Things got awkward when the word "culture" came up at the October 20 American Enterprise Institute forum about the enormous gap in academic performance that separates African-American (and to a lesser extent Hispanic) students from whites and Asians.
Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom were summarizing their important new book, No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning. It is in large part a devastating indictment, laden with statistics, case studies, and powerful analysis, of how disastrously our educational system has failed black students. But as Abigail Thernstrom noted at the AEI forum, the two authors also endorse studies suggesting that socioeconomic status accounts for only a third of the black-white achievement gap. "Group cultural differences" account for much of the other two-thirds, she said.
This drew a polite but heartfelt rebuke from one of the few black people in the audience, William T. Coleman Jr. He said that the Thernstroms had not made the case for blaming "black culture" for problems that Coleman himself blames on the continuing isolation of low-income students in mostly black schools without adequate resources.
Coleman speaks with authority. Now 83, he experienced raw racial discrimination in the Philadelphia schools and beyond, graduated at the top of his Harvard Law School class, helped Thurgood Marshall win Brown v. Board of Education, became a highly successful corporate lawyer, and served as President Ford’s secretary of Transportation (he’s a Republican), all the while continuing the work that has made him a legendary civil-rights lawyer.
Bill Coleman is also among my most admired friends — as are Abby and Steve Thernstrom, perhaps the nation’s most careful and candid scholars on what their book calls "the main source of ongoing racial inequality [and] the central civil-rights issue of our time: our failure to provide first-class education for black and Hispanic students, in both cities and suburbs." Abby’s many roles include membership on the Massachusetts State Board of Education and the U.S. Civil Rights Commission; Steve’s include a history professorship at Harvard and a position on the National Council on the Humanities.
If people of this quality cannot find common ground about how to fix the academic underperformance of black kids, the outlook is bleak indeed. But perhaps they can. Coleman is no doctrinaire liberal; the Thernstroms are no doctrinaire conservatives; and disagreements about how to disentangle the relative roles of poverty and black culture should have little bearing on the core question, which is how best to educate poor black children during the first 18 years of their lives.
Coleman’s complaint was correct in the sense that the Thernstroms did not cite much empirical support at the AEI forum for their view that black culture — as distinguished from poverty — is a major cause of black academic underperformance. But the book itself makes a strong case for that view. It makes an even stronger case that the main remedies traditionally prescribed by the major civil-rights and education groups for the academic troubles of black students either have failed or won’t work.
More racial integration, more money, smaller class sizes, assigning the best teachers to the worst schools — none of these promises much progress, if any, in closing the academic gap. The only things left to try, the Thernstroms argue persuasively, are to change our educational system’s approach to educating poor black children — in ways far more radical than have ever been attempted on a widespread basis — and to change the attitudes about learning that many absorb from their parents, peer groups, local communities, and television.
That is what the Thernstroms mean by culture. "This is not a book about innate intelligence," they stress. " ‘Culture’ is a loose and slippery term, and we do not use it to imply a fixed set of group traits, but rather values, attitudes, and skills that are shaped and reshaped by the environment [and] open to change."
No Excuses begins by documenting the stunningly large deficiencies in the academic performance of most black children, including upper-middle-class kids in relatively good, integrated schools. The average black high school senior has poorer reading skills and has learned less about math, U.S. history, and geography than the average white or Asian eighth-grader, according to test scores of a representative national sample of 17-year-olds by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. (Hispanics do a little better than blacks.)
Still more surprising, "The gap in academic achievement that we see today is actually worse than it was 15 years ago," according to the Thernstroms. "In the 1970s and through most of the 1980s, it was closing, but around 1988 it began to widen, with no turnaround in sight." For example, in 1978 the average black math score was at the same level as the 13th percentile of all white scores, meaning that 87 percent of whites had higher scores. By 1990, the average black score had moved up to the 24th percentile of white scores. But then it fell back just as dramatically, down to the 14th percentile of white scores, by 1999.
What explains such deeply depressing numbers, and what might change them? The Thernstroms dismantle the conventional wisdom point by point, in compelling detail. The gist:
• Racial isolation. It’s true that many black children are still isolated in majority-minority schools. But many are not, and even middle-class black children in well-integrated schools in prosperous suburbs still lag very "woefully far behind whites." There is no evidence either that black students need whites sitting next to them to learn or that major desegregation plans have substantially improved black achievement. While there is some evidence that black students gain ground when attending overwhelmingly white schools, segregated residential patterns preclude that possibility for most blacks, especially in urban districts that whites have fled. Seventeen of the 26 largest central-city districts are less than 20 percent white, and white children are already a minority in a growing number of states.
• Money and class size. Writers such as Jonathan Kozol have dramatized the "savage inequalities," to borrow the title of his 1991 best-seller, between the richest white and the poorest black schools. But in fact, most black students are not in underfunded schools. Indeed, the average majority-minority district spent more per pupil than the whitest districts in gross dollars, according to the best available nationwide study; even after correcting for the fact that a dollar buys less in urban areas, they spent only 6.5 percent less. (While the study dates to 1990, the national trend since has "been toward a more egalitarian distribution of school dollars," the Thernstroms note.) Studies have also shown that "the highest pupil-teacher ratios and the largest classes were to be found in the schools with the fewest black [and poor] students."
In addition, while "greater school funding could be put to good use" if spent wisely (such as merit pay for exceptional teachers), pouring more money "into the existing system" has been woefully ineffective. Nationwide, per-pupil spending nearly doubled (on an inflation-adjusted basis) between 1970 and 2000, and average class sizes plunged. But American students’ test scores remained "essentially flat."
Two cities provide stunning examples of lavish spending to help black students (among others) with virtually no educational benefit to show for it. Liberal Cambridge, Mass., spends $17,000 per pupil — more than most of the nation’s wealthiest suburban school districts — keeps class sizes very small, aggressively pursues racial balance, and has eliminated ability groupings in the name of racial equality. But still, the city’s black and Hispanic students have done very badly on statewide tests — worse than those in nearby communities "with comparable demographics [that] spend only half as much or less per pupil." In Kansas City, Mo., a federal judge ordered massive spending increases starting in 1985 to attract white suburban students to the 75-percent-black schools. This bought 56 magnet schools, more teachers, higher pay, smaller classes, lavish science labs, greenhouses, and other attractions, including a 100-acre farm, a wildlife sanctuary, a planetarium, a classical Greek theater, and an Olympic-sized swimming pool. But "15 years and $2 billion later, the schools were no more racially integrated [and] test scores were just as dismal."
• Teacher quality. While mostly black and mostly poor schools do appear to have more weak teachers than others, this reflects not centralized assignment policies but self-selection by teachers who tire of combat duty and rules making it virtually impossible to fire incompetents.
In short, the black-white gap will not be closed by more integration, more money, smaller classes, or tinkering with teacher assignments. What’s left to be tried? And what does "culture" have to do with it? More on this in a future column.