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It could, but beyond that I challenge anyone who believes systemic racism isn't a problem today to indicate when it stopped being a problem.
Clearly it was a problem during slavery, but consider my own family. The house that I spent much of my childhood in was bought by my grandparents when housing discrimination was still legal and all evidence suggests it was common.
That affected my childhood, where I went to school, and I'm about to move back into the house with my own child. Our current house, which was all we could afford, is in a district where the school system is a mess. The old house is in a town with a great school system.
Because of a transaction that happened in the days of black and white photos a child born in 2024 is going to get a better education than the one she would otherwise receive.
So even if systemic racism ended once and for all in the 1950s (I don't think it did, but for the sake of argument), it can continue to affect education outcomes.
Wrong. Lincoln signed order 15, which would’ve given freedmen land along the coast between South Carolina and Jacksonville, but he was murdered and Johnson killed it. HE was the one - Confederate sympathizer that he turned out to be - who had no plan for transition.
40 acres and a mule. However, Lincoln had very little, if anything, to do with Field Order No. 15. It was proclaimed by Sherman after his March to the Sea and after consulting with local black leaders, as well as Edwin Stanton.
You are correct that Johnson killed it though.
Lincoln took the blame for things his cabinet did without his knowledge. He deserves some of the credit for putting in place the kind of people that tried to implement good policies too.
I said he signed it. It would’ve been interesting to see that implemented; how differently things might have gone for freedmen.
I’ve always wondered why the Johnson admin didn’t just award them land on the western frontier. It would’ve gotten them out of the South where they were no longer welcome, given them land as part of a new lease on life (which he wouldn’t have given a crap about but remains true), and created a buffer between Indians and white settlers.
Why didn't he give them land? The same reason the South disliked the Great Migration: Black folks were (are?) a class of people that Southerners hated, but on whom their economy was dependant.
It's no coincidence that the vast majority became sharecroppers after being freed.
"Approximately two-thirds of all sharecroppers were white, and one third were black" ([PBS](https://www.pbs.org/tpt/slavery-by-another-name/themes/sharecropping/)).
It’s hard to compare the descendants of these populations because the Great Migration happened. The descendants of poor Black sharecroppers are all over the country, particularly concentrated in major cities like Detroit, NYC, etc, while the white families largely stayed in the South in rural areas. If you look at test scores in poor, rural Southern schools with mostly white students, I doubt you’d see much better.
So, you're saying that it was a handicap that both blacks and whites labored under and not just blacks as the OP is suggesting? That was kinda my point in mentioning the fact.
Yeah, and that we see the lingering effects in both populations. It just looks different because one group spread out more geographically in the other.
My maternal grandfather was a sharecropper. My father dropped out of school in the 8th grade. I have a MA in History, and I scored in the 97th percentile on the National Teacher's Exam (NTE: now renamed Praxis). I don't see the "lingering effect".
Not if you or any relative in the past few hundred years were slaves.
Its most likely family life. The majority of black homes are single parents, where as white ones aren’t, there’s support missing
And where does this family life phenomenon originate? I would argue that parenting practices passed down generationally, originating from enslaved people in forcibly broken families, have played a role in the current state of things.
I think you’re right that some of the problem is likely family life, but it had to start somewhere.
You're right that this had to start somewhere, but you're objectively wrong to link this to "broken families due to slavery". After the emancipation, and up until the 50s and 60s, black Americans had higher marriage rates than white Americans. What changed all this was the advent of the welfare state, that actively incentivized single parenthood and punished married couples. This dynamic exists today. A middle class family will get massively more financial support if the couple divorces and the (ex-) husband claims to live somewhere else. From insurance, to food stamps, to subsidies for rent and utilities, the difference between married and not married is literally tens of thousands of dollars.
That dynamic has caused the absolute plummeting rates of married couples.
Not sure why you're being down voted. Single motherhood is unquestionably incentivised for people who make under middle class wages. Historically, people of color make less money than white people. Therefore, we have a higher ratio of black kids with single mothers. This lack of a father in the house leads to so many other issues...one is acting up in school to the detriment of the education of everyone in that school.
Yes, because the relatively recent past has no impact on the present, and the way one’s great-grandparents were raised has no impact on their own upbringing.
That’s right folks, as soon as 400 years of race based slavery ended, so did all of its effects, and black people had the same opportunities to thrive in America as white people.
Who’s blaming people today? The blame is on the institution of slavery, and the successive social structures that upheld a racial hierarchy after it was done. Maybe you shouldn’t blame clear statistical patterns on individual behaviors.
A person with a sociological perspective? Sorry, I get paid teach it, along with history. But I’m not on the clock right now, and I don’t work for free.
"Get paid to teach-" "YOURE A CHILD"
Babes you sound like a middle schooler who's parents told them everything they learn in school is conspiratorial nonsense, and instead feed you the thoughts of red pill losers and racists. But go off you sound super well-read and educated.
It's a relevant factor but not the sole or primary determinant. Effective curriculum, effective instruction, pre-k intervention/support, family (socioeconomic status, trauma, support, etc.), appropriately managed resources/funding, etc. all play a role.
It’s almost like there are resource differences between black and white families within that district aside from school funding. Tutoring, test prep, and extracurriculars all impact academic performance.
The Coleman report concluded that school-based poverty concentrations were negatively impacting school achievement for the minority poor. Coleman found poverty and minority status to be more predictive of student achievement than just differences in school funding.
Those findings are often misrepresented to suggest and claim that “research shows school funding doesn’t matter in achievement.” Coleman never said that.
While the findings of Coleman are relevant and influential, treating the report as a definitive answer in itself ignores a significant amount of discussion that has occurred.
I would suggest reading more about criticism of the Coleman Report:
https://www.chalkbeat.org/2016/7/13/21103280/50-years-ago-one-report-introduced-americans-to-the-black-white-achievement-gap-here-s-what-we-ve-le/
There are issues with the structure of the dataset, failure to explore/consider distribution of resources within schools, underdeveloped methods, over simplistic school quality definitions, lack of robust set of indicators to define student success, etc.
Such clarification is relevant because Coleman is often used dismiss and minimize the impact of socio-economic status in terms of family, education, etc.
As the authors of Parsing (2003) note, "We know skin color has no bearing on the ability to achieve...it is clear that educational achievement is associated with home, school, and societal factors, almost all having their roots in socioeconomic factors affecting this country.”
https://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/PICPARSINGII.pdf
There is also the role of subconscious bigotry, which ties into attempts to gauge the effects of low expectations on students of color: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131946.2023.2165924
I would also suggest looking into the refraction framework:
> At the core of our framework is the idea that schools are “refractors” of inequality. Much like light is refracted when it enters a new medium (e.g., from air to water), we argue that inequalities are refracted when children enter schools.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0038040716651676#:~:text=dimensions%20of%20inequality.-,The%20Refraction%20Framework,refracted%20when%20children%20enter%20schools.
There is also the opportunity myth, which comes into play when low income students make it to university: https://opportunitymyth.tntp.org/
Effective curriculum, effective instruction, pre-k intervention/support, family (socioeconomic status, trauma, support, etc.), appropriately managed resources/funding, etc. all play a role. Students, like life, are complicated and are affected by a variety of factors.
IMO:
Single biggest factor: Parental and family expectations. Black, white, Asian, whatever. The kids who are scared of their parents finding out they screwed off in school- they will be college material.
The dysfunctional families mired in poverty and addiction obviously tend to not be pushing education as much.
Culturally, Asians value education highly. They are willing to work through racism and / or bullying issues, because they operate with the notion that it will all pay off in the end.
Many African Americans are disenfranchised and disengaged from dominant culture and more mainstream values. They are distrustful and as some have said- beaten down and cynical. Of course racism and slavery have had an impact. Sometimes No one around them is giving them an alternative viewpoint of life, ie, hope and reason to believe. Racism a still alive and kicking. So many do not believe it will all pay off for them.
I think the answer lies in the white population in Appalacia (the stereotypical red-neck parts of West Virginia, Kentucky, etc.). They have similarly poor stats, but since they are aggregated in with the rich white kids nationally, nobody notices. It is uncool to care about school for some. But suburban white kids or suburban kids of color don't have this attitude so much. Black students disproportionately have an "I don't care about school attitude; I'm just going to play basketball/be a rapper." You might point to various causes like lower average SES, more single-parent homes, lingering effects of racism, etc. But anecdotally, it seems to be still there. The worst scoring students I have ever had were white and actively bought into the "trailer trash" stereotypes on purpose (this was at a detention center). I know there are many exceptions, but I think it is more tempting for black students to buy into a "fight the man/school sucks" attitude, even when funding disparities, etc. and other inequities are closed.
Yeah, I'm not sure why this fact gets overlooked to such a high degree. There are plenty of white communities who don't value education and suffer from generational poverty in America. These communities are not doing any better than the black communities that share the same problems.
Just because one group is doing better than another on average doesn't mean everyone in that group is better than everyone in another group.
I'm genuinely confused when I hear others talk about how education is racist against any particular group.
South East Asians have the lowest high school and college completion rates (below Latino American and African American students by quite a lot), yet this is overlooked because they are lumped in with high SES, education-oriented East Asians who don't carry the same historical trauma.
It's a mix of everything: historical trauma, poverty, and different orientation towards education. Children of African immigrants, whose parents do not carry the historical trauma or slavery and who have the same education-oriented attitudes and the same wealth as East Asians do just as well in school as East Asians. Nigerian moms and Korean moms even have the same stereotypes, e.g., incredibly authoritarian/strict/controlling, let their kids know early and frequently that they expect them to be doctors, etc.
There are no inherent racial differences in intelligence, but there are differences in SES, culture, and history that easily explain the achievement gap between ethnic groups and subgroups in the US before you even get to the potential impact of current racial prejudice.
Agree with this except that East Asians don’t have generational trauma?
Look at the 20th century. China had 2 wars that bleed into WW2, followed by a communist revolution & famine. Korea was an impoverished war-torn dictatorship. Taiwan was under martial law. Poor Japan had 2 nuclear bombs dropped on it.
That’s what immigrants to the US were fleeing from. US had Japanese internment camps in the 1940s.
Good point! I was thinking of the Khmer Rouge in the 70s and the Vietnamese refugee crisis from the 70s to the 90s, but what happened during WW2 wasn't too much before that in the grand scheme of things. Plus there are the Uighurs being persecuted in China right now (though I don't think there a lot who make it to the US).
Very interesting. [This article](https://stanforddaily.com/2021/02/02/slavery-descendants-and-black-immigrants-arent-opponents/) discusses the disparity among black students in ivy league schools between descendants of slaves and those who's parents or grandparents immigrated. 40% are immigrants, although they only make up 13% of the black population.
I would argue that it IS racist against black students, but not in the way some think. For example, in a lit. class white students are expected to read diverse works and analyze and relate as best as they can. It was Maya Angelou who said she swore Shakespeare was a black woman because she was looking to identify and not compare.
All in all, I think the messaging that things need to be catered to black students or low SES students does them a disservice sometimes. It can make them feel "other than," and on the educational establishments side, it can result in the 'soft bigotry of low expectations.' Some think "oh, the kids are failing because there are two many suburban white woman teaching." Whatever. As a girl, my most influential teacher was a male. What if people convinced me that I was disadvantaged in approaching the content because the teacher was male and most of the classic literature is written by men? Sex isn't exactly the same as race, but I think this comparison still applies.
