I've said before that we will never make serious progress toward eliminating racism until Black students are educated on a par with white students. Half a century ago that would have been an uncontroversial statement, but after 50 years of trying and failing to close the Black-white education gap it's become tiresome to many people, little more than a cheap excuse for doing nothing. But tiresome or not, it's still a huge problem. Here's a chart that demonstrates the scope of what we're up against:
Black students who graduate from high school score about 30 points worse than white students on the NAEP reading test. Ditto for the math test. That's roughly three grade levels, which means that, on average, Black high school grads perform at about the same level as 9th grade white students. And this hasn't gotten any better over the past 30 years. In fact, it's gotten worse.
This is bad enough on its own. But it turns out that education is associated with a host of other problems. Not every problem, but a lot of them. Today I want to go through a few of them in an effort to persuade you to join the education cause. The evidence isn't perfect—in the real world it never is—but it's surprisingly consistent.
Income
About a decade ago Jay Zagorsky, then at Ohio State, wrote a paper comparing the incomes of various educational groups. He used the language of IQ because that was the data available to him, but don't let that throw you: An IQ of 85 is roughly equivalent to an 18-year-old performing like someone three grade levels lower. What Zagorsky found was simple: that person earned about 25% less than a person performing at age level. And according to recent census figures, the median income of Black workers is 21% lower than white workers.
Put these numbers together with the NAEP test results and they suggest that the average Black worker (a) performs at about the same level as a white worker with a 9th grade education, and (b) earns about as much as a white worker with a 9th grade education.
And of course there's a corollary: Education is also tightly bound up with Black wealth, both directly (higher income ---> higher wealth) and indirectly (higher income ---> higher death bequests and higher inheritances). There are other things that affect Black wealth too, but education is clearly one of the strongest.
Unemployment
As we all know, the unemployment rate of Black workers is substantially higher than it is for white workers:
On average over the past three decades, the Black unemployment rate is about five points higher than the white unemployment rate. But take a look at this:
When you compare the unemployment rate for Black workers to the unemployment rate of all high school dropouts, the difference almost disappears. Once again, the average Black worker is being treated like a white worker with roughly a 9th grade education.
Incarceration
Moving on from jobs-related research, here's a paper that looks at incarceration. The main result is shown in this pair of charts:
White people with a 9th grade education are incarcerated at the same rate as Black people who are just shy of a 12th grade education. These numbers plummet so steeply between 9th and 12th grade that they aren't very precise, but once again we find that the average Black person with a 12th grade education is treated very much like a white person with a 9th grade education.
Life Expectancy
This one is interesting. Here's a table from a study of life expectancy by educational level:
Back in 1990, the life expectancy of Black people with a high school diploma was almost identical to that of white people who had dropped out of high school. This is very much in keeping with our thesis.
Interestingly, things have changed since then. White women with no high school diploma have lost nearly three years of life expectancy while Black men with a high school diploma have added about four year of life expectancy. Put together, it means that Black people with a high school diploma are now doing a bit better than white people who dropped out.
This is evidence that things can change even without a change in educational differences. Education has a big impact, but it's not everything.
Children's Health
This one is a little tricky because, obviously, it can't be based on the child's education. However, it can be measured relative to parental education. Here's the chart:
The red dot on the gray line shows the health of Black children whose parents have a high school education. (Poor health is indicated by having "activity and school limitations.") It's equivalent to the health of a white child whose parents have about a 10th grade education.
Summary
Nobody claims that education is the sole determinant of Black well-being. Studies over the years have consistently found that even after you adjust for education there's still a significant residual effect due solely to being Black. Most often, the residual is the impact of straight-up bigotry, both personal and systemic.
What's more, the evidence I've presented here isn't 100% consistent. It never is in the real world. In most of the studies the effect of education has stayed constant over the years, while in the case of life expectancy Black men have made large improvements. Sometimes a Black person with a 12th grade education is equivalent to a white person with a 9th grade education, while in others it's closer to a 10th grade education.
And of course there's a famously circular argument to address: We know that poor education is one of the causes of poverty, but we also know that poverty (especially concentrated poverty) is one of the causes of poor education. Which is the chicken and which is the egg? I think the evidence is fairly clear that education is the primal cause here, but there are plausible arguments in the other direction.
Taken as a whole, the evidence is strong that Black people in the US who graduate from high school perform, on average, at about a 9th grade level and have outcomes that are similar to white people with a 9th grade education. What's more, this disparate performance starts long before high school. Some of it is visible by kindergarten or earlier, and the full effect is generally in place by the end of elementary school. To close the gap, we need to address it as early as pre-K and keep it up all the way through the end of high school.
