Proficiency of Black Students Is Found to Be Far Lower Than Expected

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/education/09gap.html?_r=2&src=twt&twt=nytimesnational

by Alex3917 • 16 years ago

23 34 16 years ago

nytimes.com

asmithmd1• 16 years ago

I started to develop a little skepticism when I came across this quote:

"In college, black men represented just 5 percent of students in 2008."

Isn't that exactly how many you would expect based on the demographics of the US?

Alex39173• 16 years ago

Well by the time you get to the NYT article you're on the third layer of overlapping propaganda, after NAEP and the CGCS. But since most HN readers aren't interested in reading through the hundreds of pages of methodology for the NAEP, you just have to take pretty much the whole thing with a grain of salt.

nickpinkston• 16 years ago

Wikipedia says they're 14% of US population - I'm not sure how the age distribution is, but that's plenty high enough to show a problem.

billpaetzke2• 16 years ago

But the stat is about black men only--excluding women. So 7% then.

Is 5% actual vs 7% desired a big enough gap to cause alarm? I don't know.

billpaetzke2• 16 years ago

Blacks account for 13% of the population, according to US Census estimates of 2009 (39.6 mil / 307 mil). (Now, we only want to look at 18-25 yr olds, but I don't have that data. So we have to assume equal distribution among age ranges).

And let's say, of that 13%, half are men and half are women. So, it would be "normal" if 6.5% of college students are black men.

5% vs 6.5% doesn't seem like a HUGE problem.

Data source: http://www.factfinder.census.gov/servlet/DTTable?_bm=y&-...

JabavuAdams7• 16 years ago

I suspect that home and community culture is the main reason, and race is somewhere off in the noise.

I'd like to see research on different home cultures. I'd especially like to see a way to assign a metric to a family to rate how "scholarly" the environment is for the children.

You couldn't ask people directly, because pretty much every parent will agree with the statement: "We think education is important." It's just that a lot of them don't translate that into action. E.g. "What, why would you read to a 1 year old? They can't understand it."

Instead, go to substantive things like:

1) How often did you read to your child at age 0-3 months

2) When did your child first start watching TV?

3) Do you have books or magazines in the house?

4) Do you read with your kids every day?

...

Alex39173• 16 years ago

Reading to your kids doesn't seem to help them read more proficiently, at least not on average. The 1994 Scarborough & Dobrich paper on this is one of the most famous in education literature, and there are a bunch of good responses to it as well.

JabavuAdams7• 16 years ago

I'll check that out, if I have time.

The problem I have with a lot of these studies and various parenting advice is that tiny, tiny details matter.

Word choice, what you remark on, what you reward, and how you behave by default (as opposed to when consciously teaching) matter so much.

Investigations into child psychology should probably teach us a lot about the children, themselves.

The problem with investigating parenting is that you really need a 24/7 video log.

util• 16 years ago

How about encouraging them to read by themselves?

stevie2• 16 years ago

I think this is wrong.

Reading does help, but it has to done in the correct way, like much else to do with education in general.

The Success For All study done in 2006:

"Conclusion The quantity and quality of research on Success for All, and the positive outcomes found in almost all studies by more than fi fty investigators in eighteen different research institutions worldwide, clearly establish that Success for All is highly effective in increasing student reading. The effects can be quite substantial, averaging more than half of the national white-minority achievement gap and almost a full grade equivalent by second grade (see Slavin et al., 2006). In a time when educators are increasingly being asked to use proven programs, Success for All is the best demonstration in existence of the idea that rigorous research on practical programs can be done and can show substantial positive effects. Every child should have a right to participate in a program with this level of evidence."

wdewind• 16 years ago

Agreed. Anyone who has been through a metro public school system has more than enough anecdotal evidence to know it's not race (and NOT the school), but the culture and family the kid goes home to at night that makes the biggest difference.

While I agree with the idea of picking specific metrics and asking about them, at a cultural level I think what is going on here is a little more complicated than simply not knowing.

Frequently public schools teach things that the subcultures feel are simply not relevant, to their lives. Let me give you an example:

When I showed up for day 1 of high school, I was immediately bombarded with the idea of applying to college. I was essentially told that the next four years would be spent preparing for college - that's what the "point" of hs was. This in an of itself is pretty bad, in terms of limiting intellectual exploration and all that good stuff.

