A seminal new work on ethnic education, by Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, No Excuses:Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, is out and being reviewed. Stephan is at Harvard, Abigail is at the Manhattan Institute. Here are two columns on it. The first by Raspberry, the second by Sowell.
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washingtonpost.com
A Gap That Won't Go Away on Its Own
By William Raspberry
Monday, October 6, 2003; Page A23
Perhaps the most powerful lesson we learned from the civil rights movement is that America responds to righteous demand. Because it does, we have voting rights, desegregated schools and housing and access both to places of public accommodation and to an incredible array of once-foreclosed opportunities. Demand still works. It can get rotting trees removed, streets paved and lights or stop signs placed at dangerous intersections.
Here is what we haven't learned: Education is different. You might wake up one morning to find the graders and cement trucks on the street outside, brought there by righteous protest. But your children will not wake up one morning and find a truckload of education at the curb. Education cannot be just delivered -- it has to be actively sought and received. And that fact may account as much as any other single factor for the academic achievement gap between blacks and whites in America.
Two very different books make that point with compelling clarity. Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom ("No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning") begin by describing the breadth of the gap. "By twelfth grade, on average, black students are four years behind those who are white or Asian. Hispanics don't do much better." Now, that's a huge gap. It doesn't mean that all black and Hispanic youngsters are failing, but it assuredly does mean that we are handing out a lot of high school diplomas to children capable of performing only at an eighth-grade level in reading, math, history and geography.
What's wrong? It isn't a matter of IQ, the Thernstroms make clear right away. They painstakingly plow through the reasons -- poor funding, underprepared teachers, feelings of being an outsider, racial isolation -- and they acknowledge that all of them probably have some impact on educational outcomes. But they also point to a wide variety of schools, public and private, whose low-income, inner-city students are achieving well above the national average. Their point: It can be done.
The Thernstroms (she is at the Manhattan Institute and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights; he is at Harvard) are mainly concerned about poor black children. John Ogbu, who died in August, focused on a problem that in many ways is more puzzling: the consistent underachievement of black children in affluent suburbs.
His specific focus was Shaker Heights, Ohio, where black parents asked him to find out why their middle-class children were lagging behind their white counterparts.
Shaker's black children, he found out right away, outstrip black children everywhere else in the state -- and in much of the nation. Indeed, many of their families moved to Shaker Heights specifically for its schools. They wanted their children to have an excellent education. But the gap between them and their white schoolmates is significant -- and dismaying. White kids predominate in advanced placement and honors courses. Black children, who gravitate to the easier "general education" and "college prep" courses, nonetheless racked up 80 percent of the D's and F's.
Like the Thernstroms, Ogbu and his researchers ran through the usual suspects: low teacher expectations, prejudiced personnel, the distractions of race. Like the Thernstroms, he thought many of them had some effect on achievement.
But he found something else that must have surprised him. The black students were quite open in telling the researchers that, in general, their white classmates studied more, worked harder and cared more about getting good grades.
"In spite of the fact that the students knew and asserted that one had to work hard to succeed in Shaker schools, black students did not generally work hard. In fact, most appeared to be characterized by the low-effort syndrome. . . . [They] were not highly engaged in their schoolwork and homework." And their parents and communities, wittingly or not, support them in this nonengagement.
There is plenty of literature on why black youngsters put forth less academic effort -- some of it linked to peer pressure and a great deal of the rest attributed to the alienating effects of racism, white cultural domination or "Eurocentrism." Most of it, I suspect, contains at least a grain of truth.
But what we need is not so much explanation as change. We can wait for white America to change its attitude toward blacks. Or we can change the way we respond to what we believe that attitude to be. Given the fact that white America is doing okay the way things are, the choice seems obvious.
washingtonpost.com
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School performances
Thomas Sowell
September 24, 2003
Everyone knows that black students in general do not perform as well in school as white students, much less Asian American students. But few realize how painfully large the gap is. Even fewer know that there are particular black schools, even in low-income neighborhoods, where students perform above the national average.
Discussing racial gaps in education is taboo in some quarters. But this subject is discussed deeply and thoroughly in a new book titled "No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning" by Abigail Thernstrom of the Manhattan Institute and Stephan Thernstrom of Harvard. They are also the authors of the best book on race relations -- "America in Black and White" -- so there are high expectations for this new book.
"No Excuses" lives up to those expectations. If you read just one book about American education all year, this should be the book. It not only goes into the causes and cures of racial disparities in education, in the process it punctures many of the fads, dogmas, and pious hypocrisies of the education establishment.
First, the existing gap: Black high school students graduate an average of four years behind white students in academic skills. In other words, the high school diplomas they receive are given -- not earned -- for a junior high school education.
The excuses for this range across the spectrum from poverty to racism and even innate lack of ability. Yet none of these excuses stands up to the facts.
As the Thernstroms show, there are some schools where the students are equally poor and equally black, where test scores are outstanding. Moreover, such schools seldom get any more money than the schools that are failing.
Some of the most heavily financed schools are doing miserably. Even spending $17,000 per pupil, Cambridge, Massachusetts was still left with a huge gap between the test scores of its black and white students. In fact, black students in Cambridge scored lower than other black students in nearby communities with less than half as much spending per pupil.
Those who believe that money is the answer are not going to be stopped by anything so mundane as facts. To many in politics and in the media -- and to everyone in the teachers unions -- "improving" the schools means spending more money on them. But what is called "investing" in better education could more accurately be called pouring money down a bottomless pit.
Don't suburban schools with high levels of spending do better than other schools with lower levels of spending? Usually, yes. But Olympic-sized swimming pools and tennis courts do not make you any smarter. Nor do generous-sized parking lots for affluent students with fancy cars.
"No Excuses" does not limit its comparisons to blacks and whites. In some cases, the educational performances of Asian American students exceeds that of whites by more than the performances of whites exceed that of blacks.
There is nothing mysterious about any of these differences. Asian students put more time into study and homework and watch less television. They behave themselves in class. Their parents don't tolerate low grades -- or even medium grades.
In those rare black schools where the students follow a pattern similar to that of Asian Americans, they get educational results similar to those of Asian Americans.
What about the role of the schools in all this?
American schools waste an incredible amount of time on fads, fun and propaganda for political correctness. Those students who come from homes with highly educated parents, or parents whose values stress education, get a lot of what they need outside of school, as well as making the most of what they get within the school.
It is those children who do not come from these kinds of homes whose futures are forfeited when class time is frittered away. Low-income black students are the biggest losers when educators fail to educate and when courts create so many legal obstacles to enforcing school discipline that a handful of classroom clowns or hoodlums can prevent everyone else from getting a decent education.
More money won't cure any of this.
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