Our inability to educate Black kids as well as we do white kids is one of our great national shames, and until we turn this around there's no chance of making substantial progress on the racial equality front. It's the frustrating but necessary minimum effort necessary for anyone who's serious about fighting racism.
It seems (based on historical lack of improvements) that trying to get minority kids' education on par with white ones is too hard a problem to expect a solution soon.
How about then if we try to make it much easier for minority students to get more years of education? pay them college, 2 years of community college at least, give them a stipend. That seems like a more direct and doable plan while the real fix is worked out/implements/takes effect....
Free summer school, especially this year.
Just so I'm clear, you want to give scholarships based solely on race?
Some people just want to take a stab at relieving socioeconomic inequity in this country brought about by 400 years of brutal race-based oppression.
Where is the "block" button when we need it?
So, your answer is yes? As a republican, I think the house should pass such a bill. That would undoubtedly assure republicans would win the majority in the next election.
not with the albatross known as donald trump around their proverbial neck.
Ok, can we switch to Disqus now? Desperately need up/down voting in my life.
And to think that, when I noticed that you complained of the same issue that I had with the WordPress comment system & layout, & replied to your post with the helpful information that someone had given me, you've provided proof that you're still the same old bigot.
Imagine if YOU & YOUR ancestors had been the victims of slavery & discrimination for four centuries.
Just once, TRY.
Outside of racially-mixed marriages, how are the children of alumni not benefiting from race-based admission when they get preferential treatment at matriculation?
Just so I'm clear: If criminals keep their stolen loot past a given time limit they don't have to give it back?
And say, tell us again how mail-in fraud is so easy 😉
Not sure that will work. Kevin didn't include collegiate differences but they are there. Moreover, black folks do less well on the GRE *despite* having a four year education. This suggests that the losses that accrue in early education are not easily fixed during college. Not shocking really. Who wants to sign up for classes you will struggle in because of lack of preparedness?
We keep describing the problem but not looking at solutions. We have known for a long time that schools with high poverty levels — above approximately 30% usually have much worse outcomes. We have also known for decades that high quality preschool has lasting effects. That was proven with the decades-long follow up of model Head Start programs like the Perry High Scoop program. In fact even regular Head Start that weren’t staffed with people early childhood backgrounds resulted in fewer of their kids being held back, graduating and getting jobs that kids of comparable backgrounds that didn’t attend. IQ was raised in the first years after attending HS but that effect generally washed out. If memory serves, (High Scope did result in some modest gains in IQ.) Republicans used that to claim that Head Start was a waste of money. Head Start was for poor white kids, not just minorities, something most people forget. There are more poor white kids in total although minorities are over represented in the low income category.
The UK has had the same problems with minority and low income white kids. A recent article in the Guardian describes the success of the UK’s BAME (Black, minority and ethnic) schools in the London area where the effort has been made to ensure they are high quality. In contrast the schools in the North have not been nearly as successful at educating disadvantaged white kids:
“ The rate of progression into higher education for white British students who are eligible for free school meals is only 16%”, compared with rates of 32% and 59% for poor black Caribbean and African students respectively. But, astutely, the blog emphasised the impact of geography on these outcomes: white students who receive free school meals in London have pulled away from those in other parts of the country with their rate of HE participation 8% higher than any other region, at 44.7%.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/04/geography-not-race-explains-the-disparity-in-englands-educational-outcomes
thanks.
Hard to focus on becoming educated when you're poor. Every bad luck and failure weighs more heavily, too, without the safety net of wealth.
It doesn't matter if two students get into the same school - if you're poor, you're going to have fewer resources, less ability to fix things that are broken, and just aren't going to be able to afford the morning coffee or oj or student loans as well.
Poverty makes gaining an education much, much harder. Being a student is a job, and should be paid for.
It is not much incentive either to know that your educational efforts will result in a college acceptance that you can't use because Pell grants don't cover enough of the expense to allow you to attend.
Racism is irrelevant. The US is a mulit-ethnic state were power brokers are vast and not concentrated like 50-60 years ago. Many blacks simply don't care about education and instead live the drug/gang lifestyle which is better than going to school anyway. Even in rural areas, many whites have figured out the same thing with the drug trade. It doesn't show up in income and that is a problem. If it did, blacks wouldn't look near as "poverty" stricken as you may think.
Its why the progressive movement is slowly dying out and degrowther politics is replacing it on the left. That is where the real white supremacy has gone: the far left's eco-socialism which has a long tie to Indo-European culture. Eventually there will be a "Tim McVeigh" moment where the more nutter parts of the group lash out violently and it won't be pretty.
Is this a case of Poe's Law?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
Multiethnic population does not equal multiethnic governance.