But imagine you aren't planning to go to college. Imagine no one in your family went to college, and it's likely you'll end up working a blue collar job where your degree doesn't matter. What exactly should your parents be doing/saying here to get their kid interested in school? And why even bother?

TLDR: I think this is much more about subcultural groups feeling excluded from, and thus rejecting, mainstream education, and the cultural norms that are projected from it, than simply explaining the cultural norms more scientifically.

maxklein4• 16 years ago

Well, I suspect that scholarly families tend to continue that way, and that a group of people that have been farmers for generations, and that were forced into schools with other farmers children just one generation ago are going to not be reading to their children everyday, or have a lot of books and magazines in the house.

African-American culture did not just happen on its own, you know. There were major societal factors that forced that group of people to have a culture that is the way it is.

JabavuAdams7• 16 years ago

I don't understand why you're taking this tone. I think you're misinterpreting what I'm saying.

It's very important to make the culture vs. race point because culture changes over time, as you've pointed out.

Also, I like to focus on culture because it's crazy that people get ultra-detailed in their discussion of race, while often ignoring this thing that is much more causative, in my experience.

anamax• 16 years ago

> a group of people that have been farmers for generations, and that were forced into schools with other farmers children just one generation ago are going to not be reading to their children everyday, or have a lot of books and magazines in the house.

How many farmers do you know and where?

I'm serious. Commercial farming in the US is quite high-tech and successful farming has always been reasonably intellectual.

roel_v2• 16 years ago

"1) How often did you read to your child at age 0-3 months"

Is there any documented benefit to this? I'll be a father in about 3.5 months so I still have a little time to prepare :)

JabavuAdams7• 16 years ago

I'm using this as a measure of how scholarly the parents are.

Kids imitate what you do, so I wasn't thinking about it in the context of a learning program, but rather being part of a house where everyone reads all the time.

It's useful to know if it's the kind of place where reading to the child would take extra effort, or where not reading to the child would take extra effort.

dflock• 16 years ago

There's a chapter on this in Freakonomics:

"Factors that are important in determining high standardized test scores in children include: highly educated parents, high socioeconomic status, maternal age of greater than thirty when the child was born, low birth weight, English as the primary language spoken in the home, parental involvement in the PTA, and many books in the home environment. Also, adopted children tended to have lower standardized test scores than their non-adopted peers. Factors that are not important in determining high standardized test scores in children include: the family is intact, the parents recently moved to a better neighborhood, the mother didn't work between birth and kindergarten, the child attended Head Start (US government program providing education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services to low-income children and their families), the parents regularly take the child to museums, the child is regularly spanked, the child frequently watches television, the parents read to the child nearly every day. Noting the overgeneralization, Levitt explains that what is important in parenting is who you are, not what you do."

http://www.wikisummaries.org/Freakonomics:_A_Rogue_Economist...

JabavuAdams7• 16 years ago

What you do is who you are.

It was a surprise to me that not all fathers read math books for enjoyment in their spare time.

It was a surprise to me that people study things they're not interested in.

I've noted elsewhere in this thread the difference between doing things "because it'll be good for the kids", and doing things that are good for the kids because it's what you do every day.

So it could be that parents who do these enrichment activities but don't "live it" are dragging the average down.

I'm not sure how you'd test for "preach it" vs. "live it", though.

Towle_4• 16 years ago

The more excuses any given demographic has available to it, the worse it will fare.

maxklein4• 16 years ago

That's a terribly dismissive thing to say about people who are just one generation away from not being able to vote because they were born darker than others.

Towle_4• 16 years ago

It should be noted that it matters not whether those excuses are valid. When an entire group buys into the idea, correctly or incorrectly, that their lack of success is someone else's fault, the group as a whole stops trying at all. "What's the point in trying? They won't let us succeed."

edit 1: A strong, telling corollary is that forced immigrant groups always fare poorer than willful immigrant groups. Always.

edit 2: How many generations removed from communist tyranny are America's Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants? How're they doing?

JabavuAdams7• 16 years ago

This is true. I'm always amused that people expect the legacy of US segregation to work itself out in a couple of generations.

But ... the culture of victimization is a terrible thing. You have to somehow pretend the injustices didn't happen, while working on the aftermath of the injustices.

Proficiency of Black Students Is Found to Be Far Lower Than Expected

Related Stories