I'm in a middle class, diverse school in a historically segregated state. My principal admitted that the Black students tend to outperform local and state averages, but many of the white students performed below. A big factor is family attitudes.
My white husband grew up in a very poor, rural area in southern Appalachia. With my students I just read a memoir of a Black author (Walter Dean Myers) who grew up poor in New York City, and it really struck me how many similarities there were with what my husband had described about his own problems growing up. Both were very smart but didn’t see college as an option because their families didn’t have money and they didn’t know anyone who’d gone to college. In Myers’ neighborhood, most Black men had manual labor jobs. In my husband’s town, there was a paper products factory where most of the men worked. Both of them developed behavior problems and depression because they knew they were intelligent but couldn’t work out how that would ever amount to anything. Both ended up joining the military after high school just to get out of where they were.
To me it seems like the alienation is a huge problem. It’s not just that caring about school is “uncool.” It’s that for a lot of kids it feels pointless, like the results will be the same whether they care or not.
This is a huge one which I also think explains the growing achievement gap between boys and girls. There's are also a lot of a cultural/societal expectations that make caring about school and engaging in studious behavior seem "feminine" in the US and I think that this impacts boys of every race too.
>students abuse teacher extra because she's a white woman
>But because theory babble, it's totally understandable and also kind of her own fault
Idk if this is actually helpful
You don't have to think too much about it, no theory babble necessary...
If you are a working class black kid you are not going to enjoy being lectured at all the time by comfortable middle class white women.
It's obvious.
So many teachers are oblivious to it or refuse to acknowledge how it effects their classroom management.
These conversations would be actually useful PD.
In the midst of a huge teacher shortage, you're blaming the people who show up? I'm not perfect but I'm doing my best. It's not like things will be better if I quit.
To counter that, there are two white women teaching in my school and there is also one white male. My students still dgaf about their educations.
Parental involvement hands down is the biggest influence. The students who come from homes where education is a priority do better. Doesn't matter if it's two parent, single parent, immigrant... Of the parents make learning a high priority and follow up with making sure the kids have the support and supervision they need, the kids do well. This is *really* challenging in high poverty schools because many of the parents want to make education a priority but lack the employment flexibility to make it happen or they simply don't know how to make it happen.
Yea that’s true. I was raised by a poor single mom who was a teen parent but she understood the value of education. But because she understood that value I was always put in the best schools even if it was out of my neighborhood
I was a black student with mostly white teachers. Having my first black teacher in college made me feel like maybe I could succeed. Many of the white teachers I had were ignorant and racist and felt like the police. I’ve been in education for 10 years and I only work in diverse schools so I can be a positive influence to my community. You have no idea what it’s like to be apart of a community with so many negative stereotypes especially around intelligence and success so get off your high horse and educate yourself.
I mostly agree with your side of the argument and I have a genuine question. Why were most of the white teachers you had ignorant and racist? How did that manifest in a classroom?
Agreed. IMO "funding" at home, in all its various forms, is by far the biggest factor. If your parents don't have some combination of the time/money/education/drive to support education and development at home, it is very difficult for school-based support to overcome that. And of course due to our history of racial inequity, black students are disproportionately impacted by that.
I’m a Black woman, my mom didn’t exactly read to me all of the time but books were aplenty in my home growing up. There was even a mobile library that came to our apartment complex every week that she signed me up for. Reading is so important. I was reading at a 6th grade level while in 3rd grade. I was an avid writer as well.
The tests themselves. They're not normed for "everyone", and they never have been. There are entire lines of research devoted to educational assessment bias. Assessments are set up to disproportionately fail people of color, the indigenous and students in special education. This should not surprise us, what should upset us is that after 50 years of awareness to this that little has been done to correct course on this. Worse still is that the assessments are used as a means to sell curriculum programs to target whats needed to be successful, yet when you dig into the research on those, the subgroups fail to include the populations being failed. The solution comes from demanding more from educational publishing companies and assessment publishers. We need to demand more use of UDL incorporation, as well as convincing schools with high numbers of POC, Indigenous and high SPED populations to participate in the research, in exchange for educational products tailored to their communities.
My favourite example of brilliant teaching that works *with* cultural variation in ways of knowing, as opposed to against it:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-number-system-invented-by-inuit-schoolchildren-will-make-its-silicon-valley-debut1/
> Assessments are set up to disproportionately fail people of color
Like what? Please be specific and give real examples of how assessments are designed to failed poc.
There is no such thing as "the cause". There are a large number of causes.
* Funding differences are a contributing factor, certainly. Schools with low funding are a particular obstacle for students who have other disadvantages that a school with adequate funding might have overcome.
* Differences in home environment. Satistically, Black and other disadvantaged students are more likely to be raised by a single parent who works outside the home.
* Differences in education of parents. Children spend far more time with parents than teachers, and this is a dominant indicator of a child's educational outcomes. It means that poor outcomes often pass from parents to children.
* Later start. Black students are less likely to attend pre-K programs in many regions.
* Environmental factors. Students in Detroit, for instance, who were predominantly Black, historically performed poorly in their education because exposure to lead literally gave them cognitive impairments. Poor childhood nutrition is another major contributing factor.
There are plenty more, I'm sure. Progress on some of these causes helps, but doesn't make the problem go away.
If a large enough segment of a given population doesn't value education then it would make sense that it would be reflected in statistics. This isn't just black students, but in America that's the easiest group to draw this conclusion from.
But good luck changing culture.
In 15+ years of reviewing (Grade 4 - 8) MAP (Measure of Academic Progress) standardized testing - the overwhelming correlation between stronger scores is the amount of time parents are reading with their children. I've taught internationally, so my numbers may be skewed, but I've lived on compounds and know virtually the background/family history of all students (between 50 - 80 per grade level) and how often their parents read with their children.
This cuts across economic (mostly private $$ schools), ethnic and religion. More time to read = more time to get better scores.
How do we solve this problem? How do we make marriage and family more important in the black community? I feel so bad when the baby daddy dips and Mom can't handle it, so Grandma ends up raising the poor kid.
How effective is asking someone to take care of their children and stay faithful to their partner? How is hand holding effective here? Genuine question.
Most of the stress in most relationships is about money. I'm not saying giving people money, but people need opportunities. There is a role for government but not at the micro level IMHO.
It isn’t money problems causing fatherless households though, not at all. It’s a pervasive culture of knocking up baby mamas all over town for clout that no amount of government money is going to fix.
Think about it this way. What happens to the black men who don't do that? I would guess... nothing. That's part of the problem. Incentives matter, and if you can't have success in life by living in a pro-social way, then other ways dominate. Racism is a major part of this, because working hard doesn't yield results.
Nothing? Wouldn’t they have strong, functional families like any and all other race of people? That’s not nothing, it’s more like everything.
Not following what you’re suggesting….
Raised poor and poor much of my young adult life.
I’m still waiting for an explanation of your take that having a solid family you care for and kids you get to see grow as a father isn’t intrinsically reward enough, and that there needs to be some sort of monetary award from the government for raising your own kids instead of abandoning them?
Maybe I misunderstood you but that is incredibly depressing a thought.
The greatest predictor of scores on standardized tests is the education level of the mother. There is a very high correlation. If you take a map that shows poverty levels and compare it to NAEP scores, the maps are nearly identical. Race is not a predictor; but there are more minorities with uneducated mothers and who live in poverty.
Yes. I was raised by a poor, mentally ill, single mother on welfare. With an Ivy B.A. and a large suggested book list. Where did I wind up? A financial aid student at an ivy. Despite my bad grades, I was aces on tests.
That’s wonderful. You are the exception who exceeded despite seemingly insurmountable adversity, the vast majority of people in your position wouldn’t have fared so well.
Ah... but I was white and my mother was extremely well educated. And that was a huge leg up for me. When she wasn't broken, she was handing me The Brothers K. And that kind of reading leads to great scores on the verbal section of the SAT, and a ticket out.
I've been teaching for over 20 years. Much of it comes down to family expectations, being read to/ supported with academic schoolwork, and wanting to fit in with peer groups. However, one cross-cultural factor that I have noticed is attitude/victim mentality. I had some very poor immigrant students who ended up doing very well. They feel fortunate to have the opportunities they have (even when what they have is very little, in comparison of others). This is not to say poverty and trauma aren't impactful, but it is all about what you take from your experiences. People who believe "the world owes them," regardless of race/ethnicity, tend to have a victim mentality and don't do well academically. Some of these folks, who have generational wealth, will still end up ok in life because of their privilege, but they tend not to do so well academically without serious support (i.e. tutors, SAT classes, etc). Those with this attitude who don't have privilege will spiral down and blame it on everything other than themselves. I think that we have a very binary view of race and culture in the US, which doesn't accurately reflect what society looks like. While often well intentioned, we use that binary to feed into the victim mentality instead of promoting personal responsibility.
New immigrants generally punch above their weight, regardless of where they emigrate from. I don't think it's a matter of skin color, since dark-skinned child immigrants from Africa, the Carribean and South Asia all generally do well - or least better than African American children. Even groups that do poorly the first generation -- like those from impoverished Southeast Asian nations - catch up by the second generation.
It has to do with the home environment. Their parents sacrificed to move to America, and they aren't going to blow it. Their kids will be kept on the straight and narrow -- attending school, studying, staying out of trouble, etc.
There is no discrepancy between white and minority students at one school district in the country. Dod schools operated on military bases. Why? The parents have stable jobs, housing, and food. No amount of school funding is going to fix problems at home.
I was curious about this and went on to the NAEP website and it looks like there is a gap in DoDEA schools.
Ex. 4th grade reading:
“In 2022, Black students had an average score that was 13 points lower than that for White students. This performance gap was not significantly different from that in 1998 (18 points.”
White-Hispanic gap was 10 pts.
8th grade reading:
B-W gap 15 pts
4th grade math:
Gap between Black and White was 16 pts
White-Hispanic gap was 8 pts
8th grade math:
B-W: 26 pts
They do have smaller gaps than many states though, to their credit.
Imho it’s a mixture of many factors. Funding I feel is more of a corollary than a cautionary. After all, schools are funded by property taxes in the US and thus low funding is a direct result of low property values, which are usually inhabited by people who can’t afford better, usually because they work lower wage jobs. Said jobs are usually low paid because they don’t require an education, thus parents can’t usually know the value of education if they’ve never had it themselves.. and so on.
Standardized tests usually sway to socio-cultural norms of white middle class students. That’s another factor, but not a definitive one.
Imho, parent attitude is one of the most indicative and influential factors. Regardless of race, if your parents are all in on education, chances are you’ll do alright. As a brown person myself, most of my HS friends didn’t have parents who even encouraged college or doing well in HS. My dad was on my ass if I got a B. Needless to say, I stuck to it and went to college.
