Why Racial Test Score Convergence is Imperative

Now that is a sexy title. Anyway, moving on...

Much of the hullabaloo regarding the No Child Left Behind Act, passed back in ’01, was the extra attention that public schools would have to pay towards “higher standards,” as if this was some sort of panacea towards fixing schools, which are plagued with some of the following problems, among others, in no particular order:

• Local monopolies
• Enormous barriers to entry and exit in both number of schools and the necessary labor (e.g. teachers)
• Rising costs and few mechanisms or incentives for reducing costs
• No mechanism between pay and performance
• Extremely limited ability for customers (e.g. parents and their children) to “shop around” for better facilities
• Parent-Teacher Associations that prevent schools from pressing kids harder on the grounds that it will “hurt their feelings”
• Old and decaying facilities
• An unequal, regressive, poorly-designed revenue base system (property taxes)
• Very little actual consensus about what the priorities of school should be

There are more reasons. Higher standards will solve few, if not any, of these. In fact, it will solve none of the reasons listed above. That isn’t to say that higher standards won’t help…before continuing, it’s necessary to issue a slight disclaimer: I do not support raising standards, particularly in math and science, to the degree of, say, Japan. As much as I’d prefer the rest of the United States to emulate my old stomping grounds of Seattle a little more, higher suicide rates isn’t the best place to start. Kids there…well, they take school and achievement a little too seriously.

Not that such an eventuality would ever happen here. That’s a cultural difference twixt the Land of the Rising Sun and the Land of the Swelling Waistline.

Again, I digress. The main point is that higher standards, coupled with a little more of a carrot-and-stick system from schools (throwing out the arcane age-based grade system or the one-track-fits-all school achievement ladder, for instance) could do wonders to give kids real incentives to get interested in learning. They’re not the end-all and be-all to save public schools in this country, but they could help significantly on the achievement end of the situation.

So where does race come into this debate? Try about five million different places, but I’ll just choose one and try not to stray from it too significantly. One of the biggest problems in raising standards is that there are students that are far enough behind the current standards as to make it next to impossible to catch up with the rest of the student body: young minority students. The gap is – thankfully – closing, but there are still significant shortfalls between majority and minority students. Now, there’s something to be said about the “cultures of learning” argument – the idea that a child’s ethnic/racial/socioeconomic background could have a profound impact on a child’s attitude towards learning – and that’s not something that can be addressed on a governmental level. The most important objective is still to seek some sort of convergence among test scores for children.

Obviously, this isn’t a proposition that has many detractors. Provided that scores harmonize up and not down (i.e. scores rising to a convergent plateau as opposed to falling to a parallel floor), most everyone would support student averages to be relatively similar across racial boundaries.

However, there’s a more important factor here. The argument of the state of Mississippi in U.S. v. Fordice, back in 1992, was on-target, but for the wrong reasons.

Backing up a minute. The case itself dealt with the Justice Department suing the State of Mississippi for keeping abnormally high academic admissions standards based on ACT scores (rather than GPA), which were known to be racially disparate (the Mississippi white schools had an admission requirement ACT score of 15; the average white student’s score, 18; the average black’s, 7).

The case for the state of Mississippi was that the white colleges couldn’t afford to lower their standards, because their higher standards in classes would be too much for kids that scored too low on the ACT tests to demonstrate aptitude but were high enough to get into the predominantly white schools under newer (and lower) standards, whereas no one would be able to get into the predominately black schools if they raised their standards.

Why was this argument sensical? Because of the vast disparity between the scores of white and black students. Which gets me to the main point of this entire post:

Academic standards can’t be raised sufficiently to promote achievement until racial disparities are statistically insignificant.

If they’re raised too soon, there’ll doubtless be another case like Fordice in which someone will say that the new standards discriminate somehow – and given the current state of affairs, that’s all too possible.

As to how to solve this problem…I don’t know. I really don’t. One of my first posts relayed several solutions to help improve education and I certainly have a good number more. However, those are all majoritarian; I have scarce knowledge about how kids of different races think, act, and approach education at such a young age. I have little or no study in psychology and even less in child psychology. Not having any racial studies background either, I can’t attest to any superior insight from racial group to racial group.

When it comes to the solution of this muddle, I can only frame the problem. Your guess is as good – if not better – than mine.