& those Black-majority cities with (Black) Democrat mayors that people like KKKlay Travis like to go on about having the worst outcomes in this country, while White Towns like River Hills, WI, or Lake Oswego, OR, continue to excel, well -- support for municipalities is as much on state & federal allocations as local ingress.
As Finnish education researcher, Pasi Sahlburg, is fond of saying , "America does not have an education problem. It has a poverty problem."
A major absence from this post is the amount of money spent on kids in different school districts. How much is this correlated with outcomes? I am not going to try to chase this down - Kevin should do it. But to the extent that it is important one thing that could be done, and probably should be done anyway, is to make education a state or national enterprise, rather than a district or city/county enterprise. The money spent should be at least evened out.
All the public schools in New York City receive essentially equal per capita funding, and the racial disparities in outcomes are still huge. (I'm not sure, actually, how they compare to national disparities, but it's clear that equalized funding is no panacea if indeed it makes any difference at all.)
Apparently some thing we also need to cancel Shakespeare to battle racism.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/feb/15/woke-teachers-want-shakespeare-cut-curriculum-abou/
Racism is pervasive in many facets of life. Those who are battling against it would get more traction if they disavow clowns like those mentioned in this article.
Yeah, I'm seeing the cancel-Shakespeare movement everywhere I look. /s
Do you Fox trotters have a grievance clearing house you go to every morning, like city folks go to Starbucks to get energized for the day? Or do you just log into Facebook and let their algorithms do the work for you?
Get a life, dude.
+1
It's in the bottom of the Chik*Fil*A bag, like the toy in a Happy Meal.
SHYLOCK DID NOTHING WRONG.
Chicken-egg-problem.
There certainly have been a lot of PBS shows on schools. I remember one, a poorer school in Appalachia, where the principal was trying to turn things around. By the end of the year, the school was a full fledged community center, truancy was down, and....scores didn't improve so he was gone. A lot of problems have to be tackled at once, and there has to be a long term commitment.
So, you're telling me, the moron who wrote Hillbilly Elegy's prescription of respectability politics, but for white people, too, isn't the answer?
Thanks for asking - I *do* want to fight racism. I don't know that I agree that we are where we are because of our education system though. And I would amend Sahlburg thusly - we have a poverty problem because we have a race problem.
To me it is more important to emphasize that each child/potential voter has a right to be educated such that they feel they can reach their goals in life ... and, of course most important, be a responsible voter. And of course they have no idea what those goals will be when they are 5, which is why we force people to go to school. I agree with Beth, and I'll go further - we need to be getting at 0 to 3 too. And we should make it fun insofar as possible, which imo should be pretty bleeping far too.
Still, I am not at all convinced that our economic inequality comes from our ed system. What you may have here is simply correlation. That is, lack of education is a great capitalist excuse for paying as little as possible. Ie, it's the (lack of) unions, stupid. (You aren't stupid. It's just a saying.)
Even if we all had Ph.Ds, there would still be inequality. The problem is human nature and organization - not people's grades. Also ... I get that it's Black History month ... but it just looks so weird to look at things through a B/W prism. It's like you're from a different time (and you aren't! I'm old too!) Even OC is diverse now. And it makes it feel zero-sum. I'm not sure it is, really.
Capitalists don’t need an excuse - if they can get away with it, they will. And, with no countervailing force, e.g. unions, they can. Besides making it easier to organize, we may need new forms of worker empowerment, given the change to a service-oriented economy, increasing automation, etc.
It wouldn't hurt if we taught everyone civics and basic political reality skills. One of the most successful and longest running cons in America involves flim-flamming desperate and/or poor white people to vote against their own interests.
The Big People laugh all the way to the banks....and things get worse for everybody.
My question is, after seeing the last graph of activity limitations due health issues, why do more educated Latinx & AAPI parents more often have children with physical incapacity (asthma, & the like). Is it more well-to-do/higher-achieving "model" minorities embracing the white people's fetishization of food allergies, homeopathy, antivaxxxia, etc., as a way to be more white?
My black brother-in-law could tell you stories all day about what it was like growing up as brainy black kid in the inner city. He was pretty much tormented all day at school. And just as badly at home by his older brothers. As a nerdy white kid from a blue collar city I can certainly relate on some level - but some of his stories are horrific.
My wife used to work at a nonprofit that sent volunteers to teach reading skills at inner city schools. Prior to around 7th grade these kids were little vacuums for knowledge and attention. But there was like a lightswitch when they went to middle school. Suddenly, almosts for self-protection, these kids just act like they didn't care about education.
So there is a massive problem to overcome. But even pointing out what that problem may be is not allowed.
