Race & Education

Education is a very interesting institution because, one way or another, everybody has to go through it. Obviously, some are more successful than others. Because of this, education is a good place to look at points of demographic divergence and see trends. While researching for my persuasive essay about the socioeconomic achievement gap, I found many disturbing things out about how American kids are doing in schools. Basically, unless you are well off, white and straight, you have a decent chance of experiencing some sort of setback in your academic career, whether you notice it or not. Since this blog is about race, I'd like to delve deeper into the statistics behind racial achievement in school.

If you couldn't guess, there is a problem when it comes to race in education. Many different minority groups such as blacks or Hispanics make, on average, worse test scores than their white peers. This happens across the board; it doesn't matter the subject or the class. This gap extends to every single minority group, save only for Asian-Americans, who actually tend to do better than even whites in an academic setting. Also, minorities have problems graduating high school with only just above 70% of Hispanics and 68% of blacks graduating. This is obviously a huge problem, since education is what prepares our children for the world, giving them the skills they need to succeed. How is it that entire ethnic groups can be doing so much worse than whites? It's preposterous to propose that black or Hispanic people are just less intelligent, since there is no evidence to support such a claim. What is it, then, that is causing these minority students to achieve at such low levels? Nobody has completely figured it out yet, but there are many different theories.

One of the most plausible theories is that, since minorities are more likely to be impoverished, this crosses over to the classroom. As was mentioned before, poor people are disadvantaged in school from the beginning. They have more cognitive difficulty right off the bat, and this bad trend only gets worse later in their academic career because being bad at school makes it harder to get better. Also, schools with large amounts of poverty are likely to not have much funding as well, which could definitely affect learning. According to this article, African-Americans are exposed to high-poverty schools at a much higher rate than whites. Could it be that poverty is the only reason behind whites out-performing minorities in school? It could be a large contributor, but research suggests that the problem goes deeper in many ways.

One popular theory with certain researchers is the "acting white" theory. This is a theory that suggests that black kids are discouraged, explicitly or implicitly, from succeeding at school because their peers judge them for "acting white". This is something that can make sense; peer pressure is very effective to teenagers, especially when you live in a dangerous neighborhood where every friend you have helps. Also, many black celebrities have confessed to have experienced talk similar to this. Even Barack Obama referenced this theory as a Senator in 2004, saying "Children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.". Barack himself has certainly read a book or two in his youth, so is what he is saying true?  According to some, this theory is absolute malarkey. What these young, black scholars experience is the same sort of treatment that I and many other kids got as a kid. The "acting white" accusation is, in reality, just an extension of being called a nerd or a geek. While being called a nerd has probably discouraged one or two kids from succeeding academically, it is not a widespread social problem that needs to be solved.

When trying to solve a problem, it is very hard to think of of preventative measures when you have no idea about the causation of said problem. I have only talked about two ideas that are tossed around -- there are dozens of potential reasons as to why there are achievement gaps in American schools today. It could be as simple as having English as a second language; an issue that is probably very relevant to the millions of children who are born to illegal immigrants. While the issue itself is ambiguous, the goal is straightforward: to provide every single American child with the same opportunity to succeed in a country that prides itself in giving everyone "equal opportunity". It is often stated that a goal of the American economy is "economic equity". I find it very hard to believe that equity is achievable when minority kids are performing at a lower academic level before they get into middle school. These are the things that need to be fixed, guys.