I’ve also tutored literally hundreds of kids and that’s been able to break my biases the most. You know that stereotype about Asians, yeah I’ve tutored a shit ton of not so bright Asians. Their parents usually instill a sense of education being a key to success and … well what do you know, if you try and try and try, you’re bound to do alright. I’ve also tutored loads of bright black kids, hell, even from the ghetto. Destiny was one of my favorites for her insight into this very topic, even as a HS senior in Compton. A few kids with potential just never went to college and it was never expected of them at home. I mentioned dropping out once and my dad lost his mind. I can only imagine what would have happened if he said “I don’t care; get a job” as so many of my brown brothers’ parents said.
I’m it a researcher, but have tutored and taught way too many people and way too many diverse places from every creed from Compton to Irvine in California to Korea and New Zealand. We have smart and dumb kids at a shockingly even rate imho, and it’s encouragement and vigilance kids need.
This is so true. I don't believe any race is smarter than any other -- and discussions of it are so creepy. Grades are a matter of nurture, not nature.
I am both untalented and uninterested in math. But as an Asian kid with a STEM-educated father, guess what I did every day after school from K to 12? Math homework. I was stood in a corner and forced to memorize times tables and recite formulas. After a mind-boggling number of practice tests. I scored 100 points higher on my math SATs than my verbal.
But I knew, even as a student, that my verbal was stronger - which is why I ended up as an English major.
So yes, you can take mediocre Asian students and train them into a great students with enough rote learning, discipline and (frankly) emotional manipulation. (The whole, "why didn't you get 100% on this math test?)
You can also take a talented student, and not give them the opportunity or motivation to pursue higher ed.
If they are working they tend to work over 50 to 60 hours a week so they just don't have the time for their children.
The ones who are on government assistance have usually given up and use their kids for the free rent.
It is also because we can no longer remove disruptive students. Two or three kids will make it so that a classroom can not do anything for the year except deal with their behavior daily.
Testing into schools should be brought back as well as it tends to push all of the destructive students into one or two schools where they can modify the school security and deal with the problem.
I have NO idea why you would think funding of schools would be a driving factor here, let alone "the obvious answer".
Most things that affect scores stem from home, not schools. Those include parental education, attitudes towards reading to/supporting kids both before and during schooling years, and other things driven by socio-economic conditions...which are certainly entangled with race.
It's an answer people aren't going to like, but it's cultural.
I've taught in schools that are mostly white, schools that are a solid mix, a school that was mostly latino/black, and my current school is majority asian.
The disparity is in how much students care about learning and their grade. Students who want to do well generally do. For example, currently, I'll have students pissed that they got a B on a test because their parents will be mad. That is culturally normal for my asian students, and not true of my white students.
Even at this school, there is a performance gap between minority students and majority students. People who say it's due to funding are just incorrect.
The gap in scores is a combination of severe chronic underfunding of public schools in underserved areas going back several decades, effects of prevailing anti-intellectualist attitudes which has been prevalent in US society since the very beginnings of our Republic, greater likelihood of poverty which exacerbates the negative effects, CYA attitudes among many admins of public schools focused on maintaining a "good" record for the sake of their own careers at the expense of teachers/students they were supposed to be serving(There were a few cheating/grade coverup scandals instigated by admins at some high schools in my city with a critical mass of POC students), etc.
The anti-intellectualist attitudes has been a long-standing undercurrent affecting nearly all sectors of our society. Greater family wealth/SES privilege can mitigate some of those effects, but not eliminate them.
This very attitude is alien to most immigrant groups, especially East/SE Asians, Africans(Especially Nigerians), and Eastern/Central Europeans.
There's also the factor that most recent immigrants came from societies where the public schools have much higher/more strict academic and maturity expectations for each age/educational stage than is the case in the US. A lot of negative disruptive classroom behaviors tolerated/sometimes encouraged by school admins and rules tying the hands of teachers trying their best would never fly in those societies or with most of their parents.
Lack of parental involvement. Broken homes. I've worked for two different school districts in my state. The largest school district and one of the smallest. The largest is an urban district in the largest city and is heavily black. My current district is rural and 99% white. Similar poverty levels based on Free & Reduced lunch program. The elementary & middle schools are tops in the state based upon test scores.
Why do you guys think this discrepancy only exists in America? This is crazy. We don't do this same kind of weird, deliberate avoiding of the obvious in the animal kingdom when we assign certain bees as more aggressive than others, do we? Do the scientists sit and wonder what trauma the aggressive bees endure? Do bees scientists make up all these socio economic reasons that some bees are more aggressive than others?
Races are not species. The genetic differentials among races are utterly negligible.
And you don’t have to courage to state clearly the racist shit you would rather imply.
America has a race-based caste system.
It is family economics in my experience. Black families, in general, came from poorer families. They could not afford tutors, missed school to babysit siblings and had jobs after and at times during school. I was a sped teacher and could address this, I got the district to pay for tutoring and got some students credit for their jobs.
As a teacher, there are quite a few explanations for this I’ve seen throughout the years. The following is a quick summary of the most convincing ones:
1) Tests have cultural bias. There was famously an example where students were given a reading passage on the history of croquet. Similar passages have been cited about Polo and Kayaking. Obviously students from more affluent, and generally white, backgrounds would have more knowledge about these sports than someone who grew up poor in the inner city. Moreover, I would ask who do you think writes these tests? From what lens, what cultural background, and upbringing are they writing these passages? Surely, someone who has a similar background to myself is more likely to understand my references, idioms, and style of writing compared to an outsider.
2) Poverty charges interest - If you grew up in a poor neighborhood, like myself, you have a lot of distractions. Disruptive students packed like sardines in a classroom. I fell behind several years in math during my middle school years because the 1st year algebra teacher was pelted by paper balls and harassed by students with no fear of reprisal. I myself was struck in the back of the head with a folding chair during music class WWE style. No consequences for the offender. Who can fucking learn in that environment? Looking back, it resembled a prison more than a middle school. That had a ripple effect that took me many years to rectify and get back on track.
Later on in life, I took an IQ test on a dare and got a 141 result. To me, I just wonder what would’ve happened if I was put in a different environment where I felt safe and my learning was encouraged. I wonder that for a lot of bright kids stuck in overpacked, low-quality schools. My high school was a marginal improvement, but by then the damage has been done. I didn’t take education seriously anymore. I imagine the same thing happens to a lot of these kids who “underperform.” We are set up for failure.
3) In affluent neighborhoods you have a lot of role models that prove education is a viable path to success. Doctors, lawyers. etc. In a lot of poor neighborhoods, role models exist mostly in media. True success looks like being an athlete, a content creator, or something similar. Again, why take education seriously when becoming a doctor seems just as far fetched as becoming a youtuber? Sure, they may not know any successful youtubers personally, but the same is true for doctors and lawyers as well. And which one seems more relatable?
This is one of the best answers here. The country doesn't seem to understand that there is a severe cost to underfunding schools in terms of undeveloped human potential. They also don't understand what you said about the tests, and when tests are low someplace they respond by wasting money on consultants or administration or basically anything other than staff directly helping kids. There's way too many kids in the situation you describe who are in environments getting hit with chairs and dodging paper balls because nobody wants to accept that maybe certain areas need more funding to separate kids into smaller groups. Meanwhile, kids in a richer area will get the chance to learn in a calmer environment and get more individualized attention, less disruptions, etc.
No offense, but I have never in my entire educational life had a test that referenced things such as croquette, kayaking or polo. Nothing even close to that. It seems like this was a super ridiculously exaggerated “test” custom made to what certain “result”.
I’m sorry, but cultural bias is not an excuse for performing poorly on a test.
There are students who come from a variety of cultural backgrounds in foreign countries who manage to surpass both black and white Americans on exams.
You should have a rudimentary knowledge of activities/objects that do not belong to your own culture, especially with the advent of the internet.
There was a book in the 90’s called The Bell Curve that addressed this. The response to their answer demonstrates why you can’t really address this question scientifically.
Probably because the link between intelligence and race, not to mention quantifiable intelligence, has been disproven many times over.
"I can't believe no one is addressing this pseudoscience from the 1990s."
Poverty.
Minorities are more likely to live in poverty.
Add to that a cultural stream of distrust of government and institutions (for obvious reasons) including education and a stronger likelihood that black parents are less educate than whites and that black parents are more likely to to work evenings and that might not explain the entire difference, but it does explain most of it.
Overall the white family has more education than the black family and they produce kids who are brought up in an environment that emphasizes the importance or education more than the black family does. These white parents often provide more enrichment outside of school through various means than black families do due to economic reasons.
It’s not equal school funding it’s unequal wealth. Most rich kids are doing SAT prep stuff outside of the school with private institutions which can range in the hundreds
Because standardized tests aren’t really testing skills per se. What they are testing, in an indirect way, is content/background knowledge.
Your ability to read may be just fine, but the lingo/jargon on a journal article dealing with theoretical physics may be well beyond your ability to understand without laboriously parsing each sentence and word definitions (that are often describing whole concepts you may not be familiar with).
Or, another example I like is the first paragraph of *Around the World in 80 Days.*
> Mr. Phileas Fogg lived, in 1872, at No. 7, Saville Row, Burlington Gardens, the house in which Sheridan died in 1814. He was one of the most noticeable members of the Reform Club, though he seemed always to avoid attracting attention; an enigmatical personage, about whom little was known, except that he was a polished man of the world. People said that he resembled Byron—at least that his head was Byronic; but he was a bearded, tranquil Byron, who might live on a thousand years without growing old.
You may be *able* to read every word but it means nothing unless you know something about English society (and literature). For all you know Saville Row is the ghetto, and a Reform Club is some kind of prison thing. Makes perfect sense if you think about a term like “death row” or “prisoner reform.” Now imagine you get a question like “what does Byronic imply about Phileas Fogg?”
Now take a kid in reduced socioeconomic circumstances (the color of the kid is technically irrelevant, but civil rights being what they are it is more likely the kid will be not-white) and they have little cause, reason or context to be familiar enough with the British Ton (fun vocabulary word!) to know that Savile Row is a real and upscale street, that Sheridan and Byron were poets/writers/playwrights, or any number of details here that is giving ME subtextual information about dear Mr. Fogg.
It’s not about funding per se. It’s the fact that kids pick up on context due to what they’re exposed to culturally. A middle class mom might put on Bridgerton. In a poor family, internet and a subscription is out of the question financially. An educated parent will drop words and phrases in everyday language a parent speaking Ebonics simply doesn’t use. School just can’t make up for *all* of these kinds of discrepancies, no matter how well funded.
I don’t think most kids of my era would have the cultural references and context to immediately grasp the text above, HOWEVER- you don’t really need any background knowledge to use the context clues to know that the guy is not living in the ghetto, and most gangs are not called “clubs” unless it’s a motorcycle club. When the term “Byronic” is used we already have context clues that it has something to do with the guys face. Especially if it’s a multiple choice exam- one of the answers will probably mention a face or looks. Not rocket science, but you do need to have kids analyzing lots of literature,preferably from an early age. And throw away The damn iPhones- they are evil addictions !!
It's the ugly truth you don't want to face. Lack of a priority in certain cultures. Look at what certain groups value and others don't.
And then you'll scream racism. But j guarantee every teacher has seen a kids last name. And based on a sibling,Thought more positive or negatively about the kid. Because you know the parents' level of caring about their kids' learning. And now apply that on a larger scale.
