The great education journalist Dana Goldstein made this point some years back, but I can’t find the piece, and it bears rewriting: while a greater percentage of black and Hispanic students fail to meet educational performance standards in this country than their white counterparts, due to the demographics of the United States, a plurality of the students who struggle academically are white. This has rhetorical and policy implications.
Look at NAEP data, for example. The NAEP is the gold standard of American educational metrics. (Not coincidentally, it works on a stratified sampling model, not the census model typical of most state standardized testing regimes. But that’s a different post.) The sturdy racial achievement gap is present in recent NAEP scores, as it is in most metrics. (Although cf. the racial achievement gap compared to the income achievement gap over time.) Certainly, that percentage gap is important, and addressing educational inequalities requires paying attention to racial disparities.
But according to the most recent Children’s Defense Fund report on childhood inequality (PDF), “Of the 73.7 million children in the United States in 2012, 10.2 million —14 percent — were Black, while 38.9 million — 53 percent — were White and 17.6 million — 24 percent — were Hispanic.” That means that, if the NAEP findings are correct and their sampling is rigorous– and, again, NAEP’s sampling is the gold standard– then there are about 8,500,000 black students, about 13,500,000 Hispanic students, and about 18 million white students that are below proficient in math or reading. (Tons of NAEP info here to play with.)
There’s of course some sampling error here, and this is a crude type of analysis; we could chop these numbers up in a ton of more sophisticated ways. We’re extrapolating past 8th grade, which is sensible if a bit loose. I’m amenable to people disagreeing with these numbers on the margins. But in pure brute force terms, the reality is clear: given the still-large white majority, white kids are the largest single racial group contributing to poor educational performance. The percentage gaps are real and vexing, but you could bring every black and Hispanic child in America to proficiency tomorrow and you’d still have millions and millions of students below grade-level proficiency.
Why does it matter? Working in educational and pedagogical research, I interact with a lot of people who have a tendency to perceive and portray our country’s educational inequality as a matter of poor minority students underperforming everyone else. This isn’t an artifact of racism; on the contrary, it’s usually a consequence of an attempt at progressive realkeeping. Many researchers and journalist are deeply committed to ending America’s historic racial inequalities, they think that eliminating the education gap is a key aspect of that, so they want to devote their attention and resources to that problem. That’s a natural, principled stance, but in the frequent tendency to focus on educational problems as problems for people of color, we risk developing a distorted picture of these issues.
In part, the problem is that there’s a thin line between identifying particular demographic groups as in need of help and attention, and creating a stigma about those groups. Hispanic and black children need attention and help, but if you are relentless in associating these groups with educational failure, you risk creating a cultural expectation that educational failure is inherent to these groups. I’m particularly sensitive to the ways in which equating educational failure with black and Hispanic students contributes to cultural scapegoating that is not defensible, and to the “human biodiversity” race-and-IQ arguments I’m forever arguing against. We need to advocate for the special needs of black and Hispanic students without falling into the easy-but-false assumption that educational problems are black and Hispanic problems. To do so can too easily become another way in which our national problems are projected onto these vulnerable populations.
I also think that we need to pay attention to the millions of white children who are struggling in schools because they also suffer from systematic inequality and deserve our attention and help too. This worries some of my liberal friends; there seems to be this latent attitude that if we expand our sympathetic attention to white students as well, we will fail to adequately prioritize the needs of black and Hispanic students who additionally suffer the consequences of racism. To this I simply insist on our capacity to walk and chew gum at the same time; we are fully capable of recognizing the special burden students of color face, dedicate ourselves to helping to ease those burdens, while also recognizing the potent social and economic inequalities that deeply hurt white children as well. We can, and we have to.
I think part of the misperception you are addressing is due to the fact that while a plurality of failing students nationwide are Black and Hispanic, a majority of failing students in otherwise-affluent coastal cities are Black and Hispanic.
It’s the Brooklynization of our national discourse.
Sorry, “…a plurality of failing students nationwide are White, this is less likely to be the case in otherwise-affluent…”
I think Tolstoy’s (or was it the other guy?) quote about happy families applies to education as well: Every successful student is successful in the same way, while every unsuccessful student is unsuccessful in their own way.
I can only speak for myself, but I grew up white and middle class and did terribly in school, despite living in good school districts and having good teachers. I nearly flunked out of high school, mainly because I just hated school. It was an epic struggle for me to complete assignments; I could barely muster the energy to care, even when I knew I would fail the class. But while I struggled with math, I always scored in the top percentiles on the verbal portions of standardized tests. I was also one of those obnoxious, precocious punks who would sit in the back of Algebra II and read Faulkner or Camus during lectures. I somehow still made it to college, which I also nearly flunked out of, and then grad school, where I excelled academically for the first time in my life. Now I have a decent job, a wife, and a middle-class existence. I am viscerally aware that I owe my relative success in life to having been born a white American.
There are some really smart kids who just suck at school who will nevertheless become very successful. There are some kids who are doing poorly because they live a life of poverty. There are some kids who were doing well until their dad started going though chemo. And you know what? There are some kids who just aren’t very bright. The notion that there is some kind of national reform that is going to save them all is just pure folly.
I don’t see why you aren’t viscerally away that you owe this to being born a *middle-class* white American, most likely in a part of the country where college was assumed. If you grew up somewhere that working on an oil rig or as a coal miner were considered good jobs, your life would be pretty different. Were your parents college grads?
Another interesting factoid: the rate of college enrollment for black female high school graduates is five percentage points higher than the rate of college enrollment for white male high school graduates. Part of this is the fact that black women are more likely to be enrolled in high schools where graduation is not a foregone conclusion (such that they have already overcome some hurdles to get a diploma), and part is that white men have more fallback opportunities without college (union connections, joining the national security state in its domestic and international forms), but it’s still an interesting fact about our times, that was nowhere near true just a few years back.
I think your reasoning is incorrect. White kids are a majority among the failing students, because they are a majority of the student population. Instead, you should be looking at the failure rates for each subgroup, i.e. number of failures to student population in that group. According to the numbers you posted, there are about 39 million white kids and about 18 million failures, which gives the failure rate about 50%. There were 10.2 million black kids with 8.5 million failures, which gives the failure rate of about 83%. For Hispanics, the failure rate is about 77%. These numbers clearly show that blacks and hispanics are significantly more likely to fail than whites.
No, my reasoning is correct. Your reading is incorrect. I conceded, repeatedly, that the percentages are far higher for black and Hispanic students. But the plurality of failing students in this country is white, and that has political and policy consequences, which I listed here. If you chose a failing student at random from the American population, that student is more likely to be white than to be any other subgroup. Perhaps you should Google what “plurality” means.
Seriously: do you guys read the posts at all before you comment?
Hey, it’s the internet—most people skim, and nuance is the first victim.
What I didn’t notice skimming the discussion is the class background of struggling students. If most, black and white, are from poor families, then the white ones will be the plurality because there are twice as many non-Hispanic white folks in poverty as black ones.