I hope you'll bear with me while I do a bit more education blogging today. Education Week reports on two new studies that find that if you track students from kindergarten through 8th grade, the achievement gap between white and black kids is steepest among the most gifted students. In other words, a gifted black child and a gifted white child might begin school with many of the same skills and aptitudes. But by the time they enter high school, the black student is likely to have fallen well behind, in large part because of the racial segregation within American public schools:
“It appears on average to be worse for a child to be in a school with a high black enrollment share, but it's not clear why,” said Mr. Rivkin. “It could be important given the recent [U.S.] Supreme Court decision on desegregation,” he added, referring to a ruling in June of last year that sharply limited schools from using race to assign students to schools.
Mr. Reardon reasoned that, because schools with predominantly African-American enrollments tend to have lower average test scores, high-achieving black children may be further from the mean, academically, than is the case for top-scoring white children.
“If instruction is aimed more to the middle of the distribution, then black children are less likely to have cognitively stimulating opportunities—not because anyone is being racist, but because the thing to do is aim instruction to the average level of the school,” he said.
The conclusion here is pretty obvious. Class and race are still inextricably linked in our society. Lower class students who are black likely attend schools that are overwhelmingly poor and black, or black and Latino. As a result, the most talented kids in those schools have few opportunities to benefit from the kind of education upper middle class, white gifted children receive, in large part due to the pressure their affluent parents put on schools. The solution is also obvious, and has been for decades: integration. Check out this old article of mine for ideas on how it can be done.
--Dana Goldstein
