The New York Times recently ran an article, “Proficiency of Black Students Is Found to Be Far Lower Than Expected,” about a troubling report by the Council on Great City Schools, which in essence asserts that underachievement among black youth is so resistant to change that it must be a relatively stable fixture in the disposition of the black community.
The report, A Call for Change [pdf], argues that racial differences cannot be explained by economic factors and that black males without disabilities do not measure up to white males with disabilities. It pointedly states, “Black males without disabilities had reading and mathematics scores, on average, lower than those of white males in national public schools with disabilities” and makes similar comparisons using those who do and do not receive free and reduced lunch.
The New York Times article did not question the report’s methodology or bias; this failure reflects the larger problem of deficit statistics being promoted and embraced among people who would have challenged their merits years ago.
In 1994, when Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and American Enterprise Institute political scientist Charles Murray released The Bell Curve, the book immediately drew fiery rebuttals from progressive scholars. Books like The Bell Curve Debate and articles in the Journal of Negro Education and Journal of Black Psychology picked apart, point-by-point, dangerous assertions such as, “It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences [in intelligence and by extension achievement].”
However, unlike their reaction to Murray’s work, today's black progressives are mostly embracing the work of the Council on Great City Schools, giving them endless platforms to explain how our normal black boys are more academically inept than white boys with disabilities.
With the vast range of disabilities affecting children, it seems inappropriate to lump them all in the same category. However, A Call for Change refers to black and white students with and without “disabilities,” about 50 times, but never defines the specific disabilities. Oddly, after doing a document search of common adjectives that typically precede “disabilities,” words including "emotional," "physical," and "learning" did not appear anywhere in the report. Before accepting at face value, that normal black boys are less proficient than disabled white boys, at a minimum one should seek a definition of disability. Many students who receive a proper diagnosis of a learning disability also receive educational accommodations, especially during testing, that could improve performance.
The fact that black students receive lower scores on standardized tests has been documented in more than a half century of research studies. What is less well-documented is the predictive validity of these tests.
Due to the established, unresolved issues with cultural bias in all achievement tests, the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing—developed by the American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education—recommends using the norms for specific race groups as a basis of making decisions. Test scores should always be presented as an estimate with the margin of error revealed and disclaimers indicating that issues of cultural bias limit the degree of confidence one should place in assessment results.
Culturally biased assessment practices and institutional racism continue to be at the core of the impending “national catastrophe” so glibly forewarned by A Call for Change. But, in the 120-page report, the words “cultural,” “racism,” and “bias” do not appear once; not even as a remote possibility for the racial differences they found.
And when you really dig into the numbers, educational inferiority is less of a black male problem and more of an American problem.
A Call for Change also reports pretty low achievement indicators for white males, but allow them to shine next to the absurdly low numbers for black males. For example, it is surprising that with all of the social advantages afforded to them, only 38 percent of white boys were proficient in reading. Yet even more vexing is how this society can establish a metric that only finds 25 percent of black and white boys combined proficient in reading and consider it valid. If trends continue, educational disparities between black and white, will pale in comparison to American education and educational systems in other developed nations.
I do not question the motives of the Council on Great City Schools, but I do unequivocally question the methods and the merits. Concerns regarding black males in education are real and pervasive, but we do not need to harvest negative propaganda to promote change.
Overstated and unqualified deficit statistics have the unintended consequence of promoting black inferiority. Whether skewed left or skewed right, The Bell Curve remains an invertible force that undermines black achievement, by using numbers to obscure legitimate indicators such as graduation rates, college enrollment, and economic attainment, while neglecting social forces such as social inequities and institutional racism.
I appeal to all noble scholars, activists, and policy makers to pause and contemplate the benefits and risks of promoting negative racial deficit statistics. Two years ago, I suggested that educational researchers should reduce the focus on comparing black males to white males. This lazy research method implicitly positions white male standings as the standard for black males to achieve. Instead, we should compare black males with high levels of proficiency in reading and math to those with lower levels. This is the only method that will reveal culturally specific strategies to improve educational standings among black males.
8 Comments
"Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us (Issues of Our Time)"
by Claude Steele explains in depth, and with scientific support a large part of this disparity. Everyone should read this book!
I am a teacher. My dream is to start a school to help address these problems but I find it hard to get the support that I need. Does anyone have any ideas?
Dear Ivory A Toldson,
thanks for your enlightening article.
I hope that in future you will write about the academic attainments and needs of the girls of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds of your country.
My society and civilization in India, has a long tradition of excluding male laboring people and the entire female population from instruction. With the coming of the idea of the need for universal instruction in literacy and numeracy, our ruling elite has left no stone unturned to set and reset "academic standards" for discouraging women and men of the laboring castes and tribes. The game starts here from the first lessons of literacy and numeracy through primers that use elite-friendly words, sentences and contexts. These are sure fire methods for discouraging children from non-elite families, while pretending to encourage uniform universal instruction.
