Must Schools Fail?


















Definitions of class distinctions are often imprecise. Ogbu observed black and white middle-class families in Shaker Heights who, despite having similar incomes, may nevertheless belong to different social classes. In Whitewashing Race, Michael Brown and his colleagues try to give a more sophisticated description of race-based class differences.8 They are critical of arguments against affirmative action in the Thernstroms’ previous book, America in Black and White (1997), pointing to many differences between blacks and whites that the Thernstroms ignore. While the lives of blacks and whites may be becoming more similar, there remain vast differences that affect blacks’ ability to compete with whites in school.

Black median family income is now 62 percent of white income, up a little from 58 percent thirty years ago. But, as Brown and his colleagues point out, the median net worth of black families is still only 8 percent of whites’. Part of the reason for this difference is that government and private lenders have discouraged or prohibited black families from buying homes in suburban communities where values have appreciated in the decades after World War II. Part of the reason, too, is that black middle-class adults are more likely than whites to be the first generation in their families to have risen to the middle class; many have low-income parents and other close relatives to help support, making it more difficult for them to save money.

According to Brown and his colleagues, “The best predictor of current net worth for young black and white families is their parents’ net worth.” Especially in today’s inflated housing market, young couples who are not the first generation in their families to be middle class often get financial help from their parents to buy a house. Even in comparatively well-off suburbs like Shaker Heights, black families, lacking such help, are likely to be under more economic strain. Blacks and whites in Shaker Heights may all be middle-class, but blacks have a more tenuous hold on their status. Young people who know their parents have saved money for their college tuitions are likely to have different attitudes toward their educations than similarly middle-class young people (more often black) whose parents have no such savings. The Thernstoms acknowledge that current income alone is an insufficient explanation of difference in status:

A more refined measure of social class that took into account the socioeconomic status of grandparents as well as parents and that included information about wealth would doubtless narrow some of the differences that we have attributed to race.

But they nonetheless attribute these differences to a black culture of underachievement, even though culture is at least partly an inextricable expression of social and economic life.

No one can say how much of the gap in academic achievement between blacks and whites is caused by racially neutral class differences, how much is attributable to black culture, and how much of that cultural difference is itself a defensive reaction to continuing discrimination. The Thernstroms write that poverty (defined by current income), parents with little education, and residence in poor neighborhoods explain only about a third of the gap. It doesn’t take much reflection to think of other noncultural factors that may help to explain the differences in academic success. Poor black families, for example, are likely to have low incomes for longer periods than poor whites, whose poverty is more episodic. But when the test scores of “similar” black and white students are compared, current-year family income is usually the only evidence available.9 Taking into account poverty’s duration would account for more of what falsely appears to be a gap in race and culture.

Partly because urban rents have climbed faster than earnings of low-wage workers, low-income families move frequently. And black families move more often than whites, perhaps because poor urban blacks are poorer than poor urban whites (partly, in turn, owing to more single-parent families and to higher black unemployment). A government survey a decade ago found that black children are more than twice as likely as whites to have attended at least three different schools by third grade.10 An analysis of demographic and test score data in Texas recently concluded that if the mobility of black students could be reduced to the frequency of whites’, it would eliminate about 14 percent of the racial gap in test scores. Taking income into account, blacks’ average test scores would rise by 7 percent if poor children moved only as often as the non-poor.11


What is most puzzling about the Thernstroms’ argument is the lack of connection between their analysis and the policies they prescribe. On finding that the gap in achievement between blacks and whites derives from some combination of social class and black culture, they conclude that it can be closed by establishing more charter schools, issuing vouchers to black children to attend private schools, improving the quality of teachers (largely by weakening the power of teachers’ unions so that administrators will have more discretion over hiring and firing teachers), and concentrating more on basic academic skills (“facts are good”).

