Black-white gap- Will anything work?

By Nathan Glazer

"No Excuses" is the good faith follow-up to the Thernstroms' "America in Black and White," which appeared in 1997. That massive work presented a solidly documented account of black oppression since the Civil War and then of the civil rights revolution that transformed the condition of American blacks.

It went on to analyze the still-substantial differences in the economic and social conditions of black Americans and white Americans, and in its most provocative sections it strongly attacked affirmative action as a method for closing the gaps between black and white.

But if not affirmative action in education, in jobs, in government action, then what? Are we simply to live with these continuing differences? Are we to expect that in time, with direct discrimination against blacks no longer a major factor in their lives, the racial gaps would shrink?

The Thernstroms' answer was education. Improve the educational achievement of blacks, they counseled, and the consequences will be to make affirmative action unnecessary and thereby to achieve a society in which we can truly move beyond race.

Their new book takes up the challenge that their critical view of race preference raises, the challenge put starkly five years ago by Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips in their important book "The Black-White Test Score Gap":

"If racial equality is America's goal, reducing the black-white test score gap would probably do more to promote this goal than any other strategy that commands broad public support."

This strategy does indeed command broad public support. It is a principal objective of the No Child Left Behind legislation of 2001, the latest revision of the almost 40-year-old federal effort to improve the education of poor and black children. The legislation requires all states to administer tests annually to all students in elementary schools, and the results will have to be reported by race.

"It's a remarkable turn of events," the Thernstroms write. "The racial gap -- hidden from public view until so recently -- has suddenly acquired top billing in the national educational agenda."

"No Excuses" is a comprehensive and informed effort to explore the racial gap in education and what can be done about it. The book is based on a scrupulous examination of the current research literature. The Thernstroms could not have expected, I assume, that their examination would lead to the answer, or indeed that there is a single answer or even a group of answers that are strongly supported by social scientific research.

They demonstrate that many answers that enjoy wide intellectual and political currency -- more money, more racial integration, more minority teachers, better teachers -- either have little foundation in research or are enormously difficult or even impossible to implement. And so we are left pretty much with the current array of efforts, which have had little effect in closing the huge gap in test scores between white and black in the last 10 years, though there was some progress shown in the years before.

While the gap has not quite been "hidden from public view," as the Thernstroms write, it is true that educational leaders, politicians and scholars have been inhibited from describing the problem in its full dimensions. Anyone who lectures and writes on these topics has undoubtedly experienced a necessary sense of self-imposed restraint in straightforwardly setting forth the utterly devastating scale of black deficiency in educational achievement to an audience with large numbers of blacks. What would be the effect on them of learning, say, that 12th-grade black students do not do as well in reading or American history as eighth-grade white students, and do rather worse in mathematics, and do catastrophically worse in geography?

These facts are set forth in the first chart of "No Excuses." The Thernstroms characterize this as a four-year gap in achievement -- that is, a full high school education behind.

The most obvious causes will not explain this deficiency. Black students do generally come from poorer families, and their parents average fewer years in school, and it is believed that less public money is spent on their education (though this is hard to demonstrate), but none of these factors explains the gap.

As we have recently become aware, though the facts were clear for some time, black children from families with incomes equivalent to whites continue to do worse than whites. And so this is not, or not only, a problem of class, though many an authoritative public statement asserts so.

While the Thernstroms do not carry through a full analysis of differences in expenditures in the schooling of black and white children, they give some striking figures from Cambridge, Mass., which show how little high expenditures matter. Currently, they write, the city spends an astonishing average of $17,000 per year on the education of each child, which must be among the highest figures in the nation. Cambridge has a ratio of 9.8 students to a teacher, 40 percent lower than the national average. But only 49 percent of black students in Cambridge, which is purportedly one of the more positive environments for blacks in the nation, passed a new state exam in English -- lower than the state average for black students, 67 percent. Only 35 percent passed the state exam in mathematics, below the state average for blacks of 55 percent.

The Kansas City, Mo., school district, under judicial supervision since 1985 to respond to segregation, was the recipient of lavish court-ordered state expenditures to upgrade it so as to attract white suburban students and to improve education for blacks. Gary Orfield of Harvard, a leading advocate of strong intervention for desegregation, is quoted as asserting that "they really can't show much of anything, though they spent $2 billion."

The Thernstroms give no credence as an explanation to the genetic differences in intelligence that were highlighted by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray in "The Bell Curve" some years ago. "The assumption that differences in IQ are primarily genetic rather than environmental," they assert, "is one that we reject." They are much more sympathetic to the idea that important differences in culture may explain African American backwardness in education.

The Thernstroms are not so pessimistic about changing culture, in part because they reduce culture to specific traits that can be taught and inducted into a group. They observe that culture "is a loose and slippery term that has been used in a great many different ways. It is sometimes taken to mean a fixed set of group traits that are passed on from generation to generation, an inheritance that is fairly impervious to changes in the social environment. That is not how we use the term." Values, attitudes, and skills are formed in the families in which children are reared, but they "continue to be shaped by children's interaction with their peers, teachers, neighbors and other aspects of their environment." So it is in the schools that one should try to change culture.

The black problem, it appears, is sui generis. It is not an aspect of immigrant difficulties, language difficulties, class difficulties, or income difficulties, all of which are indeed problems but different from the problem that keeps blacks educationally backward. Despite regular references to Hispanics, the issue that mostly concerns the Thernstroms, and should urgently concern the nation, is the educational deficiency of blacks.

We explore Asian American educational performance because here are groups of rather different cultural backgrounds -- including Chinese, Japanese, Asian Indians, Koreans, Vietnamese, Filipinos, and others -- that as a whole show high educational achievement, equal or superior to that of whites. And this occurs despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of Asian Americans are immigrants or the children of immigrants. To say that their average high educational performance is explained by "culture" seems a bit odd: which culture is it?

The demand for harder courses and tougher curricula has had some positive effects -- more students now study mathematics -- but it has not resulted in a narrowing of the black-white achievement gap. And it seems clear that tougher curricula and tests lead to more dropouts, who are disproportionately black.

The Thernstroms properly note all the obstacles to true reform: the difficulties in getting better teachers, the controls on principals' freedom of action, egalitarian pay scales that make it impossible to reward better teachers and principals, the politics of school systems (in which racial issues play a very large role), the role of unions (which quite properly protect the teachers and pay less attention to the students). And their answer in the end is not general reform, which they support but about which they must be skeptical.

Their answer is escape from the system. They put their hopes in charter schools, or in vouchers permitting choice of schools released from the controls of public school systems, in which principals have freedom of hiring and firing and curriculum-setting, teachers can be chosen more freely, students enroll because of choice (theirs or their parents'), standards can be set and enforced.

Escape into achievement for a few, in view of the necessary limits on the number of charter schools and the size of voucher programs, is the best that the Thernstroms have to offer. This does not promise any rapid reduction or erasure of the black-white difference. But nobody has come up with anything more promising. But the reality is that if some groups achieve well above the average -- as some groups do -- the facts of mathematics and averages mean that others will perform below the average. How a society that is so committed to raising every politically salient group to at least an average performance can live with this result is something that we should grimly ponder.

Nathan Glazer is a contributing editor at The New Republic. This essay is excerpted from his full book review.