July 4, 1999
Reason Is Sought for Lag by Blacks in School Effort
Forum Join a Discussion on Ideas on Contemporary Education
By PAM BELLUCK
VANSTON, Ill. -- Taking on one of the most troublesome and contentious issues in American education, school officials and educators around the nation have begun discussing why the academic achievement of black middle-class and upper-income students lags behind whites of comparable socioeconomic status.
On some tests, black students from middle-class or wealthier families have done no better than white students who live in poverty. And some especially puzzling data have suggested that at higher achievement levels, the gap between black and white performance is wider than at lower levels.
School officials and black education experts are increasingly troubled by the gap.
"How do we explain the underproductivity of middle-class kids, of able and gifted minority youngsters who come out of situations where you would expect high achievement?" asked Edmund W. Gordon, a professor emeritus of psychology at Yale University and the co-chairman of the National Task Force on Minority High Achievement, formed in 1997 by the College Board.
"This is not something that a lot of people feel comfortable talking about."
In one of the most closely watched efforts in education circles, more than a dozen middle-class, racially integrated communities across the country, including Evanston, and two in the New York metropolitan area -- White Plains, and South Orange-Maplewood, N.J. -- have formed a network to learn more about the disparity and try to do something about it.
They will scrutinize what happens in schools and classrooms, and will also look at research on the home lives, study habits, and attitudes of black students.
In Evanston, a comfortable, attractive community just north of Chicago, Venessa Woods has a firsthand look at the problem.
Ms. Woods, who runs a high school program to help minority students do better, keeps coming across black students from stable, educated, middle-class families who have fallen behind despite seeming to have all the ingredients for success.
"The first thing that came to my head is 'Oh, they're poor' or 'Oh, they're in a single-parent home,' " said Ms. Woods, who is African-American. "To my surprise, the students were living in the better part of Evanston. Students were living with two-parent families who have college degrees. They have computers. They have personal tutors. And they're getting C's and D's, and why?"
Nobody claims to have clear answers. But from conversations with teachers, students, researchers and parents, the reasons seem to be multilayered, going beyond a student's socioeconomic status to include lingering racial inferiority complexes, peer pressure, low teacher expectations, curriculum, parental involvement and access to information, and vestiges of racism in schools.
Some of the most compelling insights come from students like Akilah Rogers, who just completed her junior year at Evanston Township High School taking advanced placement and accelerated classes, and helped organize a day of student discussion about minority achievement this spring.
"I would say that the most African-Americans in one of my honors classes is three," said Akilah, who is 17. Early on, she said, "People were like, 'Oh, you're an oreo.' Getting good grades was always connected to white people. So they're like, 'Are you going to be white and achieve?' "
In Chicago Suburb Numbers Defy Logic
he 14 schools in the network are mostly top-notch, with high per-pupil spending, many middle-class families and diverse student populations. At these schools, middle-class blacks typically perform better than poor blacks and often score above the national and state average for African-Americans. Many are in university towns like Berkeley, Calif., Chapel Hill, N.C., and Amherst, Mass. But they still perform worse on average than whites.
"These are areas in the country where you would think you would get people being high achievers, but it's not happening to the degree it should," said Allan Alson, superintendent of Evanston's high school, who is concerned about what schools like his should be doing differently.
At Evanston, 42 percent of the high school's 2,900 students are black. And while there is poverty here -- about 30 percent of the students, mostly blacks, receive free or reduced-price lunches -- there is also a solid black middle class. Evanston provides after-school, summer and weekend programs for struggling students, and honors and advanced placement courses are open to any student who wants to enroll.
Still, the numbers at Evanston have been disappointing. A study of the first semester of the 1997-1998 school year found that nearly 25 percent of black students had failed at least one class, compared with 4 percent of white students. Seven percent of black students' grades were A's, compared with 25 percent for whites.
In 1996, on a state reading test, 49 percent of African-Americans at the school were reading below grade level, compared with 9 percent of whites. And while the college attendance rate of both blacks and whites here is above the national average, 66 percent of blacks go to college, compared with 95 percent of whites.
Evanston's most recent efforts include hiring more African-American teachers, raising the academic eligibility requirements for participation in sports, increasing the amount of homework, and creating more advanced placement courses.
Students at Evanston and elsewhere say doing well in school is not always accepted by their peers.
Fitzroy Dennison, 18, said he was so conscious of the stigma that he avoided speaking grammatically correct English with friends.
"You learn to switch it off," said Fitzroy, whose parents are from Panama and Belize. "When you're on the streets, you speak Ebonics. When you're at home, you speak Creole. When you're in school, you speak proper English. But when you talk too proper, your peers will call you white and say you're a cracker."