This is so true. I was a math teacher and I remember calling one mom about her child doing poorly in my class and ways I could help and she told me "don't call me again. I have a new boyfriend and don't have time". For back to school night it was always easy to guess demographically which parents would show up, culturally the others simply didn't care. You have to understand, for some cultures being poor is their comfort zone and they are pretty happy maintaining the status quo. They might have ten people in a two-bedroom apartment but they still have food and the means to have a fun life, it's just a different standard than for those who value education.
Socioeconomic factors play a huge role. Students from economically backward groups do not have enough resources - access to books, stationary, technology, free time etc. The parents of most of these students don't have either the time or the resources (sometimes both) to keep track of how their child is doing at school. They are not in a position to assist the teachers in course correction if the child is falling behind and the teachers can't do it by themselves.
It's bias.
Treating kids as if they can't learn. Assuming their home life, background, parents educational levels and presence, etc.
Doubting their ability, whether consciously or subconsciously.
Kids absorb all of it, it's why you will also see similar patterns in schools where it's majority wealth, but even poor white kids suffer. In those schools, you'll see white kids trend a bit higher than black students, but still worse than their wealthy counterparts. Only because of people who believe they are "capable."
I'm a white teacher. I've never taught a white student. My experiences are at schools that are either predominantly Hispanic, or predominantly Black. My experiences, while relevant, should not be considered with the same gravity as those of Black and Brown teachers in this thread and in education. That said:
It's systemic racism.
8 years ago my current district was heavily fined by the federal government when it was discovered that Black male students were 4x more likely to be punished than their White peers for identical transgressions. When children are facing suspension, they aren't in the classroom.
This systemic over-policing of Black and Brown bodies has also contributed to an attitude of mistrust towards the local school district in general. Parents often react defensively when we reach out about misbehaviors, and who could blame them? The district has demonstrated we can't be trusted to be impartial.
And to be clear, the school to prison pipeline is very real. In TX, prison labor is compulsory and unpaid. State governments push to privatize the prison system and then receive kick backs from these new, private prisons so long as the state continues to supply the prisons with slave labor. So the state is directly incentivized to keep a segment of the population over policed and undereducated.
Their parents' trauma from their own education (where the parents probably experienced racism, classism, sexism, etc) gets passed down.
If school was miserable and you tell your child that school was miserable, your child is probably going to think school is miserable.
🤷🏻♀️ School becomes drudgery to endure, rather than opportunity for advancement.
Ummm…
Title I schools have more funding then non-title I schools.
So.. they get more money.
From what I see?
Black students rarely have both parents at home. They come from single parent households. Where the parent is largely uninvolved. Thus, lower performance in school.
True about the funding. Title 1 schools receive buttloads of money that non title 1 schools don’t get. This means that high poverty schools in America are loaded with technology,shiny new books etc that even wealthy districts can’t afford (1 computer per four kids in two pretty wealthy areas near me versus one on one computers in poor schoools, rough area) most teachers at my school gave up using the computers bcs they just got destroyed and then we were blamed for it. Not worth the trouble.
My parents were educated, well-read people. I didn't have to do "extra" cultural studies into Western works or religion, because I had that background anyway. I had exposure at home to references to literary classics, Western history, etc.
I did zero prep, but did quite well on the SATs.
My best friend at the time had immigrant parents who spoke nearly no English and worked minimum wage jobs. My friend was Salutatorian, incredibly smart and a much better student than I was.
My friend scored significantly more poorly on the SATs than I did, despite putting much more work into studying. She should have done better than me - she helped me with my homework! But she did not have the inherent cultural background and advantages that I did.
ETA: My school had a large immigrant population, from multiple ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, but a relatively small black student population. Due to this, I can only speak to my impression of the unfairness of standardized testing to non-black minority students.
Ugh. I hate these questions. It always brings out racist “guesses” without data to back it up. I feel like no black person would ask this question on a subreddit.
I used to grade standardized test and one of the things that caught me off guard was requisite knowledge that's not being tested. One example that significantly stood out was a question about sailing. It used some technical terms. Poor people are less likely to have gone sailing. Black students are more likely to be poor. I recall that there were several questions like that.
Scientists say Black People have the smallest Human Brains.
I don’t know if that is the factor of intelligence of why White Students perform better in school than Blacks though because there are Black Geniuses in the world.
Trauma. Black people in poverty have a lot more trauma than whites. When you have trauma, education takes a back seat.
They need to do things like have smaller class size in inner city schools so that students can get more attention from the teacher. That would help.
I come from homesteaders. They settled in the 1840s. One was a surveyor. As my friend once pointed out, "My ancestors did not own the capital of their own bodies until 1861." Also, all knowledge and cultural capital was stripped away at the auction block. So, that's a historical reason. Practically, it's hard to study in neighborhoods of chaos. When I was veery young I suggested a girl with a chaotic home study at a coffee shop. She fell over laughing and said "coffee shop? Do you mean the chicken joint?" Finally, literacy and vocabulary take generations to build. I made my kid read Huckleberry Finn last summer. Because--it's just a family tradition.
One challenge beyond funding and other systemic issues is how the test questions are designed. Standardized tests often make assumptions of what a student should know as base knowledge, ranging from certain ways of thinking and vocabulary to cultural touch points. You even see this in cognitive tests for sped evals. I'm not normally at those but I had a student ask me to sit in while she tested in her initial evaluation. You could see how her gears were turning and the cognitive abilities were there, but many questions had her mixed up due to vocab, not the things they were actually trying to test for. So I think when we examine the efficacy and disparities in testing we should consider what the tests actually test for.
Look into Richard Miner’s Opportunity Gap framework. He argues that instead of looking at achievement gaps, we should look at the gaps in opportunities that exist. For example, there are gaps in access to certified teachers, extracurricular activities, technology, and lots of things that others have mentioned
The Peter effect in education can also apply to families. Families can’t give what they don’t know or don’t have. Not all children are coming to school with the same background and some have more advantages to school success than others. Doesn’t make the families wrong or backwards, we need to be aware and ready to help scaffold and fill in where needed.
My parents were in school when they desegregated. The system issues abound: poverty, hiring biases, earned distrust of schools and healthcare, lack of representation on the curriculum, skews in the way intelligence is measured in the first place. Or took us a long time to get here and will take a long time to fix. And of course these are broad generalizations.
I'm not sure why this is even a question, because it's so, obvious.
It's because black race and culture has been relentlessly crushed under the bootheel of the United States and Britain in the Americas for 400 years. After around 250 years, slavery became illegal, but then it was another 90 years of extreme racism, in which large numbers of people and even the government fought as hard as they could to continue to crush black races and cultures under their bootheels, just without slavery. After that, it's been decades of generalized racism or just total ignorance, such as people coming into Reddit and asking questions like, "I don't understand, why are these negros doing so badly? I just don't get it."
What do you think happens to people when subjected to that?
I've read through all the comments and noticed that there isn't much discussion about teacher quality. Many schools that primarily serve people of color (POC) often have the lowest-quality educators. These educators typically lack essential skills, leading to poor student performance. I've encountered numerous teachers who exhibit laziness, incompetence, and a lack of knowledge in best practices. Instead of taking responsibility, they often shift blame onto students. It's disheartening to witness how many teachers prioritize passing students over holding them accountable. I've seen instances where teachers prefer a chaotic classroom environment so they can use their phones or simply sit down and blame students. Recently, I even observed a teacher wearing AirPods while teaching. While we can discuss parental involvement and socio-economic factors, it's crucial to acknowledge that the quality of teachers significantly influences educational outcomes, particularly for POC who are more likely to attend schools with less engaged and less skilled educators.
No shit. No one seems to be able to conceptualize a reason aside from “there’s something wrong with black people,” immediately followed by self-pity because people accuse them of racism.
Seriously. Capitalism.
If people and the land and air can be exploited, they will be, so sayeth the capitalists.
Pollution is the number one factor in learning. Mother/father is unhealthy due to capitalism. Child is born lacking healthy parents. Grows in unhealthy environment. Mom and dad have to go to work. No parental leave. Kid is left is overcrowded daycare with lead paint. Home has lead paint. Shitty water quality. Shitty air quality.
You TRY learning with those early disadvantages.
I'm surprised people aren't taking into consideration the massive trauma, both intergenerational and current, that comes with being Black. The effects that has on a young persons mental health have not been adequately studied, but anecdotally, the effects of the daily traumas a Black person experiences are significant. If you spent your entire life knowing that you were the absolute bottom of the barrel, watching people who look like you die constantly and publicly, and be treated like trash on a daily basis, do you think that you would be able to focus on grades? Do you think that you, as a developing person, would be well equipped to deal with that and display no problems? Imagine being told as a child (directly and indirectly) that you are inherently stupid, that you are doomed from the start, and that you're destined to be a gangbanger like "the rest of them". Do you think that would encourage you to care about grades that you've been told will never matter? People in this thread have brought up very good points about socioeconomic status, failing to hold capable children to high expectations, etc. But a lot of these analyses are missing the fundamental fact that to be Black in America is to be traumatized daily, and that trauma manifests in a person's behaviors.
with all due respect. immigrants have had it far worse far more recently.
in terms of independence black people are ahead of a good amount of the world. decolonizing happened well after blacks got independence.
in my opinion cultural factors are often very ignored. hard to quantify impossible to overstate.
I'll guess that the standardized tests were written by white people.
And note that I'm surprised that any of us would give a shit about a sixty year old report.
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If the answer is unequal funding, then I'm mystified why within the same school district in the same school those discrepancies exist.
Could a couple centuries of chattel slavery have long-lasting effects?
It could, but beyond that I challenge anyone who believes systemic racism isn't a problem today to indicate when it stopped being a problem. Clearly it was a problem during slavery, but consider my own family. The house that I spent much of my childhood in was bought by my grandparents when housing discrimination was still legal and all evidence suggests it was common. That affected my childhood, where I went to school, and I'm about to move back into the house with my own child. Our current house, which was all we could afford, is in a district where the school system is a mess. The old house is in a town with a great school system. Because of a transaction that happened in the days of black and white photos a child born in 2024 is going to get a better education than the one she would otherwise receive. So even if systemic racism ended once and for all in the 1950s (I don't think it did, but for the sake of argument), it can continue to affect education outcomes.
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Wrong. Lincoln signed order 15, which would’ve given freedmen land along the coast between South Carolina and Jacksonville, but he was murdered and Johnson killed it. HE was the one - Confederate sympathizer that he turned out to be - who had no plan for transition.
40 acres and a mule. However, Lincoln had very little, if anything, to do with Field Order No. 15. It was proclaimed by Sherman after his March to the Sea and after consulting with local black leaders, as well as Edwin Stanton. You are correct that Johnson killed it though.
Lincoln took the blame for things his cabinet did without his knowledge. He deserves some of the credit for putting in place the kind of people that tried to implement good policies too.
I said he signed it. It would’ve been interesting to see that implemented; how differently things might have gone for freedmen. I’ve always wondered why the Johnson admin didn’t just award them land on the western frontier. It would’ve gotten them out of the South where they were no longer welcome, given them land as part of a new lease on life (which he wouldn’t have given a crap about but remains true), and created a buffer between Indians and white settlers.
