The Black-White Achievement Gap
Q. I
thought busing and the billions we've poured into social engineering programs
like Head Start and Title I were supposed to get rid of the test-score
disparities between black and white children in this country. Didn't they?
No, far from it. According to
the National Center on Education Statistics, the racial gap in math and reading
test scores is actually wider today than in the late 1980s.
The
evidence is clear, that despite mountains of tax dollars spent on early
childhood education programs for the poor, many of whom are also minority group
members, and on in-school programming such as the federal remediation program,
Title I, any gains that minority children display in the early years of school
wash out by about third grade, and after that, minorities are over-represented
in in-school suspensions and dropout statistics, and under-represented in
upper-level math and science courses and the college preparatory track.
Not
even the infusion of an extra billion dollars or two zeroing in specifically on
improving inner-city urban schools will help. In Kansas City, a judge ordered
an intervention of just that size because of declining student achievement in
the inner city after "white flight" to the suburbs . . . but a few years later,
despite the massive infusion of extra cash, students were doing even worse, and
the district lost its accreditation.
No
one is saying that Caucasians have better intelligence than minorities, or
anything of the kind. So what is the reason for this persistent, decades-old
gap?
According
to a long list of specialty organizations and observers, it comes down to:
(1)
Better parent education, especially preserving
marriage, health care, family educational expectations, and home management skills,
and working with minority mothers so that the frequency, elaboration and verbal
interaction quality of their speech with their children is improved, so that
parents can guide their children's educations with more success;
(2)
School choice, such as:
n scholarship tax credits for
donors who get a tax break in exchange for providing money to reduce the cost
of tuition at private schools for low-income parents who want to give their
children a private education;
n free private-school tuition for
kindergarten through second grade subsidized by taxpayers if the parents choose
it, which would be funded by the dismantling of the huge education bureaucracy
that has been built up around decades-old, failed policies and methods of
trying to plug the racial achievement gap;
n phonics-ONLY reading instruction
in the early grades to compensate for the weaker vocabulary experience of
low-income children, and
n merit pay / battle pay for
inner-city teachers whose "value-added" contributions as measured by
standardized test scores and other objective data show they deserve extra pay, and
(3)
Better
out-of-school, complementary educational experiences to approximate what
middle-class and wealthy students get in the way of after-school, weekend and
summer enrichment opportunities.
Here
are some of the organizations which zero in on closing the achievement gap.
They don't all share those three goals, and don't much agree with each other,
but they all do have some excellent ideas and input into this national effort:
www.nabse.org
(National Alliance of Black School Educators)
www.NAMEorg.org
(National Association for Multicultural Education)
www.naaha.com
(National African-American Homeschoolers Alliance)
www.urbancure.org
(Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education; Star Parker)
www.msanetwork.org/aboutus.asp
(Minority Student Achievement Network)
And here are articles for more
information:
Inequality
at the Starting Gate (Economic Policy Institute)
www.epinet.org/content.cfm/books_starting_gate
Closing
the Achievement Gap: Principles for Improving the Educational Success of All
Students
http://eric-web.tc.columbia.edu/digest/dig169.asp
The
Black-White Test Score Gap
http://brookings.nap.edu/books/0815746091/html/1.html#pagetop
Add
It Up: Using Research to Improve Education for Low-Income and Minority Students
http://www.prrac.org/additup.pdf
Raising
Minority Academic Achievement: A Compendium of Education Programs and Practices
www.aypf.org/forumbriefs/2001/fb111901.htm
Erasing
the Education Gap
www.ucc.org/justice/witness/wfj062402.htm
Get
Teachers, Parents on Same Page
http://newsobserver.com/news/story/1848339p-1845219c.html
The
Broad Foundation
www.broadfoundation.org
Homework: Most
observers agree that the single-most important way of equalizing achievement
among the races is to have public policies that foster competition among types
of schools. The monopoly public school model has been shown to not work for
African-American kids; it's long past time we moved on to a more effective and
innovative approach, starting with school choice.