Spending more money on schools, lowering class sizes, and making efforts to integrate schools, they say, have proven to be failures. Nor do they endorse expensive early childhood programs for black infants and toddlers that might expose them to well-educated adults who could help provide the more literate (middle-class) intellectual environment these children lack at home. This is not a radical idea. Last year, President Bush’s assistant secretary of education responsible for elementary and secondary school policy resigned, and shortly thereafter denounced the administration’s insistence that blacks’ inadequate achievement was caused by “low expectations” held by schools. Rather, she said, by age three, black children are already far behind, making necessary high-quality early childhood programs beginning in infancy.12

The Thernstroms do not recommend interventions that could modify the enormous out-of-school differences that contribute to the lower achievement of black students—neither early childhood programs nor the funding of after-school or summer programs that could offer artistic and athletic activities to lower-class children. Instead, they hold up as models a few charter schools that report high test scores for black children, and a single teacher in Los Angeles who is reputedly successful. The charter schools the Thernstroms describe are doubtless excellent, but they are questionable models for raising the achievement of lower-class blacks. For example, the Thernstroms praise a chain of middle schools called the KIPP Academies, which try to enforce an academic culture that the Thernstroms say most black families lack: strict discipline, constant talk of college plans, and a focus on basic skills.13 But these charter schools do not enroll black children from typical low-income families. For example, the Bronx KIPP Academy, cited by the Thernstroms, entering fifth graders have fourth-grade test scores that are considerably higher than the averages in the regular schools from which they come. Parents who send their children to such schools are already unusually interested in their education; children are accepted only if parents agree to monitor their homework, enforce approved disciplinary measures, and limit television-watching. If children or their parents violate these agreements, the children can be expelled—a rare occurrence, but a threat nevertheless.

KIPP also provides after-school, Saturday, and summer programs devoted to artistic activities, yet they do so without spending more than regular schools whose students are in attendance for 40 percent less time. The Thernstroms see this as proof that more money for schools isn’t needed, and attribute KIPP’s accomplishments to its “creative budget decisions.” But KIPP survives largely by hiring young, energetic teachers who do not intend to make teaching a career. For working many more hours and weeks than most teachers, the KIPP faculty gets extra pay but still earns less than experienced teachers in the regular public school system. KIPP teachers are frequently replaced, partly because the program cannot sufficiently raise their salaries as they grow older. KIPP is an interesting model but one that cannot be widely reproduced.

The founders of KIPP were inspired by the example of Rafe Esquith, a teacher at the Hobart School in Los Angeles who, the Thernstroms believe, is an exception to the ineffectiveness of other public educators. In his memoir There Are No Shortcuts, Esquith describes teaching at a school whose students are almost entirely the children of Korean and Central American immigrants, many of whom were well educated in their home countries. (Some of the Central Americans, for example, were professionals who fled the civil wars of the 1980s.) Esquith has had virtually no experience with black students, which makes him a curious model for the Thernstroms, who make so much of black culture as the cause of blacks’ low achievement in school.

Esquith is an inspiring teacher whose pupils perform Shakespeare, learn to play stringed instruments, read literary classics, and win academic competitions. His students arrive in school early for extra instruction, stay late, come to school on Saturdays, and take cross-country trips in the summer, all under Esquith’s tutelage. He initially paid for these extras himself with what he earned by taking second and third jobs, and later, as his reputation grew, from foundation grants. Esquith only mentions in passing the crucial fact that his students were specially selected because of their unusually high IQ scores (his were “gifted and talented” classes). There is no reason to think that what works for these children will work for poor children of average ability.

Would providing additional money to public schools serving black students help them? Convinced that public schools are incompetent, the Thernstroms say no. For some schools they are probably right, although they underestimate how many public schools in impoverished communities are staffed by dedicated teachers who impose appropriate discipline and high standards. Still, if the causes of the discrepancy in achievement are as rooted in class and culture as they appear to be, more money for the schools won’t itself close it. But more money could somewhat narrow the gap, as is suggested by evidence which the Thernstroms ignore.