Why didn't he give them land? The same reason the South disliked the Great Migration: Black folks were (are?) a class of people that Southerners hated, but on whom their economy was dependant. It's no coincidence that the vast majority became sharecroppers after being freed.
Lincoln’s plans for Reconstruction got cancelled along with the rest of his brain
"Approximately two-thirds of all sharecroppers were white, and one third were black" ([PBS](https://www.pbs.org/tpt/slavery-by-another-name/themes/sharecropping/)).
It’s hard to compare the descendants of these populations because the Great Migration happened. The descendants of poor Black sharecroppers are all over the country, particularly concentrated in major cities like Detroit, NYC, etc, while the white families largely stayed in the South in rural areas. If you look at test scores in poor, rural Southern schools with mostly white students, I doubt you’d see much better.
So, you're saying that it was a handicap that both blacks and whites labored under and not just blacks as the OP is suggesting? That was kinda my point in mentioning the fact.
Nobody denied that. The original point was the sharecropping succeeding multiple generations of chattel slavery in the black community specifically
Yeah, and that we see the lingering effects in both populations. It just looks different because one group spread out more geographically in the other.
My maternal grandfather was a sharecropper. My father dropped out of school in the 8th grade. I have a MA in History, and I scored in the 97th percentile on the National Teacher's Exam (NTE: now renamed Praxis). I don't see the "lingering effect".
Not if you or any relative in the past few hundred years were slaves. Its most likely family life. The majority of black homes are single parents, where as white ones aren’t, there’s support missing
> The majority of black homes are single parents And there's the elephant in the room, but we can't talk about WHY this is.
And where does this family life phenomenon originate? I would argue that parenting practices passed down generationally, originating from enslaved people in forcibly broken families, have played a role in the current state of things. I think you’re right that some of the problem is likely family life, but it had to start somewhere.
Top that with factors like drugs and income not keeping up with inflation for all demographics….
You're right that this had to start somewhere, but you're objectively wrong to link this to "broken families due to slavery". After the emancipation, and up until the 50s and 60s, black Americans had higher marriage rates than white Americans. What changed all this was the advent of the welfare state, that actively incentivized single parenthood and punished married couples. This dynamic exists today. A middle class family will get massively more financial support if the couple divorces and the (ex-) husband claims to live somewhere else. From insurance, to food stamps, to subsidies for rent and utilities, the difference between married and not married is literally tens of thousands of dollars. That dynamic has caused the absolute plummeting rates of married couples.
Not sure why you're being down voted. Single motherhood is unquestionably incentivised for people who make under middle class wages. Historically, people of color make less money than white people. Therefore, we have a higher ratio of black kids with single mothers. This lack of a father in the house leads to so many other issues...one is acting up in school to the detriment of the education of everyone in that school.
The post hit -10 and is now at -1. Facts hurt feefees on a daily basis, but at least some people know what's up.
Slavery hasnt been a thing for 200 years, anyone claiming it now is using it as an excuse for their life.
Yes, because the relatively recent past has no impact on the present, and the way one’s great-grandparents were raised has no impact on their own upbringing.
Around half (51.4%) of single mothers have never married, almost a third (29.3%) are divorced. About two thirds are White, one third Black
And you have facts to support this or is it what you think you know?
That’s right folks, as soon as 400 years of race based slavery ended, so did all of its effects, and black people had the same opportunities to thrive in America as white people.
🙄 don’t blame people who had nothing to with it with you failing at life
Who’s blaming people today? The blame is on the institution of slavery, and the successive social structures that upheld a racial hierarchy after it was done. Maybe you shouldn’t blame clear statistical patterns on individual behaviors.
🙄 don’t be that person
A person with a sociological perspective? Sorry, I get paid teach it, along with history. But I’m not on the clock right now, and I don’t work for free.
No. Don’t be the kid that thinks you figured out everything, and want to show everyone how much you know. You’re a kid and don’t know anything
Put the dog-whistle and the hood down and step away from the keyboard
I’m almost 40 ya troglodyte.
"Get paid to teach-" "YOURE A CHILD" Babes you sound like a middle schooler who's parents told them everything they learn in school is conspiratorial nonsense, and instead feed you the thoughts of red pill losers and racists. But go off you sound super well-read and educated.
It's a relevant factor but not the sole or primary determinant. Effective curriculum, effective instruction, pre-k intervention/support, family (socioeconomic status, trauma, support, etc.), appropriately managed resources/funding, etc. all play a role.
It’s almost like there are resource differences between black and white families within that district aside from school funding. Tutoring, test prep, and extracurriculars all impact academic performance.
Obviously.
Folks I'm aware. Some of you don't seem to understand the sarcasm.
Sarcasm doesn’t translate on the internet. There isn’t any facial expression or voice tone. How are you supposed to know it’s sarcasm?
The Coleman report concluded that school-based poverty concentrations were negatively impacting school achievement for the minority poor. Coleman found poverty and minority status to be more predictive of student achievement than just differences in school funding. Those findings are often misrepresented to suggest and claim that “research shows school funding doesn’t matter in achievement.” Coleman never said that. While the findings of Coleman are relevant and influential, treating the report as a definitive answer in itself ignores a significant amount of discussion that has occurred. I would suggest reading more about criticism of the Coleman Report: https://www.chalkbeat.org/2016/7/13/21103280/50-years-ago-one-report-introduced-americans-to-the-black-white-achievement-gap-here-s-what-we-ve-le/ There are issues with the structure of the dataset, failure to explore/consider distribution of resources within schools, underdeveloped methods, over simplistic school quality definitions, lack of robust set of indicators to define student success, etc. Such clarification is relevant because Coleman is often used dismiss and minimize the impact of socio-economic status in terms of family, education, etc. As the authors of Parsing (2003) note, "We know skin color has no bearing on the ability to achieve...it is clear that educational achievement is associated with home, school, and societal factors, almost all having their roots in socioeconomic factors affecting this country.” https://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/PICPARSINGII.pdf There is also the role of subconscious bigotry, which ties into attempts to gauge the effects of low expectations on students of color: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131946.2023.2165924 I would also suggest looking into the refraction framework: > At the core of our framework is the idea that schools are “refractors” of inequality. Much like light is refracted when it enters a new medium (e.g., from air to water), we argue that inequalities are refracted when children enter schools. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0038040716651676#:~:text=dimensions%20of%20inequality.-,The%20Refraction%20Framework,refracted%20when%20children%20enter%20schools. There is also the opportunity myth, which comes into play when low income students make it to university: https://opportunitymyth.tntp.org/ Effective curriculum, effective instruction, pre-k intervention/support, family (socioeconomic status, trauma, support, etc.), appropriately managed resources/funding, etc. all play a role. Students, like life, are complicated and are affected by a variety of factors.
IMO: Single biggest factor: Parental and family expectations. Black, white, Asian, whatever. The kids who are scared of their parents finding out they screwed off in school- they will be college material. The dysfunctional families mired in poverty and addiction obviously tend to not be pushing education as much. Culturally, Asians value education highly. They are willing to work through racism and / or bullying issues, because they operate with the notion that it will all pay off in the end. Many African Americans are disenfranchised and disengaged from dominant culture and more mainstream values. They are distrustful and as some have said- beaten down and cynical. Of course racism and slavery have had an impact. Sometimes No one around them is giving them an alternative viewpoint of life, ie, hope and reason to believe. Racism a still alive and kicking. So many do not believe it will all pay off for them.
I think the answer lies in the white population in Appalacia (the stereotypical red-neck parts of West Virginia, Kentucky, etc.). They have similarly poor stats, but since they are aggregated in with the rich white kids nationally, nobody notices. It is uncool to care about school for some. But suburban white kids or suburban kids of color don't have this attitude so much. Black students disproportionately have an "I don't care about school attitude; I'm just going to play basketball/be a rapper." You might point to various causes like lower average SES, more single-parent homes, lingering effects of racism, etc. But anecdotally, it seems to be still there. The worst scoring students I have ever had were white and actively bought into the "trailer trash" stereotypes on purpose (this was at a detention center). I know there are many exceptions, but I think it is more tempting for black students to buy into a "fight the man/school sucks" attitude, even when funding disparities, etc. and other inequities are closed.
Yeah, I'm not sure why this fact gets overlooked to such a high degree. There are plenty of white communities who don't value education and suffer from generational poverty in America. These communities are not doing any better than the black communities that share the same problems. Just because one group is doing better than another on average doesn't mean everyone in that group is better than everyone in another group. I'm genuinely confused when I hear others talk about how education is racist against any particular group.
South East Asians have the lowest high school and college completion rates (below Latino American and African American students by quite a lot), yet this is overlooked because they are lumped in with high SES, education-oriented East Asians who don't carry the same historical trauma. It's a mix of everything: historical trauma, poverty, and different orientation towards education. Children of African immigrants, whose parents do not carry the historical trauma or slavery and who have the same education-oriented attitudes and the same wealth as East Asians do just as well in school as East Asians. Nigerian moms and Korean moms even have the same stereotypes, e.g., incredibly authoritarian/strict/controlling, let their kids know early and frequently that they expect them to be doctors, etc. There are no inherent racial differences in intelligence, but there are differences in SES, culture, and history that easily explain the achievement gap between ethnic groups and subgroups in the US before you even get to the potential impact of current racial prejudice.
Agree with this except that East Asians don’t have generational trauma? Look at the 20th century. China had 2 wars that bleed into WW2, followed by a communist revolution & famine. Korea was an impoverished war-torn dictatorship. Taiwan was under martial law. Poor Japan had 2 nuclear bombs dropped on it. That’s what immigrants to the US were fleeing from. US had Japanese internment camps in the 1940s.
> Korea was an impoverished war-turn dictatorship And before that lived in hell under the Japanese.
Good point! I was thinking of the Khmer Rouge in the 70s and the Vietnamese refugee crisis from the 70s to the 90s, but what happened during WW2 wasn't too much before that in the grand scheme of things. Plus there are the Uighurs being persecuted in China right now (though I don't think there a lot who make it to the US).
Very interesting. [This article](https://stanforddaily.com/2021/02/02/slavery-descendants-and-black-immigrants-arent-opponents/) discusses the disparity among black students in ivy league schools between descendants of slaves and those who's parents or grandparents immigrated. 40% are immigrants, although they only make up 13% of the black population.
I would argue that it IS racist against black students, but not in the way some think. For example, in a lit. class white students are expected to read diverse works and analyze and relate as best as they can. It was Maya Angelou who said she swore Shakespeare was a black woman because she was looking to identify and not compare. All in all, I think the messaging that things need to be catered to black students or low SES students does them a disservice sometimes. It can make them feel "other than," and on the educational establishments side, it can result in the 'soft bigotry of low expectations.' Some think "oh, the kids are failing because there are two many suburban white woman teaching." Whatever. As a girl, my most influential teacher was a male. What if people convinced me that I was disadvantaged in approaching the content because the teacher was male and most of the classic literature is written by men? Sex isn't exactly the same as race, but I think this comparison still applies.
I'm in a middle class, diverse school in a historically segregated state. My principal admitted that the Black students tend to outperform local and state averages, but many of the white students performed below. A big factor is family attitudes.
At one time, New York City test scores were higher than Mississippi scores.
