The Canary in the Mine: The Achievement Gap between Black and White Students

Abstract

The educational achievement gap is real and has serious social, economic, and political consequences, Mr. Singham points out. But the situation is by no means hopeless, if we start looking at the problem in new ways and avoid simplistic one-shot solutions. Shaker Heights is not your typical community. It is a small inner-ring bedroom suburb of Cleveland, coveting an area of about five square miles and having a population of 30,000. It is a carefully planned city with tree-lined streets winding past well-maintained homes and manicured lawns, lakes, parks, and red-brick schools nestled in campus-like grounds. The city is about one-third African American and two-thirds white, with a sprinkling of other minorities. Although income levels in the city range from the poor (about 10% below the poverty level) to millionaires, the image of Shaker Heights is that of a primarily middle- and upper-middle-class community (median family income of $66,000) that is home to many of the academics, professionals, and corporate executives of all ethnic groups who work in the Cleveland area. It is also a highly educated community, with more than 60% of all residents over the age of 25 holding at least a bachelor's degree - a figure three times the national average. Shaker Heights prides itself on the excellence of its school system, taxing itself voluntarily with one of the highest rates in the state of Ohio in order to maintain the wide range of academic and extracurricular programs that provide the students who take advantage of them with an education that would be the envy of any child in the nation. Hence the city tends to attract as residents relatively well-off people who seek both an integrated community and a high-quality education for their children. Every year, the school district sends off about 85% of its graduating seniors to four-year colleges, many of them prestigious, and boasts a remarkably high number of the National Merit Scholarship semifinalists, way out of proportion to the small size of its student enrollment (about 5,500). But all is not well, and the problem is immediately apparent when you walk into classrooms. Although the school population has equal numbers of black students and white ones, in the highest-achievement tracks (the Advanced Placement sections) you find only a handful of blacks (about 10%), while the lowest-achievement tracks (called general education) are populated almost exclusively by blacks (about 95%). When educational statistics are disaggregated by ethnicity, it is found that black Shaker Heights students on average do better than black students elsewhere, just as white Shaker Heights students do better than their counterparts in other school systems. The real puzzle has been why, although both communities have equal access to all the school district's educational opportunities, the academic performance of black Shaker Heights students lags significantly behind that of their white peers. For example, the average black SAT score in 1996 was 956 (compared to a national black average of 856), while the average for white students was 1198 (compared to a national white average of 1049). This ethnic educational achievement gap is hardly news. It is a well-studied and well-established fact that, using almost any measure (the famous 15-point average I.Q. gap between blacks and whites sensationalized by The Bell Curve, SAT scores, college and high school grade-point averages, graduation and dropout rates), black students nationwide do not perform as well as whites.(1) While the phenomenon itself is indisputable, there is no clear consensus on the causes, and favored explanations seem to depend on where one stands on the ideological spectrum. The so-called liberal interpretation is that this gap is the result of economic disparities between the two ethnic communities that can be traced back to the legacy of slavery and other forms of oppression that blacks have suffered. …