Mind the Gap: Why Good Schools are Failing Black Students
October 31, 2009 
6 Comments
A clear gap has emerged between students of low-income and high-income families. Because of general economic imbalances between caucasians and black in the United States, criticisms of America’s schools are frequently characterized by racial arguments. Whether it is simply correlation or true causality, our schools are, without doubt, failing black students.
This phenomenon is especially visible at Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, part of the South Orange-Maplewood School District. At a high school which is 60% black and 40% white, the achievement gap between black and white students can be seen just by observing the racial makeup of its classes. In her radio documentary Mind the Gap: Why Good Schools are Failing Black Students, Nancy Solomon traces educational and social development, from preschool to high school. She includes interviews from pre-school directors, parents, and students, addressing both sides of the debate on leveling and other proposed causes for the schools’ failure to produce successful black students. History teacher James Cotter leads her down the halls of Columbia, playing the “Guess the Level” game, in which Cotter can easily guess each class’s level (regular, honors, advanced, etc.) based on the number of white students. Much of the documentary is comprised of interviews like Cotter’s. Solomon is able to convey her message without the dogmatism that tends to embitter discussions on race. Why Good Schools are Failing Black Students is truly a documentary; whether or not you agree with the interviewees’ claims, you will emerge with a better understanding of why our schools are failing black students. How we fix them is up to you.
Mind the Gap: Why Good Schools are Failing Black Students will air on WNYC AM 820 on Saturday, October 31st at 2 PM. It will air again on Sunday night, November 1st on WNYC at 8 PM. You can also listen to the complete documentary below.
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Very interesting topic will bookmark your site to check if you write more about in the future.
Outstanding listen. Most useful hour I’ve spent on a school night in a while.
“…local selective pressures exerted even over several hundred years can cause big changes in cognitive function.” – MK
This is a compelling biological argument that may be true in the case of the Ashkenazi. But I’m hesitant to believe that, on a larger scale, the impact of natural selection on the brain over mere centuries could really be affecting the achievement of racial groups so profoundly. The human brain, by and large, looks the same as it did hundreds of years ago. This is especially true in the case of the limbic system, which contains the true indicators of intelligence and cognitive function: the thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdala, and hippocampus. Disorders are different. When carried through smaller biological groups, the effect on intelligence of these disorders may be noticeable. But in the case of the achievement gap, where the correlation between race and performance is much more widespread, we need to look at fundamental brain structure, which is less prone to arbitrary mutation than DNA structure.
Note that Ashkenazi Jewish and East Asian students also outperform other students on average.
Although this is often attributed simply to culture, transracial adoption studies show that adoptees perform about as well as their biological peers, not their adoptive parents.
This summary of recent adoption studies on gene expression casts doubt on the idea that there is some unique cultural advantage driving these differences.
http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/004064.html
In terms of the Ashknenazi there is evidence that local selective pressures exerted even over several hundred years can cause big changes in cognitive function.
“This paper elaborates the hypothesis that the unique demography and sociology of Ashkenazim in medieval Europe selected for intelligence. Ashkenazi literacy, economic specialization, and closure to inward gene flow led to a social environment in which there was high fitness payoff to intelligence, specifically verbal and mathematical intelligence but not spatial ability. As with any regime of strong directional selection on a quantitative trait, genetic variants that were otherwise fitness reducing rose in frequency. In particular we propose that the well-known clusters of Ashkenazi genetic diseases, the sphingolipid cluster and the DNA repair cluster in particular, increase intelligence in heterozygotes. Other Ashkenazi disorders are known to increase intelligence. ”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16867211
http://homepage.mac.com/harpend/.Public/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf
Let’s get real here. I was once accused of being a racist by a black colleague. When I asked him to define “racism” he couldn’t come up with one (at least that could be applied to me). Note that we are both post graduate degree holders and professionals. The point is, we use words for which the meaning to one person is not the understanding of another. Culture, I believe, has far more to do with scholarly achievement than does skin color.
The motives of a teacher in demanding excellence might be described as racist while actually being the opposite.
I wholeheartedly agree. There is a difference between a racist and a racial argument. They are not synonyms.