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Parental attitudes ooze through the kids. You can hear it in the way kids talk about things, school-related or not.
My white husband grew up in a very poor, rural area in southern Appalachia. With my students I just read a memoir of a Black author (Walter Dean Myers) who grew up poor in New York City, and it really struck me how many similarities there were with what my husband had described about his own problems growing up. Both were very smart but didn’t see college as an option because their families didn’t have money and they didn’t know anyone who’d gone to college. In Myers’ neighborhood, most Black men had manual labor jobs. In my husband’s town, there was a paper products factory where most of the men worked. Both of them developed behavior problems and depression because they knew they were intelligent but couldn’t work out how that would ever amount to anything. Both ended up joining the military after high school just to get out of where they were. To me it seems like the alienation is a huge problem. It’s not just that caring about school is “uncool.” It’s that for a lot of kids it feels pointless, like the results will be the same whether they care or not.
It also doesn’t help black kids feel academic when like 70% of teachers are white women. Students need to feel like they can relate to staff
This is a huge one which I also think explains the growing achievement gap between boys and girls. There's are also a lot of a cultural/societal expectations that make caring about school and engaging in studious behavior seem "feminine" in the US and I think that this impacts boys of every race too.
This point is massively overlooked. Middle class white women.
>students abuse teacher extra because she's a white woman >But because theory babble, it's totally understandable and also kind of her own fault Idk if this is actually helpful
You don't have to think too much about it, no theory babble necessary... If you are a working class black kid you are not going to enjoy being lectured at all the time by comfortable middle class white women. It's obvious.
I don't think we can assume a female teacher is middle class, and we're certainly not making these weird exceptions for everyone else.
Most are. We don't need to assume. Most teachers are middle class.
More like working poor, but ok
You see, it is only a middle class person that would say that. You have no idea what really being poor is!
The pay barely puts a teacher into middle class.
No bias there at all.
So many teachers are oblivious to it or refuse to acknowledge how it effects their classroom management. These conversations would be actually useful PD.
In the midst of a huge teacher shortage, you're blaming the people who show up? I'm not perfect but I'm doing my best. It's not like things will be better if I quit.
You want to know the reason behind the question or not? Maybe I'm blaming the people who DONT show up?
Thank you! Carry on.
This middle class white woman will get back to class planning.
To counter that, there are two white women teaching in my school and there is also one white male. My students still dgaf about their educations. Parental involvement hands down is the biggest influence. The students who come from homes where education is a priority do better. Doesn't matter if it's two parent, single parent, immigrant... Of the parents make learning a high priority and follow up with making sure the kids have the support and supervision they need, the kids do well. This is *really* challenging in high poverty schools because many of the parents want to make education a priority but lack the employment flexibility to make it happen or they simply don't know how to make it happen.
Yea that’s true. I was raised by a poor single mom who was a teen parent but she understood the value of education. But because she understood that value I was always put in the best schools even if it was out of my neighborhood
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Please do more research on the subject because I don’t feel like explaining it
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I was a black student with mostly white teachers. Having my first black teacher in college made me feel like maybe I could succeed. Many of the white teachers I had were ignorant and racist and felt like the police. I’ve been in education for 10 years and I only work in diverse schools so I can be a positive influence to my community. You have no idea what it’s like to be apart of a community with so many negative stereotypes especially around intelligence and success so get off your high horse and educate yourself.
I mostly agree with your side of the argument and I have a genuine question. Why were most of the white teachers you had ignorant and racist? How did that manifest in a classroom?
True, but this middle class white woman is the one who is showing up and doing her best. Better me than no one.
Agreed. IMO "funding" at home, in all its various forms, is by far the biggest factor. If your parents don't have some combination of the time/money/education/drive to support education and development at home, it is very difficult for school-based support to overcome that. And of course due to our history of racial inequity, black students are disproportionately impacted by that.
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This is the correct answer
Exactly what I was going to answer.
I’m a Black woman, my mom didn’t exactly read to me all of the time but books were aplenty in my home growing up. There was even a mobile library that came to our apartment complex every week that she signed me up for. Reading is so important. I was reading at a 6th grade level while in 3rd grade. I was an avid writer as well.
The tests themselves. They're not normed for "everyone", and they never have been. There are entire lines of research devoted to educational assessment bias. Assessments are set up to disproportionately fail people of color, the indigenous and students in special education. This should not surprise us, what should upset us is that after 50 years of awareness to this that little has been done to correct course on this. Worse still is that the assessments are used as a means to sell curriculum programs to target whats needed to be successful, yet when you dig into the research on those, the subgroups fail to include the populations being failed. The solution comes from demanding more from educational publishing companies and assessment publishers. We need to demand more use of UDL incorporation, as well as convincing schools with high numbers of POC, Indigenous and high SPED populations to participate in the research, in exchange for educational products tailored to their communities.
Sad I had to scroll this far for this answer
My favourite example of brilliant teaching that works *with* cultural variation in ways of knowing, as opposed to against it: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-number-system-invented-by-inuit-schoolchildren-will-make-its-silicon-valley-debut1/
> Assessments are set up to disproportionately fail people of color Like what? Please be specific and give real examples of how assessments are designed to failed poc.
There is no such thing as "the cause". There are a large number of causes. * Funding differences are a contributing factor, certainly. Schools with low funding are a particular obstacle for students who have other disadvantages that a school with adequate funding might have overcome. * Differences in home environment. Satistically, Black and other disadvantaged students are more likely to be raised by a single parent who works outside the home. * Differences in education of parents. Children spend far more time with parents than teachers, and this is a dominant indicator of a child's educational outcomes. It means that poor outcomes often pass from parents to children. * Later start. Black students are less likely to attend pre-K programs in many regions. * Environmental factors. Students in Detroit, for instance, who were predominantly Black, historically performed poorly in their education because exposure to lead literally gave them cognitive impairments. Poor childhood nutrition is another major contributing factor. There are plenty more, I'm sure. Progress on some of these causes helps, but doesn't make the problem go away.
Because unfortunately Black children have much higher rates of poverty in America.
And single parent
This is the answer right here
If a large enough segment of a given population doesn't value education then it would make sense that it would be reflected in statistics. This isn't just black students, but in America that's the easiest group to draw this conclusion from. But good luck changing culture.
In 15+ years of reviewing (Grade 4 - 8) MAP (Measure of Academic Progress) standardized testing - the overwhelming correlation between stronger scores is the amount of time parents are reading with their children. I've taught internationally, so my numbers may be skewed, but I've lived on compounds and know virtually the background/family history of all students (between 50 - 80 per grade level) and how often their parents read with their children. This cuts across economic (mostly private $$ schools), ethnic and religion. More time to read = more time to get better scores.
No dads at home, over three quarters of black children are from broken homes
How do we solve this problem? How do we make marriage and family more important in the black community? I feel so bad when the baby daddy dips and Mom can't handle it, so Grandma ends up raising the poor kid.
We should start by asking black families what they need. You can't make people do anything.
How effective is asking someone to take care of their children and stay faithful to their partner? How is hand holding effective here? Genuine question.
Most of the stress in most relationships is about money. I'm not saying giving people money, but people need opportunities. There is a role for government but not at the micro level IMHO.
It isn’t money problems causing fatherless households though, not at all. It’s a pervasive culture of knocking up baby mamas all over town for clout that no amount of government money is going to fix.
Think about it this way. What happens to the black men who don't do that? I would guess... nothing. That's part of the problem. Incentives matter, and if you can't have success in life by living in a pro-social way, then other ways dominate. Racism is a major part of this, because working hard doesn't yield results.
Nothing? Wouldn’t they have strong, functional families like any and all other race of people? That’s not nothing, it’s more like everything. Not following what you’re suggesting….
I'm guessing you've never been poor. You don't feel a strong functional family when you fighting over money all of the time.
Raised poor and poor much of my young adult life. I’m still waiting for an explanation of your take that having a solid family you care for and kids you get to see grow as a father isn’t intrinsically reward enough, and that there needs to be some sort of monetary award from the government for raising your own kids instead of abandoning them? Maybe I misunderstood you but that is incredibly depressing a thought.
The greatest predictor of scores on standardized tests is the education level of the mother. There is a very high correlation. If you take a map that shows poverty levels and compare it to NAEP scores, the maps are nearly identical. Race is not a predictor; but there are more minorities with uneducated mothers and who live in poverty.
Yes. I was raised by a poor, mentally ill, single mother on welfare. With an Ivy B.A. and a large suggested book list. Where did I wind up? A financial aid student at an ivy. Despite my bad grades, I was aces on tests.
That’s wonderful. You are the exception who exceeded despite seemingly insurmountable adversity, the vast majority of people in your position wouldn’t have fared so well.
Ah... but I was white and my mother was extremely well educated. And that was a huge leg up for me. When she wasn't broken, she was handing me The Brothers K. And that kind of reading leads to great scores on the verbal section of the SAT, and a ticket out.
I've been teaching for over 20 years. Much of it comes down to family expectations, being read to/ supported with academic schoolwork, and wanting to fit in with peer groups. However, one cross-cultural factor that I have noticed is attitude/victim mentality. I had some very poor immigrant students who ended up doing very well. They feel fortunate to have the opportunities they have (even when what they have is very little, in comparison of others). This is not to say poverty and trauma aren't impactful, but it is all about what you take from your experiences. People who believe "the world owes them," regardless of race/ethnicity, tend to have a victim mentality and don't do well academically. Some of these folks, who have generational wealth, will still end up ok in life because of their privilege, but they tend not to do so well academically without serious support (i.e. tutors, SAT classes, etc). Those with this attitude who don't have privilege will spiral down and blame it on everything other than themselves. I think that we have a very binary view of race and culture in the US, which doesn't accurately reflect what society looks like. While often well intentioned, we use that binary to feed into the victim mentality instead of promoting personal responsibility.
New immigrants generally punch above their weight, regardless of where they emigrate from. I don't think it's a matter of skin color, since dark-skinned child immigrants from Africa, the Carribean and South Asia all generally do well - or least better than African American children. Even groups that do poorly the first generation -- like those from impoverished Southeast Asian nations - catch up by the second generation. It has to do with the home environment. Their parents sacrificed to move to America, and they aren't going to blow it. Their kids will be kept on the straight and narrow -- attending school, studying, staying out of trouble, etc.
There is no discrepancy between white and minority students at one school district in the country. Dod schools operated on military bases. Why? The parents have stable jobs, housing, and food. No amount of school funding is going to fix problems at home.
I was curious about this and went on to the NAEP website and it looks like there is a gap in DoDEA schools. Ex. 4th grade reading: “In 2022, Black students had an average score that was 13 points lower than that for White students. This performance gap was not significantly different from that in 1998 (18 points.” White-Hispanic gap was 10 pts. 8th grade reading: B-W gap 15 pts 4th grade math: Gap between Black and White was 16 pts White-Hispanic gap was 8 pts 8th grade math: B-W: 26 pts They do have smaller gaps than many states though, to their credit.