A puzzling aspect of the discrepancy in test scores is that it was cut in about half between 1970 and 1990. Since then it has remained steady, narrowing slightly on some tests, widening on others. (The Thernstroms mention only the widening.) David Grissmer, a RAND research scientist, and his colleagues have shown that some social class differences between whites and blacks narrowed during the 1970s and 1980s, explaining about half of the reduction in the gap in test scores.14 A decrease in black family size gave black parents more time to devote to each of their children. The percentage of black mothers who completed high school also rose substantially, giving black families greater comfort with formal education.

The Thernstroms believe that government spending on the education of black children has had no effect. Yet if only half of the closing gap from 1970 to 1990 can be attributed to some improvement in blacks’ social and economic circumstances, it is possible, indeed likely, that public programs (in which there was then greater interest than there is now) contributed to the other half. Between 1970 and 1990 new money was invested in Head Start, Title I compensatory programs, special education for slow learners, and reduced class size. This was also a period of school integration, another reform the Thernstroms dismiss as ineffective.15 Much of the new money in these decades may have been spent inefficiently, but enough may have been well spent to help narrow the discrepancy between blacks’ and whites’ achievement.

In his recent book Final Test, Peter Schrag argues that unequal distribution of money among schools accounts for much of the achievement gap. Many educators and activists have concluded that smaller classes, better-paid teachers, better facilities, and access to pre-kindergarten classes for four-year-olds are needed for poor and minority students to keep up. With low achievement so much a product of class and culture, and so well established by the time children are three, the idea that more money can itself solve the problem is as dubious as the idea that tough discipline, higher standards, and more basic education alone will work. Still, more money, like better instruction, can certainly help, and in Final Test, Schrag documents efforts to find in state constitutions a right to have more money spent on the education of disadvantaged children.

In more than thirty states, plain-tiffs representing low-achieving students have sought court orders to increase school funding on constitutional grounds. Beginning in the early 1970s, these lawsuits mostly challenged school districts’ dependence on property tax revenue. Communities with high tax bases can afford to pay teachers more, and have smaller classes, better facilities, even better football equipment. Plaintiffs reasonably claimed that if education was a constitutional responsibility, states could not lawfully provide different educations to children based on the wealth of their com-munities. The suits have been only moderately successful; spending on education has been rising in almost every state, with or without court orders. Perhaps the fear of litigation has provoked some governors and legislatures to increase school funds more than they would otherwise have done.

But even equal spending may not be enough, and lawsuits now have taken a different tack. Plaintiffs argue that state constitutions implicitly guarantee an education for disadvantaged children that is minimally “adequate,” and the money that a state is obliged to spend on schools cannot simply go to poor and rich districts equally. Instead, adequacy must now be defined as providing sufficient money to generate “adequate” outcomes. Yet asking judges to determine not only what the specific outcomes of schooling should be, but what specific pedagogies, processes, and resources are guaranteed to achieve them, all from vague state constitutional guarantees of, say, “a thorough and efficient” education, requires a degree of judicial activism that even the most dedicated loose constructionists should abhor.

This is why so many of the state legal disputes described by Schrag end inconclusively. In Ohio two years ago, for example, judges found the system for financing education unconstitutional, but acknowledged that the courts are not competent to design a new system. As a result the legislature must do so without further judicial review. Schrag’s response is clever, and somewhat cynical. Instead of trying to find precise pedagogical descriptions of adequate schools in state constitutions, he urges plaintiffs to endorse the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind law, and then argue that it is a denial of fairness to expect poor children to meet the law’s high standards without guaranteeing better-financed schools. This makes the definition of “adequacy” subject to legislatively adopted academic standards, not to the platitudes of constitutional aspiration.

To merge what Schrag describes as conservative goals (tough accountability for test scores) with liberal means (more money to achieve them) requires that low test scores be used as a lever to get states to put up more money. Schrag acknowledges that this tactic raises cause for concern:

…Instead of teaching kids to think and encouraging them to be creative, the accountability system foster[s] questionable drill-and-kill teaching practices and cram courses designed mainly to bolster scores, cause[s] schools to neglect things like art and music and higher-order skills that were not tested, and [drives] more students to drop out.

