As we wrap up another school year, it is beneficial to look back and reflect upon the state that student educational attainment is moving toward. However, to do such a task requires one to recognize that there are severe disparities between racial groups that place white students at an advantage over their minority classmates.
According to ACT, Inc., which is the company that administers the ACT — one of the most renowned international tests for college readiness — many minority students in the United States, especially African American or black students, are lagging behind their white counterparts.
According to this graph featured by the ACT, Inc.’s “The Condition of College and Career Readiness 2015” report that focused on African American students, white students are steeply ahead of their minority counterparts, with the exception of the Asian demographic group. Many people may argue that white and Asian students simply have greater educational achievement due to the impassioned “American dream” inspiration that leads some students to have stronger work ethics than others, yet, with such a racial disparity evidenced by student testing, scholars have been led to believe that there are more complex and institutional causes. While both Asian and white students take leading scores in education, it has been found that the “work ethic” rationale particularly tends to apply just for Asian students; according to university researchers Amy Hsin and Yu Xie, “in contrast to white American parenting, some scholars argue that Asian-American parenting fosters greater interdependence and collectivism within the family, which helps Asian-American parents to more easily inculcate values such as high educational expectations and strong work ethic in their children.”
This disparity, which leads white students to be almost five times more likely to meet college readiness benchmarks than African American students, can be contributed to three key factors that are innately part of white students’ inherent privilege and the continuation of institutional racism: differences in early educational development in primary, secondary and at-home education; disparities in the educational and family income background of students’ families; and the continued gap in the quality of education between white- and minority-majority schools.
We must recognize the full impact that educational disparity creates; the effects are lifelong and extend to future generations—they don’t only impact the individual student while in compulsory education. The educational disparity between white students and minority students has been a decades-long trend, one in which causes lower-performing minority students, especially black students, to be less likely to go on to and graduate from college and enter directly into the workforce, which holistically displaces these dropouts into lower-income, and in some cases, impoverished statuses. Moreover, institutional racism comes into play as 32% of students suspended and 42% of students expelled in the United States are black. This may not seem striking at first to some, but it should come as a drastic shock considering that just 16% of students enrolled in U.S. schools are black, representing an overwhelming disparity in the treatment and expectations of black students.
Lower incomes mean these minority families do not have the same means to pay for the resources, like books and paper, of at-home schooling as higher-income families do. Moreover, Neeraj Kaushal, a research associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Institute for the Study of Labor, explained that college educations lead to better incomes, and wealthier families will often also have access to better neighborhoods which can account for additional other basic needs and privileges like better schools and nourishment for their children—that, consequently, minority children are not as likely to have. Institutional racism has created a cycle in which minority students get less of a background in educational readiness before the start of compulsory education, which puts them behind and on the path toward economic and educational disparity later in life.
Another institutional cycle present in our school system is the concentration of impoverished students in the same schools within cities, which is a factor in the gap of educational attainment—and minority students are more likely than white students to attend these schools. According to the National Equity Atlas via The Atlantic, a modern version of schooling segregation has emerged as most black and Latino students attend schools where 75% of the students “qualify as poor or low-income under federal guidelines”—which means these students qualify for the federal free- and reduced-lunch program.
It should also be recognized that teachers are great influences in the grand scheme of students’ success. Some may argue that though minority students are more likely to be concentrated in impoverished and lower-performing settings, there are still great teachers who are able to help them prosper and overcome educational barriers. The Center for Public Education, however, explained that most of the “better” teachers tend to flock to higher-performing schools, and the teachers that are present at lower-performing schools tend to be inexperienced, which has been linked to higher student dropout rates. And, furthermore, the teachers at these lower-performing, minority-majority schools typically have lower student expectations, which leads to lower student performance and facilitates the racial divide in educational attainment. In a study in which white teachers and black teachers were asked to predict the educational capabilities of a black student, teacher expectations were shown to represent racial bias: white teachers were almost 40% less likely than black teachers to predict that their black students will graduate from high school, and the “modest expectations of some teachers can become self-fulfilling prophecies” as teacher expectations are an important factor of student performance.
Essentially, it is time for us to stop blaming minority students for lower educational performances. With such paramount odds stacked against them, it is fallacious to believe that all of these students are at an equal advantage to white students from the outset—and it is even more ignorant to believe that racism itself is no longer an issue. We must stop creating false narratives about the “lazy black person” or the “job-stealing immigrant”: Instead, we must work to address the institutional racial discrimination that has become ingrained in our school system in order to work toward both racial equality and the right to equal educational attainment for all students.