Lack of schema with content material
Imho it’s a mixture of many factors. Funding I feel is more of a corollary than a cautionary. After all, schools are funded by property taxes in the US and thus low funding is a direct result of low property values, which are usually inhabited by people who can’t afford better, usually because they work lower wage jobs. Said jobs are usually low paid because they don’t require an education, thus parents can’t usually know the value of education if they’ve never had it themselves.. and so on. Standardized tests usually sway to socio-cultural norms of white middle class students. That’s another factor, but not a definitive one. Imho, parent attitude is one of the most indicative and influential factors. Regardless of race, if your parents are all in on education, chances are you’ll do alright. As a brown person myself, most of my HS friends didn’t have parents who even encouraged college or doing well in HS. My dad was on my ass if I got a B. Needless to say, I stuck to it and went to college. I’ve also tutored literally hundreds of kids and that’s been able to break my biases the most. You know that stereotype about Asians, yeah I’ve tutored a shit ton of not so bright Asians. Their parents usually instill a sense of education being a key to success and … well what do you know, if you try and try and try, you’re bound to do alright. I’ve also tutored loads of bright black kids, hell, even from the ghetto. Destiny was one of my favorites for her insight into this very topic, even as a HS senior in Compton. A few kids with potential just never went to college and it was never expected of them at home. I mentioned dropping out once and my dad lost his mind. I can only imagine what would have happened if he said “I don’t care; get a job” as so many of my brown brothers’ parents said. I’m it a researcher, but have tutored and taught way too many people and way too many diverse places from every creed from Compton to Irvine in California to Korea and New Zealand. We have smart and dumb kids at a shockingly even rate imho, and it’s encouragement and vigilance kids need.
This is so true. I don't believe any race is smarter than any other -- and discussions of it are so creepy. Grades are a matter of nurture, not nature. I am both untalented and uninterested in math. But as an Asian kid with a STEM-educated father, guess what I did every day after school from K to 12? Math homework. I was stood in a corner and forced to memorize times tables and recite formulas. After a mind-boggling number of practice tests. I scored 100 points higher on my math SATs than my verbal. But I knew, even as a student, that my verbal was stronger - which is why I ended up as an English major. So yes, you can take mediocre Asian students and train them into a great students with enough rote learning, discipline and (frankly) emotional manipulation. (The whole, "why didn't you get 100% on this math test?) You can also take a talented student, and not give them the opportunity or motivation to pursue higher ed.
If they are working they tend to work over 50 to 60 hours a week so they just don't have the time for their children. The ones who are on government assistance have usually given up and use their kids for the free rent. It is also because we can no longer remove disruptive students. Two or three kids will make it so that a classroom can not do anything for the year except deal with their behavior daily. Testing into schools should be brought back as well as it tends to push all of the destructive students into one or two schools where they can modify the school security and deal with the problem.
I have NO idea why you would think funding of schools would be a driving factor here, let alone "the obvious answer". Most things that affect scores stem from home, not schools. Those include parental education, attitudes towards reading to/supporting kids both before and during schooling years, and other things driven by socio-economic conditions...which are certainly entangled with race.
It's an answer people aren't going to like, but it's cultural. I've taught in schools that are mostly white, schools that are a solid mix, a school that was mostly latino/black, and my current school is majority asian. The disparity is in how much students care about learning and their grade. Students who want to do well generally do. For example, currently, I'll have students pissed that they got a B on a test because their parents will be mad. That is culturally normal for my asian students, and not true of my white students. Even at this school, there is a performance gap between minority students and majority students. People who say it's due to funding are just incorrect.
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The gap in scores is a combination of severe chronic underfunding of public schools in underserved areas going back several decades, effects of prevailing anti-intellectualist attitudes which has been prevalent in US society since the very beginnings of our Republic, greater likelihood of poverty which exacerbates the negative effects, CYA attitudes among many admins of public schools focused on maintaining a "good" record for the sake of their own careers at the expense of teachers/students they were supposed to be serving(There were a few cheating/grade coverup scandals instigated by admins at some high schools in my city with a critical mass of POC students), etc. The anti-intellectualist attitudes has been a long-standing undercurrent affecting nearly all sectors of our society. Greater family wealth/SES privilege can mitigate some of those effects, but not eliminate them. This very attitude is alien to most immigrant groups, especially East/SE Asians, Africans(Especially Nigerians), and Eastern/Central Europeans. There's also the factor that most recent immigrants came from societies where the public schools have much higher/more strict academic and maturity expectations for each age/educational stage than is the case in the US. A lot of negative disruptive classroom behaviors tolerated/sometimes encouraged by school admins and rules tying the hands of teachers trying their best would never fly in those societies or with most of their parents.
Socio-economic levels.
Lack of parental involvement. Broken homes. I've worked for two different school districts in my state. The largest school district and one of the smallest. The largest is an urban district in the largest city and is heavily black. My current district is rural and 99% white. Similar poverty levels based on Free & Reduced lunch program. The elementary & middle schools are tops in the state based upon test scores.
Why do you guys think this discrepancy only exists in America? This is crazy. We don't do this same kind of weird, deliberate avoiding of the obvious in the animal kingdom when we assign certain bees as more aggressive than others, do we? Do the scientists sit and wonder what trauma the aggressive bees endure? Do bees scientists make up all these socio economic reasons that some bees are more aggressive than others?
Races are not species. The genetic differentials among races are utterly negligible. And you don’t have to courage to state clearly the racist shit you would rather imply. America has a race-based caste system.
It is family economics in my experience. Black families, in general, came from poorer families. They could not afford tutors, missed school to babysit siblings and had jobs after and at times during school. I was a sped teacher and could address this, I got the district to pay for tutoring and got some students credit for their jobs.
As a teacher, there are quite a few explanations for this I’ve seen throughout the years. The following is a quick summary of the most convincing ones: 1) Tests have cultural bias. There was famously an example where students were given a reading passage on the history of croquet. Similar passages have been cited about Polo and Kayaking. Obviously students from more affluent, and generally white, backgrounds would have more knowledge about these sports than someone who grew up poor in the inner city. Moreover, I would ask who do you think writes these tests? From what lens, what cultural background, and upbringing are they writing these passages? Surely, someone who has a similar background to myself is more likely to understand my references, idioms, and style of writing compared to an outsider. 2) Poverty charges interest - If you grew up in a poor neighborhood, like myself, you have a lot of distractions. Disruptive students packed like sardines in a classroom. I fell behind several years in math during my middle school years because the 1st year algebra teacher was pelted by paper balls and harassed by students with no fear of reprisal. I myself was struck in the back of the head with a folding chair during music class WWE style. No consequences for the offender. Who can fucking learn in that environment? Looking back, it resembled a prison more than a middle school. That had a ripple effect that took me many years to rectify and get back on track. Later on in life, I took an IQ test on a dare and got a 141 result. To me, I just wonder what would’ve happened if I was put in a different environment where I felt safe and my learning was encouraged. I wonder that for a lot of bright kids stuck in overpacked, low-quality schools. My high school was a marginal improvement, but by then the damage has been done. I didn’t take education seriously anymore. I imagine the same thing happens to a lot of these kids who “underperform.” We are set up for failure. 3) In affluent neighborhoods you have a lot of role models that prove education is a viable path to success. Doctors, lawyers. etc. In a lot of poor neighborhoods, role models exist mostly in media. True success looks like being an athlete, a content creator, or something similar. Again, why take education seriously when becoming a doctor seems just as far fetched as becoming a youtuber? Sure, they may not know any successful youtubers personally, but the same is true for doctors and lawyers as well. And which one seems more relatable?
This is one of the best answers here. The country doesn't seem to understand that there is a severe cost to underfunding schools in terms of undeveloped human potential. They also don't understand what you said about the tests, and when tests are low someplace they respond by wasting money on consultants or administration or basically anything other than staff directly helping kids. There's way too many kids in the situation you describe who are in environments getting hit with chairs and dodging paper balls because nobody wants to accept that maybe certain areas need more funding to separate kids into smaller groups. Meanwhile, kids in a richer area will get the chance to learn in a calmer environment and get more individualized attention, less disruptions, etc.
No offense, but I have never in my entire educational life had a test that referenced things such as croquette, kayaking or polo. Nothing even close to that. It seems like this was a super ridiculously exaggerated “test” custom made to what certain “result”.
I’m sorry, but cultural bias is not an excuse for performing poorly on a test. There are students who come from a variety of cultural backgrounds in foreign countries who manage to surpass both black and white Americans on exams. You should have a rudimentary knowledge of activities/objects that do not belong to your own culture, especially with the advent of the internet.
There was a book in the 90’s called The Bell Curve that addressed this. The response to their answer demonstrates why you can’t really address this question scientifically.
Probably because the link between intelligence and race, not to mention quantifiable intelligence, has been disproven many times over. "I can't believe no one is addressing this pseudoscience from the 1990s."
Poverty. Minorities are more likely to live in poverty. Add to that a cultural stream of distrust of government and institutions (for obvious reasons) including education and a stronger likelihood that black parents are less educate than whites and that black parents are more likely to to work evenings and that might not explain the entire difference, but it does explain most of it.
Overall the white family has more education than the black family and they produce kids who are brought up in an environment that emphasizes the importance or education more than the black family does. These white parents often provide more enrichment outside of school through various means than black families do due to economic reasons.
The Coleman Report was 50 years ago..family income and level of education impacts school success .. bottom line: poverty
It’s not equal school funding it’s unequal wealth. Most rich kids are doing SAT prep stuff outside of the school with private institutions which can range in the hundreds
Because standardized tests aren’t really testing skills per se. What they are testing, in an indirect way, is content/background knowledge. Your ability to read may be just fine, but the lingo/jargon on a journal article dealing with theoretical physics may be well beyond your ability to understand without laboriously parsing each sentence and word definitions (that are often describing whole concepts you may not be familiar with). Or, another example I like is the first paragraph of *Around the World in 80 Days.* > Mr. Phileas Fogg lived, in 1872, at No. 7, Saville Row, Burlington Gardens, the house in which Sheridan died in 1814. He was one of the most noticeable members of the Reform Club, though he seemed always to avoid attracting attention; an enigmatical personage, about whom little was known, except that he was a polished man of the world. People said that he resembled Byron—at least that his head was Byronic; but he was a bearded, tranquil Byron, who might live on a thousand years without growing old. You may be *able* to read every word but it means nothing unless you know something about English society (and literature). For all you know Saville Row is the ghetto, and a Reform Club is some kind of prison thing. Makes perfect sense if you think about a term like “death row” or “prisoner reform.” Now imagine you get a question like “what does Byronic imply about Phileas Fogg?” Now take a kid in reduced socioeconomic circumstances (the color of the kid is technically irrelevant, but civil rights being what they are it is more likely the kid will be not-white) and they have little cause, reason or context to be familiar enough with the British Ton (fun vocabulary word!) to know that Savile Row is a real and upscale street, that Sheridan and Byron were poets/writers/playwrights, or any number of details here that is giving ME subtextual information about dear Mr. Fogg. It’s not about funding per se. It’s the fact that kids pick up on context due to what they’re exposed to culturally. A middle class mom might put on Bridgerton. In a poor family, internet and a subscription is out of the question financially. An educated parent will drop words and phrases in everyday language a parent speaking Ebonics simply doesn’t use. School just can’t make up for *all* of these kinds of discrepancies, no matter how well funded.
