The local Sunday paper yesterday ran another in the series of op-ed pieces I've been invited to write for them. The column (below)was based on a couple of posts I'd done for Viewpoint:
Recent test scores in the California reveal a glaring disparity in student performance between blacks and Latinos and their white and Asian counterparts - regardless of family income. According to state Superintendent of Instruction Jack O'Connell, "These are not economic achievement gaps. They are racial achievement gaps and we cannot afford to excuse them."
Statewide, only 30 percent of black students and 29 percent of Latino students scored proficient or better in English/language arts. 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 scored proficient or better, compared to 54 percent of white students and 68 percent of Asians.
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."
So what is the explanation?
Randolph Ward, San Diego County superintendent of schools claims that 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. Less experienced teachers, Ward believes, have lower expectations of their students and that students unfortunately live down to what is expected of them.
I doubt, however, that this is the real reason for poor minority performance. Whether these students had highly experienced teachers or not their difficulties would likely persist. In fact, it's younger educators who often have the highest expectations from their students and are most enthusiastic about making a real difference in their students' lives. It's only through years of bitter experience that teachers come to realize that disproportionate numbers of minority students simply don't achieve at the level other students do.
Teachers usually love their students. They want them to do well. They long for them to succeed, but teachers also know their students' capabilities better than anyone, and they know that too many of them simply don't have the tools to compete.
The problem is not confined to California, of course. It afflicts almost every community and school across the nation.
So, why do relatively fewer minority students possess the tools necessary for academic success? If the reason isn't their teachers, nor racism, nor economics, we're left with two obvious possibilities. One is that Charles Murray was correct when he wrote in The Bell Curve in 1994 that some groups are, on average, inherently less capable than others. The second possibility is that the problem is cultural. Before we resign ourselves to Murray's very controversial thesis we really should make a concerted effort to take the second seriously.
Many minority students come from communities where, for whatever reason, neither traditional family nor educational excellence is valued. Many youngsters are allowed to dress, speak, and act as if they are mentally handicapped and proud to be so, and the culture in which they are immersed not only permits this perversity but often 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, historical sites, and cultural events, is daunting to many moms who exhaust themselves just putting food on the table. When children, especially sons, grow to be about twelve or thirteen they're often very difficult for a single mother to control, and mom's pleas that the boy focus on academic work frequently go unheeded. Instead, young men, flush in their incipient manhood, often prefer to gravitate to the streets to affirm their masculinity by identifying with thugs, siring another generation of fatherless children, and dressing and talking 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 minority communities where almost 70 percent of children are born to unwed mothers (It's close to 90 percent in some urban neighborhoods). 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 spoon.
The fundamental solution to the problems of our inner cities, whether the problem is educational achievement, poverty, or crime, requires reinvigorating and restoring the biological family and discouraging behaviors which send the message that it's cool to be stupid. Nothing else will make any real difference unless we do.
RLC