Bruce Eddy, a history teacher at Evanston, recalled that during a class that mixed middle-level and honors students, "a black student came in the room and pointed to a couple of black kids in the room, and one kid got very upset and said, 'He's pointing out that this is an all-white class and there are only a couple of black students in here.' "
Some Insight Into the Obstacles
ome clues to the problem might come from students who have achieved in spite of considerable adversity, like Albert Smith, whose family is so poor that he and his parents, four siblings and a nephew often struggle to have enough food.
For Albert, a wiry, energetic 17-year-old, race had a profound effect on his self-esteem in school. As a freshman in history and English honors classes, he said, "the people around me, they were white, and it intimidated me."
"I just thought they were smart because they were white," he added. "I didn't want to raise my hand to answer a question."
That year, Albert's grade point average was 2.7, and he said African-American friends in regular classes treated him like a genius, even when he was not getting the grades he wanted. He started to push himself harder after teachers told him he had potential, and after he started "to become comfortable with all the white people."
By junior year, Albert was averaging 3.6, and he graduated in June, was accepted to several colleges and his classmates voted him best all-around male student.
Albert said he believed that many black students privately respect high achievers, but they "openly praise the people who are doing badly, the people in the gangs, the people who are doing negative things."
He said some seem afraid to try hard because "if they push themselves to the hardest and they don't do well, they think they've failed."
"Then they'll start believing some of the stigmas that are out there in society," Albert said, "that African-Americans aren't as smart as their white counterparts."
Some researchers say differences in home life may affect how well students do. Ronald F. Ferguson, a researcher at Harvard University, has been surveying students at Shaker Heights High School outside of Cleveland, an academically acclaimed school in the new network where most black and white families are solidly middle class. There, while African-Americans make up half the student population, blacks constituted 9 percent of those who graduated in the top fifth of their class, but 83 percent of those in the bottom fifth.
Among other things, Dr. Ferguson found that "black kids watch twice as much TV as white kids; three hours a day as opposed to one and a half hours a day."
National studies have also found differences. One asked students to name the lowest grade they could take home without their parents becoming angry. Blacks consistently named lower grades than Asian, white or Hispanic students.
Family Background Comes Into Play
loria Ladson-Billings, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, said middle-class, college-educated black parents were often the first generation of their families to have such success, so the roots of their academic and economic accomplishments are shallower than many white families.
"For whites, if you go to grandma's house you're maybe going to this huge family library," but for many blacks, grandma's is "a working-class household where people are very proud of what you're doing but they don't have any way of really supporting it."
On their upwardly mobile trajectory, black families may have moved frequently, switching children from school to school, not usually an educational plus.
Dr. Gordon said that because they did not grow up in academically oriented homes, "many minority parents who are serious about their child's education insist that their kids study, do homework, but the same parents are seldom seen by their kids reading a lot or doing anything studious."
Those differences may help account for some test results that showed the gap between black and white achievement on national reading tests and on S.A.T.'s was wider for children whose parents had college or graduate degrees than for children whose parents did not have a high school diploma. (But some researchers say those results might be partly explained by other factors: subtle cultural biases in tests or in schools, the many fewer black parents than white parents with advanced educational backgrounds, or the possibility that black children may have been more likely than whites to overstate or misconstrue their parents' educational history.)
"African-American parents are going to have to step up to the plate and do more," said Martha Burns, an Evanston mother who pushed to get her two children into accelerated elementary school classes, takes them to after-school reading programs and limits television watching. "Anytime you bring this up, people get defensive, insulted and then we just retreat. We really never bring it on the table."
Ms. Burns, a co-president of the P.T.A. council, and experts like Dr. Gordon also said African-American churches and community centers should create more extracurricular academic programs, following the example of, say, Asian-Americans.
But some students and parents say that teachers and guidance counselors, white or black, may, consciously or unconsciously, have lower expectations of African-American students and that this may ultimately translate into self-fulfilling prophecies of mediocrity.
Tanya Bernard, a middle-class 17-year-old who got mostly A's and B's as a junior this year, said that when a counselor discouraged her from taking a Spanish honors class, "I think it may have been a little bit of a racial thing."
Terri Shepard, whose daughter is a student at Evanston, said she believed that early on, many teachers label African-American children as having less potential than whites.
"I don't think teachers expect excellence, and you get what you expect," said Ms. Shepard, a school board member for the lower grades.
That impression, she and others said, can lead parents to distrust schools. The parents may feel less able to act as advocates for their children, less knowledgeable about how to get the attention of teachers, or simply less certain that it will make a difference if they urge their children to strive harder.
"My teachers are not telling me I have to do it; my parents don't tell me I have to do it," said Fitzroy, who graduated this year. "African-American parents, they settle for less, not knowing they can get more for their students."