But to pursue these objections to a test-based accountability system, he concludes, would only undercut the case for more money—so he advises that they be soft-pedaled.

Schrag is right to insist that if spent properly, new money for things like smaller class sizes, better-qualified teachers, pre-kindergarten, and better facilities (the sorts of improvements that may soon be decreed as a result of New York City’s “adequacy” lawsuit) can do a lot to improve outcomes from poor children. But even if lawsuits demanding an “adequate education” could produce more money, class differences will continue to ensure an achievement gap because schools alone, no matter how well financed, can’t by themselves overcome the cultural, social, and economic causes of the differences in academic achievement. The drive for “adequacy” is bound to be seen, when someday it has played itself out, as only another failed education crusade.

Today’s education debates are poisoned by the insistence of partisans on finding a single cause, whether it be low standards, parental inattention, or lack of money, for continuing racial inequality, and then to denounce remedies that address others. Of recent books bemoaning the black–white achievement gap, Pedro Noguera’s City Schools and the American Dream attempts to avoid this single-solution approach. Noguera acknowledges that conservatives are right in saying that many urban schools are failing. But in view of the social and economic problems of their students, he writes, these schools are a lot better than critics think. In contrast to the desperation of their surrounding communities, urban public schools are the safest and most enriching influences in many children’s lives. Adding health clinics and other social services would make them even better. Some schools do better than others but that doesn’t mean that even the best schools can succeed on their own. Still, Noguera argues, by promoting intensive adult–child relationships, schools can help black students to develop more positive attitudes toward their education.

But Noguera, too, fudges the central issue of national education debates: Does closing the test score gap mean raising the achievement of lower-class black children only to the level of lower-class whites? This may well be possible, but few consider it a goal worth striving for. Or does Noguera hold out hope for schools that produce classless outcomes, in which not only exceptional poor black youths, but typical ones, reach the level of typical middle-class whites? Such a revolutionary outcome is no more likely today than it was in the nineteenth-century New England towns that Stephan Thernstrom once described. Since the US today has less social mobility across generations than most other industrialized nations, modest improvement might be a more appropriate aspiration. If we fail to accept gradual progress, education reform will remain a hopeless enterprise.

  1. 1


  2. 2


  3. 3


  4. 4


  5. 5


  6. 6


  7. 7


  8. 8

    The book has seven coauthors, but is not an edited collection of separate essays. Two of the authors, Michael K. Brown and David Wellman, took chapter drafts from the others and rewrote them to make the book thematically and stylistically consistent.

  9. 9

    Statistics are derived from students’ registration for subsidized lunch programs.

  10. 10

    US General Accounting Office, Elementary School Children: Many Change Schools Frequently, Harming Their Education (GAO/HEHS-94-45, 1994).

  11. 11

    Eric A. Hanushek, John F. Kain, and Steven G. Rivkin, “Disruption Versus Tiebout Improvement: The Costs and Benefits of Switching Schools,” Journal of Public Economics (Summer 2004).

  12. 12

    Susan B. Neuman, “From Rhetoric to Reality: The Case for High-Quality Compensatory Prekindergarten Programs,” Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 85, No. 4 (December 2003).

  13. 13

    KIPP stands for “Knowledge Is Power Program.”

  14. 14

    David W. Grissmer, Sheila Nataraj Kirby, Mark Berends, and Stephanie Williamson, Student Achievement and the Changing American Family (RAND, 1994).

  15. 15

    In the current issue of Commentary, the Thernstroms repeat their argument that blaming black students’ low achievement on their continued racial isolation is “just one more excuse for the cultural and educational failures at the root of this problem,” although they acknowledge that racial imbalance in schools “dropped dramatically between 1968 and 1990,” only to stagnate or slightly intensify after that. But they fail to connect this observation with their report in No Excuses that the years between 1968 and 1990 were also those when the test score gap narrowed. (Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom, “Have We Overcome?” Commentary, November 2004).