It seems that such problems exist in all countries.
What steps are being taken in your country to get rid of such sham uniformity?
I think that organizations like the UNESCO should get involved in this area. I request you motivate your foundation and your grant provider Soros Foundation to take up the problem with UNESCO. The problems of the school going black children of your country is a part of a much larger global problem. The crisis here is much much bigger and deeper than the ongoing crisis of the financial markets. In fact the ongoing global educational scam is the nursery of all other global and local economic and political scams.
Please accept my best regards.
Pradip.
This article and its analysis is excellent. It is important to carefully explain and account for difference, without resorting to deficiency models and frameworks. Toldson correctly provides prospective on the meaning of the Black boys' "failures" by juxaposing it with the "failures" of all U.S. students in the aggregate. The Council's report is important for challenging political apathy and silence, calling for strategizing at the communal level, and impelling self-determination.
Yet not only does the report contain the methodology flaws and biases Toldson's points out, I think it also fails to account for the strong influence politics, legislation, and policy has had on creating this situation. They point out how government officials at every level have failed to adequately address the plight of Black male students, but do not put forth an incisive analysis of how these stakeholders have either created or exacerbated the situation.
At miminum there are strong correlations between poverty and educational attainment; how this intersects with race, class, and ethnicity is an important socio-economic point, and directly tied to political decision-making. This is not deductive, one can point to the work of NYU's Pedro Noguera (and many others) to trace this trajectory. The ways poverty is perpetuated and inequality is accepted speaks to how entrenched racism and prejudice is structurally and ideologically. This recent analysis on U.S. dropout rates saliently illuminates these factors
http://www.patchworknation.org/content/where-dropout-rates-are-highest-and-lowest
In short, these complex social realities will need focused political attention, social action, and nuanced planning. This piece, along with the report, hopefully is a start.
Michael Partis
Research Associate
Howard Samuels Center-CUNY Graduate Center
New York, NY 10016
http://www.howardsamuelscenter.org/
Cultural Anthropology Doctoral Student
CUNY Graduate Center
michaelpartis.blogspot.com
Great blog, Ivory. If the New York Times and other media outlets don't raise the questions that you have, it's at least heartening that you (and others) are on the case.
SparkAction.org -- an online storytelling and advocacy site by and for people interested in the well-being of children & youth -- published a blog by Karen Pittman on the same Council on Great City Schools report. Her take is slightly different, but a very good complement to your concerns.
http://sparkaction.org/content/black-male-crisis
"...America, writ large, is not embarrassed by these data. Parsing and packaging the data won’t change minds. The data will make those sympathetic more depressed. Even more dangerous, they will make those who are unsympathetic more strident and might make those who were undecided more concerned that nothing can be done."
We would love to have you join the discussion by sharing your comments on Karen's blog.
http://sparkaction.org/content/black-male-crisis
Thank you for this thought-provoking piece,
Caitlin Johnson
Looking at the actual report, it would seem that the percentage of Black males with disabilities is dramatically under-identified. The report fails to disclose the percentages of Blacks males vs. white males overall and the % of disability vs non-disability overall by race and gender, so it is not possible with these data to show it, but it seems equally plausible to me that since the performance of non-disability-identified Black males is similar to that of disability-identified white males, a high proportion of the Black males tested are suffering from unidentified disabilities. The structural and institutional racism within which they live is of course inherently disabling, and the bureaucratic processes of identifying and treating educational and learning disabilities are highly skewed toward supporting mostly children of the well-organized and better educated parents who can successfully negotiate the hurdles of getting their kids the special needs services to which Federal law entitles them but inner city schools hate to pay for. Analysis of the differential in actual vs. identified educational and learning disabilities in LC Black children would perhaps be instructive, as it might show bother higher need for and lesser access to the range of special education services associated with the "disability" label.
"I do not question the motives of the Council on Great City Schools, but I do unequivocally question the methods and the merits. Concerns regarding black males in education are real and pervasive, but we do not need to harvest negative propaganda to promote change."
Evasion!
"The structural and institutional racism within which they live is of course inherently disabling, and the bureaucratic processes of identifying and treating educational and learning disabilities are highly skewed toward supporting mostly children of the well-organized and better educated parents who can successfully negotiate the hurdles of getting their kids the special needs services to which Federal law entitles them but inner city schools hate to pay for."
Unbelievable evasion!
Look at the study and demonstrate the methodological flaws, if you can. Or perhaps you might want to deal with the findings instead?
Dear Ivory A. Toldson,
I draw your attention to an article on mathematics education and social exclusion, by Gelsa Knijnik of Brazil, available at:
.
It may be of some use to you in your noble work.
Regards.
Pradip.
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