And this culture of anti-education and celebration of stupid masculinity isn't strictly a black problem. I've dealt with it myself in school and at home from Mafioso wannabes. Maybe we need some army of Jewish/Asian mothers to just take over the parenting of all children...
Sounds like my cousin. (Who was white, & a child of a Canadian immigrant (her father; her mother was my blood relation, my mom's older sister.)
Honor roll thru eighth grade, but mother by age 17. Four kids by three fathers, or five kids by four -- not sure on the math -- & flitted from job training to job training via Wisconsin's W2 ("Wisconsin Works") program, the crown jewel of George W. Bush's HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson's welfare reform as governor, eventually pissing away a good job for a high school dropout position as a phlebotomist. At least one of her children -- also a high achiever in elementary/middle school grades -- molested by the father of a later child. (Did have an earlier marriage to an Sikh co-worker at a gas station she worked at in Riverwest, but screwed that up by running around on him while he was at work & she stayed home with the kids (though he apparently was encouraging her to finish a GED).)
John McWhorter has made similar observations, and pointed out that was a problem in his own childhood:
'When I was four—and this is my very first memory—a group of black kids in the neighborhood stopped me and asked me to spell a word. When I did, one of them directed his little sister to hit me repeatedly. I later watched a friend of mine treated similarly for answering such questions as, “How far is it from New Jersey to Florida,” and I’ll never forget being asked by one of his tormentors, “Are you smart?” in the menacing tone you’d use to ask, “Did you steal my money?”'
(Source: https://www.city-journal.org/html/what%E2%80%99s-holding-blacks-back-12025.html)
Well, yeah. Toxic masculinity is toxic masculinity is toxic masculinity. Also: group dynamics that equate prioritizing academics as 'trying to be white'. I don't know if that's still a thing, but my uneducated guess would put the probability of this being so as at least 90%.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc? I can see the one way as being indicative. The other way as a (sufficient) prescriptive? Not so much.
Well, yeah. Toxic masculinity is toxic masculinity is toxic masculinity. Also: group dynamics that equate prioritizing academics as 'trying to be white'. I don't know if that's still a thing, but my uneducated guess would put the probability of this being so as at least 90%.
Money. The lack of money. It is no coincidence that the socio-economic status of your parents is the best predictor of your future. Poor families tend to remain poor.
Education has 3 important team members: students, teachers, and parents. If your parents spend most of their time trying to survive/get money/get drugs/get alcohol, they will not be able to accomplish their part of the teamwork. We need not only to educate our poor/disadvantaged students, we need to educate their parents as well. We need parents to encourage their children to do their homework, to motivate their children to succeed in school. In the meantime, we need to encourage the groups that work with disadvantaged children to become surrogate parents and provide motivation to these children. Parental involvement in the schools is one thing that will help (not a panacea, but having children see their parents involved in this increases their participation). I think one thing that private schools and some home schooling have shown is that well motivated parents and well motivated children can achieve a good education.
According to ...
Cracks in the Pavement: Social Change and Resilience in Poor Neighborhoods Paperback – September 2, 2008
by Martin Sanchez-Jankowski (Berkeley)
https://www.amazon.com/Cracks-Pavement-Social-Resilience-Neighborhoods/dp/0520256751
... Ghetto schools fail because half the students and many teachers (!) don't see enough remuneration waiting for them in the labor market to make the extra effort worth it.
Berkeley professor Sanchez-Jankowski spent nine years on the ground in five New York and Los Angeles poor neighborhoods researching this. He had previously spent ten years on the ground studying gangs.
It is interesting to look at school spending per pupil in disadvantaged vs. advantaged communities. In most European countries, funding for disadvantaged students (e.g. immigrants) is much higher than the average spending. This means smaller class sizes, higher teacher pay to attract the best, etc. Makes sense: kids have a hard time learning, you need to try harder.
Of course, in the US we do exactly the opposite.
Where's the argument here? Will white people suddenly stop being racist because black people are better educated? How does that work? Don't we already have evidence that well educated blacks have lower outcomes pretty much across the board compared to equally educated whites (unemployment is higher, underemployment is higher)? Isn't this true even when compared to first generation college educated whites?
I also disagree with your education/poverty chicken/egg theory. Poverty existed long before education did. Poverty can also be fixed easier with near instant results. Give people who don't have money money. Done! The stress of being poor melts away and kids can learn easier. You may argue that this isn't politically feasible, but I would argue that it's every bit as politically feasible as closing the educational gap. It might even be more feasible because we can just give everyone money including racists. The Venn diagram of racism contains some racists who will allow blacks money if they also get money. The Venn diagram of racism contains zero racists who will allow just black people better educations.