News out of San Diego informs us that recently released state test scores in California reveal a glaring disparity in student performance between blacks and Latinos and their white and Asian counterparts - regardless of income:
"These are just not economic achievement gaps. They are racial achievement gaps and we cannot afford to excuse them," state Superintendent of Instruction Jack O'Connell said at a media briefing. "They simply must be addressed."
The disparity in achievement is stark....Statewide in English/language arts, only 30 percent of black students and 29 percent of Latino students scored proficient or better. In contrast, 62 percent of white students and 66 percent of Asian students scored proficient or better.
In math, only 26 percent of black students and 31 percent of Latino students statewide scored proficient or better, while 54 percent of white students and 68 percent of Asian students scored proficient or better.
While discussing the achievement gap yesterday, O'Connell said the new state test scores clearly show that lower achievement by black and Latino students cannot be "explained away" as the result of poverty. "The results show this explanation simply is not true," O'Connell said.
Similar gaps are seen in San Diego County. "This has never been about race or income," said Randolph Ward, San Diego County superintendent of schools.
Okay, but Superintendent O'Connell just said that these were indeed racial achievement gaps. If neither race nor poverty is a relevant factor then exactly what is the cause for the disparity? The news article explains:
The achievement gap persists for several reasons. One is that the most experienced and talented teachers often work at more affluent schools, while younger and less experienced teachers fill slots at poorer schools, which typically enroll minority students.
A student's economic status surely plays a role, but so do low expectations that the student's teachers, principal, counselors, family and friends have for them, educators say.
Well, maybe, but I think that placing part of the blame on teachers is a cop-out. Whether these students had experienced teachers or not these same problems would persist. After all, white and Asian students in the same school with presumably the same teachers do better than their black and Hispanic counterparts. It may be that teachers have low expectations of minority students, but teachers know their students' capabilities better than anyone, so if they don't expect much perhaps it's because they know from bitter experience that minority students simply don't perform at the levels other students do.
Even if these teachers, many of whom are minorities themselves, it should be noted, harbor diminished expectations that doesn't mean that they try less hard with these students. Teachers don't dislike the children in their classrooms, minority or not. They want their youngsters to do well. They long for them to succeed, but experience has taught them that too many of them simply don't have the tools to do it.
The important question is, why don't they? If the reason isn't racism nor economics we're left with two alternatives. One is the possibility that Charles Murray was correct when he wrote in The Bell Curve that some groups are intellectually, on average, more capable than others. The second possibility is that the problem is social. Before we resign ourself to the first possibility, we really should make a concerted effort to do something about the second.
Many minority students come from communities where, for whatever reason, neither traditional family nor educational excellence is valued. Too many black and Hispanic kids are allowed to dress, speak, and act as if they are morons and proud to be so, and the culture in which they are immersed not only permits this perversity but encourages it.
Moreover, students who grow up with only a single parent invariably find school more of a struggle than do those who grow up with both biological parents. The job of keeping after children to do their homework or taking them to libraries or cultural sites of various sorts, is simply daunting to many moms who strain just to get food on the table. When children, especially sons, get to be twelve or thirteen they often become very difficult to control, and it's even harder then to demand that they focus on academic work. Instead, the young men gravitate to the streets to affirm their masculinity by identifying with thugs, siring another generation of fatherless children, and dressing, talking, and acting as if their IQ were somewhere around the freezing point of water.
The problem certainly exists in every racial group in the country, but it's most severe in the black and Hispanic communities. Until we begin to take the plight of fatherless children seriously all our talk about improving minority academic performance is just going to be so much wasted time and breath, and all our efforts to help minorities close the achievement gap will be like bailing floodwater out of New Orleans with a teaspoon.
We cannot allow another generation of kids to sink into socio-economic oblivion nor can we allow political correctness or what Shelby Steele calls "white guilt" to inhibit us from talking about the problem. The fundamental solution to the tragedy of our inner cities centers upon reinvigorating and restoring the biological family and discouraging behaviors which send the message that it's cool to be stupid. Everything else is just applying a band-aid to a broken arm.
RLC