Re: article on achievement gap

[LeoCasey@aol.com]

I just looked at this question in a rather intensive way, for an article on racial justice in education published in the current issue of Dissent. [ www.dissentmagazine.org/menutest/articles/wi04/casey.htm ].

It is only prudential to wait to see what the Fryer and Levitt book has to say, before one passes judgment on it. But there are a number of extraordinarily problematic things in this article.

There is no evidence in any of the existing scholarly literature, which is quite extensive, to support the claim that the achievement gap is largely attributable to racist teaching. Some of the supporting contentions offered in this article, and attributed to Fryer and Levitt, are clearly misleading. Given that most African-American children are not middle class and do not attend racially inegrated schools, an examination of the specific subset of African-American students who fit those criteria tells us nothing about the large numbers of African-American children, from poor and working class families and attending largely segregated schools, for whom the achievement gap is most significant. Even the existing literature on African-American students in middle class, integrated settings, such as the landmark work of the late John Ogbu [completely ignored in this article], does not accord with the conclusions reached by this article.  There is a significant gap between African-American and white children when they enter school, largely attributable to social class, and that gap pretty much holds steady in literacy over the course of the K-12 education, and widens in numeracy in the middle school years, after which it remains the same until grade 12. 

It should be noted what is meant by attributable to social class or to race. By attributable to social class, we mean that the achievement gap is largely the effect of the conditions of living and learning in poverty; because of the historical legacy of racism, African-Americans are disproportionately in poverty. When one talks of the extent of the gap which is atttributable to social class and the extent which is attributable to race, it is important to know that this is not a matter of precise science, but largely a way of how defines those attributes and what one considers elements of social class. The results which attribute a small portion to social class and a large portion to race, do so by defining social class quite narrowly and treating race as the residual category, so that which is not social class becomes, by definition, racial. But when one considers elements such as a mother's and grandmother's [many of these families are grandmother led households] educational achievement [ie, high school dropout, high school graduate, some college, college graduate] as a manifestation of social class, then the portion attributable to social class becomes larger and larger, and the portion attributable to race becomes lesser and lesser. There certainly is a distinctly racial component, but it is nowhere near the 2/3 of the gap suggested in this article.

The article quotes Abigail Thernstrom and favorably cites her [and husband Stephan] recent work on this subject. That text is replete with ideological arguments that ignore actual research, only a few of which I had the space to mention in my above review. It can not be taken as a serious contribution to the scholarly literature on the subject.

The article makes a lot of a number of for profit, educational consulting firms [EMI and Efficacy] which have as their raison d'etre the elimination of racial prejudice in teaching. It is hardly surprising that these folks would be making a lot of racially prejudiced teaching in the achievement gap.

Leo Casey

In a message dated 3/17/2004 6:20:29 AM Eastern Standard Time, arn-l-owner@interversity.org writes:

> Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 23:41:43 -0800
> From: George Sheridan <learn@jps.net>
> To: arn-l@interversity.org
> Subject: Re: article on 'achievement gap' 
> Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.0.20040316230927.03bb9af0@pop.onemain.com>
> 
> Monty:
> 
> The sidebar, "What the Racial Gap Isn't," summarizes common theories that 
> attempt to explain test-score differences between African-American and 
> white students and explains how these theories, taken singly or together, 
> fall far short of explaining the facts. The article largely summarizes 
> points made by Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips in their 1998 book, 
> The Black-White Test Score Gap.  The big difference is in the proposed 
> explanation.
> 
> According to soon-to-be-published research by Roland Fryer of Harvard 
> University and his former University of Chicago colleague Steven Levitt,
> black children and white children with the same general characteristics 
> (socioeconomic measures, age, parents? educational achievement) start 
> kindergarten on an equal academic footing. By the end of the first grade? 
> that is, within the first two years of schooling, however, black students 
> fall three months behind .
> 
> This and other studies place the problem squarely with the schools, 
> declares Boston Phoenix writer David S. Bernstein.
> 
> If the Fryer and Levitt study proves what Bernstein claims, then the course 
> on "anti-racist teaching" from Empowering Multicultural Initiatives (EMI) 
> described in the main article may be the prototype of a breakthrough in 
> making public education work for the students most in need of assistance. 
> The premise that African-American students are especially affected by 
> perceived prejudice - "Stereotype vulnerability" - has some support from 
> other studies. But I would like to see the Fryer and Levitt study before 
> accepting claims about what it proves.
> 
> Throughout the article Bernstein develops a second theme - again one 
> advanced by Jencks and Phillips in the 1998 book. Equal resources will 
> produce unequal results, because schools with mostly black populations have 
> some expenses that are significantly higher than those of schools with 
> mostly white populations. To actually provide equal resources for the 
> education of their students, these schools must begin with more money. On 
> this issue Bernstein's claim is pretty close to self-evident.
> 
> At 01:37 PM 3/16/2004 -0500, Monty Neill wrote:
> >http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_sto
> ries/multi-page/documents/03613536.asp
> 
> George Sheridan
> Northside School
> Cool, California 95614

Leo Casey

Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never has, and it never will.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
-- Frederick Douglass --