Closing the Racial Gap in Education

By Jason L. Riley  

The usual explanation for the academic achievement gap is that blacks come from a lower socioeconomic background and their schools have fewer resources. But research finds the problem transcends class and its roots lie elsewhere.

In the late 1990s the black residents of Shaker Heights, Ohio, an affluent Cleveland suburb, invited John Ogbu, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, to examine the black-white academic achievement gap in their community. Roughly a third of the town’s residents were black, and the school district was divided equally along racial lines. Yet the black kids trailed far behind whites in test scores, grade-point averages, placement in high-level classes, and college attendance. Black students were receiving 80 percent of the Ds and Fs.



Nationwide, the racial gap in education is well documented. Black kids are overrepresented among high-school dropouts and students who are not performing at grade level. Black scores on the SAT and other standardized tests are far lower on average than those of whites. The achievement gap begins in elementary school and widens in higher grades. By the end of high school the typical black student is several years behind his white peers in reading and math. The usual explanation of this is class inequality. Blacks don’t perform on the level of whites because they come from a lower socioeconomic background and their schools have fewer resources, goes the argument. But what Ogbu found is that this problem transcends class and persists even among the children of affluent, educated black professionals.
“None of the versions of the class-inequality [argument] can explain why black students from similar social class backgrounds, residing in the same neighborhood, and attending the same school, don’t do as well as white students,” wrote Ogbu. “Within the black population, of course, middle-class children do better, on the average, than lower-class children, just as in the white population. However, when blacks and whites from similar socioeconomic backgrounds are compared, one sees that black students at every class level perform less well in school than their white counterparts.”
Ogbu and his team of researchers were given access to parents, teachers, principals, administrators, and students in the Shaker Heights school district, which was one of the country’s best. And he concluded that black culture, more than anything else, explained the academic achievement gap. The black kids readily admitted that they didn’t work as hard as whites, took easier classes, watched more TV, and read fewer books. “A kind of norm of minimum effort appeared to exist among black students,” wrote Ogbu. “The students themselves recognized this and used it to explain both their academic behaviors and their low academic achievement performance.” Due to peer pressure, some black students “didn’t work as hard as they should and could.” Among their black friends, “it was not cool to be successful” or “to work hard or to show you’re smart.” One female student said that some black students believed “it was cute to be dumb.” Asked why, “she said it was because they couldn’t do well and that they didn’t want anyone else to do well.”

The black kids readily admitted that they didn’t work as hard as whites, took easier classes, watched more TV, and read fewer books.

Ogbu found that black high-school students “avoided certain attitudes, standard English, and some behaviors because they considered them white. They feared that adopting white ways would be detrimental to their collective racial identity and solidarity. Unfortunately, some of the attitudes labeled ‘white’ and avoided by the students were those that enhanced school success.” The behaviors and attitudes to be avoided included, for example, enrolling in honors and advanced-placement classes, striving for high grades, talking properly, hanging around too many white students, and participating in extracurricular activities that were populated by whites.
“What amazed me is that these kids who come from homes of doctors and lawyers are not thinking like their parents; they don’t know how their parents made it,” Ogbu told the New York Times in 2002, the year before he died. “They are looking at rappers in ghettos as their role models, they are looking at entertainers. The parents work two jobs, three jobs, to give their children everything, but they are not guiding their children.”
Indeed, Ogbu found that it wasn’t just the black kids who were academically disengaged. Few black parents were members of Parent Teacher Organizations. Early-elementary-school programs designed primarily for black children were spurned by black families. And white parents tended to have higher academic expectations for their kids. “From school personnel reports of school authorities, interviews with students, discussions with parents themselves, and our observations, we can confidently conclude that black parents in Shaker Heights did not participate actively in school organizations and in school events and programs designed to enhance their children’s academic engagement and achievement,” he wrote.

It turned out that teachers were passing students who did not perform at grade level.

But in at least one important respect, Ogbu faulted the school system itself for the achievement gap. It turned out that teachers were passing students who did not perform at grade level. The practice was widespread, particularly in kindergarten through eighth grade, and well known among students. And the teachers who were setting lower standards for black kids had “good intentions,” he reported. But it had the effect of leading some black kids to believe that they were doing better in school than they really were. Other kids simply didn’t try as hard as they would have otherwise. When Ogbu asked students why their grades were poor, “they would say that they did not take their schoolwork seriously because they knew they were going to be passed into the ninth grade anyway.” Ogbu’s team of researchers also noted that in classes where most of the kids were black, teachers expected less of the students in terms of homework, even going so far as to de-emphasize its importance. Obviously, school officials aren’t responsible for the poor attitudes and lack of effort among black kids, but ignoring or indulging this isn’t going to help close the learning gap.
Today’s civil rights leaders encourage blacks to see themselves as victims. The overriding message from the NAACP, the National Urban League, and most black politicians is that white racism explains black pathology. Ogbu’s research shows that this message is not lost on black youth. “Black students chose well-educated and successful professional blacks in Shaker Heights and elsewhere in the nation as role models,” he noted. “However, the role models were admired because of their leadership in the ‘collective struggle’ against white oppression or in the civil rights movement rather than because of their academic and professional success or other attributes that made them successful in the corporate economy or wider societal institutions.”
There was a time when black leaders understood the primacy of black self-development. They fought hard for equal opportunity, but knew that blacks have to be culturally prepared to take advantage of those opportunities when they arrive. “We know that there are many things wrong in the white world, but there are many things wrong in the black world, too,” Martin Luther King Jr. once told a congregation. “We can’t keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do for ourselves.” Learning to value education is one of those things.
This article is excerpted from Riley’s new book, “Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed.” Riley will discuss the book at an AEI event this Thursday, September 11.
Jason Riley is a member of The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board.