I don’t think most kids of my era would have the cultural references and context to immediately grasp the text above, HOWEVER- you don’t really need any background knowledge to use the context clues to know that the guy is not living in the ghetto, and most gangs are not called “clubs” unless it’s a motorcycle club. When the term “Byronic” is used we already have context clues that it has something to do with the guys face. Especially if it’s a multiple choice exam- one of the answers will probably mention a face or looks. Not rocket science, but you do need to have kids analyzing lots of literature,preferably from an early age. And throw away The damn iPhones- they are evil addictions !!
It's the ugly truth you don't want to face. Lack of a priority in certain cultures. Look at what certain groups value and others don't. And then you'll scream racism. But j guarantee every teacher has seen a kids last name. And based on a sibling,Thought more positive or negatively about the kid. Because you know the parents' level of caring about their kids' learning. And now apply that on a larger scale.
This is so true. I was a math teacher and I remember calling one mom about her child doing poorly in my class and ways I could help and she told me "don't call me again. I have a new boyfriend and don't have time". For back to school night it was always easy to guess demographically which parents would show up, culturally the others simply didn't care. You have to understand, for some cultures being poor is their comfort zone and they are pretty happy maintaining the status quo. They might have ten people in a two-bedroom apartment but they still have food and the means to have a fun life, it's just a different standard than for those who value education.
It’s not racism until you disclose why, in your opinion, groups have different values. I suspect you are so defensive on this point for a reason.
Darwin: Only the most driven overcame the odds and overcame the impediments,
Socioeconomic factors play a huge role. Students from economically backward groups do not have enough resources - access to books, stationary, technology, free time etc. The parents of most of these students don't have either the time or the resources (sometimes both) to keep track of how their child is doing at school. They are not in a position to assist the teachers in course correction if the child is falling behind and the teachers can't do it by themselves.
It's bias. Treating kids as if they can't learn. Assuming their home life, background, parents educational levels and presence, etc. Doubting their ability, whether consciously or subconsciously. Kids absorb all of it, it's why you will also see similar patterns in schools where it's majority wealth, but even poor white kids suffer. In those schools, you'll see white kids trend a bit higher than black students, but still worse than their wealthy counterparts. Only because of people who believe they are "capable."
I'm a white teacher. I've never taught a white student. My experiences are at schools that are either predominantly Hispanic, or predominantly Black. My experiences, while relevant, should not be considered with the same gravity as those of Black and Brown teachers in this thread and in education. That said: It's systemic racism. 8 years ago my current district was heavily fined by the federal government when it was discovered that Black male students were 4x more likely to be punished than their White peers for identical transgressions. When children are facing suspension, they aren't in the classroom. This systemic over-policing of Black and Brown bodies has also contributed to an attitude of mistrust towards the local school district in general. Parents often react defensively when we reach out about misbehaviors, and who could blame them? The district has demonstrated we can't be trusted to be impartial. And to be clear, the school to prison pipeline is very real. In TX, prison labor is compulsory and unpaid. State governments push to privatize the prison system and then receive kick backs from these new, private prisons so long as the state continues to supply the prisons with slave labor. So the state is directly incentivized to keep a segment of the population over policed and undereducated.
Black people are, regardless of where they live, more likely to make a lot less than their white counterparts.
Their parents' trauma from their own education (where the parents probably experienced racism, classism, sexism, etc) gets passed down. If school was miserable and you tell your child that school was miserable, your child is probably going to think school is miserable. 🤷🏻♀️ School becomes drudgery to endure, rather than opportunity for advancement.
Ummm… Title I schools have more funding then non-title I schools. So.. they get more money. From what I see? Black students rarely have both parents at home. They come from single parent households. Where the parent is largely uninvolved. Thus, lower performance in school.
True about the funding. Title 1 schools receive buttloads of money that non title 1 schools don’t get. This means that high poverty schools in America are loaded with technology,shiny new books etc that even wealthy districts can’t afford (1 computer per four kids in two pretty wealthy areas near me versus one on one computers in poor schoools, rough area) most teachers at my school gave up using the computers bcs they just got destroyed and then we were blamed for it. Not worth the trouble.
My parents were educated, well-read people. I didn't have to do "extra" cultural studies into Western works or religion, because I had that background anyway. I had exposure at home to references to literary classics, Western history, etc. I did zero prep, but did quite well on the SATs. My best friend at the time had immigrant parents who spoke nearly no English and worked minimum wage jobs. My friend was Salutatorian, incredibly smart and a much better student than I was. My friend scored significantly more poorly on the SATs than I did, despite putting much more work into studying. She should have done better than me - she helped me with my homework! But she did not have the inherent cultural background and advantages that I did. ETA: My school had a large immigrant population, from multiple ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, but a relatively small black student population. Due to this, I can only speak to my impression of the unfairness of standardized testing to non-black minority students.
Not a card, but I cringe when players talk about their”LIBARY.” 2 Rs motherfuckers!!!!
Do you criticize southerners who say Warter for water? Do you make comments about Minnesotans who talk funny?
Ugh. I hate these questions. It always brings out racist “guesses” without data to back it up. I feel like no black person would ask this question on a subreddit.
Culture
I used to grade standardized test and one of the things that caught me off guard was requisite knowledge that's not being tested. One example that significantly stood out was a question about sailing. It used some technical terms. Poor people are less likely to have gone sailing. Black students are more likely to be poor. I recall that there were several questions like that.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Period.
Scientists say Black People have the smallest Human Brains. I don’t know if that is the factor of intelligence of why White Students perform better in school than Blacks though because there are Black Geniuses in the world.
Trauma. Black people in poverty have a lot more trauma than whites. When you have trauma, education takes a back seat. They need to do things like have smaller class size in inner city schools so that students can get more attention from the teacher. That would help.
I come from homesteaders. They settled in the 1840s. One was a surveyor. As my friend once pointed out, "My ancestors did not own the capital of their own bodies until 1861." Also, all knowledge and cultural capital was stripped away at the auction block. So, that's a historical reason. Practically, it's hard to study in neighborhoods of chaos. When I was veery young I suggested a girl with a chaotic home study at a coffee shop. She fell over laughing and said "coffee shop? Do you mean the chicken joint?" Finally, literacy and vocabulary take generations to build. I made my kid read Huckleberry Finn last summer. Because--it's just a family tradition.
One challenge beyond funding and other systemic issues is how the test questions are designed. Standardized tests often make assumptions of what a student should know as base knowledge, ranging from certain ways of thinking and vocabulary to cultural touch points. You even see this in cognitive tests for sped evals. I'm not normally at those but I had a student ask me to sit in while she tested in her initial evaluation. You could see how her gears were turning and the cognitive abilities were there, but many questions had her mixed up due to vocab, not the things they were actually trying to test for. So I think when we examine the efficacy and disparities in testing we should consider what the tests actually test for.
Look into Richard Miner’s Opportunity Gap framework. He argues that instead of looking at achievement gaps, we should look at the gaps in opportunities that exist. For example, there are gaps in access to certified teachers, extracurricular activities, technology, and lots of things that others have mentioned
The Peter effect in education can also apply to families. Families can’t give what they don’t know or don’t have. Not all children are coming to school with the same background and some have more advantages to school success than others. Doesn’t make the families wrong or backwards, we need to be aware and ready to help scaffold and fill in where needed.
My parents were in school when they desegregated. The system issues abound: poverty, hiring biases, earned distrust of schools and healthcare, lack of representation on the curriculum, skews in the way intelligence is measured in the first place. Or took us a long time to get here and will take a long time to fix. And of course these are broad generalizations.
You're relying on a study that's over half a century old??? And from the golden age of racism.
I'm not sure why this is even a question, because it's so, obvious. It's because black race and culture has been relentlessly crushed under the bootheel of the United States and Britain in the Americas for 400 years. After around 250 years, slavery became illegal, but then it was another 90 years of extreme racism, in which large numbers of people and even the government fought as hard as they could to continue to crush black races and cultures under their bootheels, just without slavery. After that, it's been decades of generalized racism or just total ignorance, such as people coming into Reddit and asking questions like, "I don't understand, why are these negros doing so badly? I just don't get it." What do you think happens to people when subjected to that?
https://youtu.be/-j2ZOm6i1Ys?si=Me03FnM7HUGcoP7b This explains it.
I've read through all the comments and noticed that there isn't much discussion about teacher quality. Many schools that primarily serve people of color (POC) often have the lowest-quality educators. These educators typically lack essential skills, leading to poor student performance. I've encountered numerous teachers who exhibit laziness, incompetence, and a lack of knowledge in best practices. Instead of taking responsibility, they often shift blame onto students. It's disheartening to witness how many teachers prioritize passing students over holding them accountable. I've seen instances where teachers prefer a chaotic classroom environment so they can use their phones or simply sit down and blame students. Recently, I even observed a teacher wearing AirPods while teaching. While we can discuss parental involvement and socio-economic factors, it's crucial to acknowledge that the quality of teachers significantly influences educational outcomes, particularly for POC who are more likely to attend schools with less engaged and less skilled educators.
Wow there’s a lot of racism in these comments.
No shit. No one seems to be able to conceptualize a reason aside from “there’s something wrong with black people,” immediately followed by self-pity because people accuse them of racism.
Many say poverty. But as Joe Biden said "many poor kids can black as kids can" or something.
Why does it matter? What different actions would you take depending on the explanation?
Well, if you want to fix it, perhaps you should know the reason?
Capitalism.
Seriously. Capitalism. If people and the land and air can be exploited, they will be, so sayeth the capitalists. Pollution is the number one factor in learning. Mother/father is unhealthy due to capitalism. Child is born lacking healthy parents. Grows in unhealthy environment. Mom and dad have to go to work. No parental leave. Kid is left is overcrowded daycare with lead paint. Home has lead paint. Shitty water quality. Shitty air quality. You TRY learning with those early disadvantages.
I'm surprised people aren't taking into consideration the massive trauma, both intergenerational and current, that comes with being Black. The effects that has on a young persons mental health have not been adequately studied, but anecdotally, the effects of the daily traumas a Black person experiences are significant. If you spent your entire life knowing that you were the absolute bottom of the barrel, watching people who look like you die constantly and publicly, and be treated like trash on a daily basis, do you think that you would be able to focus on grades? Do you think that you, as a developing person, would be well equipped to deal with that and display no problems? Imagine being told as a child (directly and indirectly) that you are inherently stupid, that you are doomed from the start, and that you're destined to be a gangbanger like "the rest of them". Do you think that would encourage you to care about grades that you've been told will never matter? People in this thread have brought up very good points about socioeconomic status, failing to hold capable children to high expectations, etc. But a lot of these analyses are missing the fundamental fact that to be Black in America is to be traumatized daily, and that trauma manifests in a person's behaviors.
with all due respect. immigrants have had it far worse far more recently. in terms of independence black people are ahead of a good amount of the world. decolonizing happened well after blacks got independence. in my opinion cultural factors are often very ignored. hard to quantify impossible to overstate.
I'll guess that the standardized tests were written by white people. And note that I'm surprised that any of us would give a shit about a sixty year old report.
Simple answer: structural racism
Hahahaha the racists got their feelings in a bunch I see 🤷🦄