of California, famously called the "multiversity." When Kerr coined that term in 1963, in The Uses of the University, he remarked on the "cruel paradox" that a "superior faculty results in an inferior concern for undergraduate teaching," and he called this paradox "one of our most pressing problems."

Increasing Competition & Threats to Universal Availability

• In The Future of the Public University in America: Beyond the Crossroads, former University of Michigan president James Duderstadt points out that private universities now enjoy what are, in effect, large public subsidies that, unlike the legislative appropriations on which public universities depend, are dispensed out of sight of the public eye. "When the investment corporations created by many private universities to manage their endowments make profits on a business venture," Duderstadt writes, "that profit is tax-exempt, and, in effect, the forgone tax revenue must be replaced by tax dollars paid by other citizens."
• Applicants are stampeding toward early admissions programs that offer, in exchange for a promise to attend if admitted, a better chance of getting in. These programs, which now account for roughly half of all enrolled students in the Ivy League, favor candidates from private or suburban schools who have well-connected counselors (sometimes privately hired) and the financial freedom to pick a college without waiting to compare financial aid offers—and the colleges know it.
• In today's educational landscape, barely one sixth of all college students fit the traditional profile of full-time residential students between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. One third of American undergraduates now work full-time, and more than half attend college part-time, typically majoring in subjects with immediate utility, such as accounting or computing.

• The incursion of market values into the putatively pure academic world has been the subject of a host of recent books, all of which point in one way or another to the marginalization of undergraduate teaching.
• One suspects that behind the commitment to student freedom is a certain institutional pusillanimity—a fear that to compel students to read, say, the major political and moral philosophers would be to risk a decline in applications, or a reduction in graduation rates (one of the statistics that counts in the US News and World Report college rankings closely watched by administrators). Nor, with a few exceptions, is there the slightest pressure from faculty, since there is no consensus among the teachers about what should be taught.
• Peter Gomes . . . in his essay "Affirmation and Adaptation: Values and the Elite Residential College," he seems to say that universities have refused once and for all any responsibility for the moral education of undergraduates, but that perhaps it is not too late (it may even be timely) for small colleges to do something about it. "
• In our "postmodern" moment, we no longer have any consensus about what culture is or should be, yet the need for cultured authority has become more urgent. Perhaps the most remarkable sentence in all of these books—as remarkable for the fact that it appears in a footnote as for the fact that it is patently true—occurs in Bok's Universities in the Marketplace: "Arts and Sciences faculties," Bok tells us, "currently display scant interest in preparing undergraduates to be democratic citizens, a task once regarded as the principal purpose of a liberal education and one urgently needed at this moment in the United States." It is not hard to imagine what other purpose the faculties have in mind. Preparation for well-paying jobs seems high among them even if that goal is not explicitly stated. So does introduction to various academic disciplines as they are conceived by the guilds in charge of them. Any larger sense of purpose seems absent and there are few signs that anyone is concerned about it.
• As my former colleague the literary scholar Arnold Rampersad (now at Stanford) remarked a few years ago at the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Columbia Core Curriculum, the Core is like the interstate highway system: we are glad we have it, but we could never build it today.
• Diversity (to be achieved not by quotas, but by considering race as one factor in admissions decisions) contributes to the purposes of liberal education, which Kronman summarizes as "expansion of the student's powers of sympathetic imagination" through appreciation of "views, moods, dispositions and experiences other than his or her own. The one place where students might be compelled to listen to one another—"to educate ourselves by knowing opposite lives," as Stover put it a long time ago—is the classroom. And yet small group education is expensive and therefore increasingly rare, and universally required courses, where students of different backgrounds cannot avoid each other, are almost unknown. The human proclivity to stick to one's own, especially in our age of diversity, is an argument for a shared general education, not
  against it.

Labels: admissions, education, NYRB, power, race