Black-White Test Score Gap Is Not Inevitable

African Americans currently score lower than European Americans on vocabulary, reading and math tests as well as on tests that claim to measure scholastic aptitude and intelligence. This gap appears before children enter kindergarten and it persists into adulthood. It has narrowed since 1970, but the average American black still scores below 75% of American whites on most standardized tests.

In a country as racially polarized as the United States, no single change taken in isolation could eliminate the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow or usher in an era of full racial equality. But if that is America’s goal, reducing the black-white test score gap would probably do more to promote it than any other politically plausible strategy. Reducing the gap would almost certainly reduce racial inequality in educational attainment and earnings--and in much that flows from them.

This was not true a generation ago. The best evidence about what happened back then to black workers with high test scores came from a study by Phillips Cutright that analyzed the 1964 earnings of men who had taken the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) in the early 1950s. Even black men with AFQT scores above the national average earned less than two-thirds of what whites earned. In such a world, eliminating racial differences in test performance would not have reduced the earnings gap very much.

Today, the situation is different. The best recent data show that by 1993 black men who scored above the national average on the AFQT were earning only 4% less than whites with similar scores. In this new world, raising black workers’ test scores looks far more important than it did in the 1960s.

Reducing the black-white test score gap would reduce racial disparities in educational attainment as well. The nationwide “High School and Beyond” survey tested 12th-graders in 1982 and followed them up in 1992, when they were in their late 20s. At the time of the follow-up, only 13.3% of the blacks had earned a bachelor’s degree compared to 30% with the non-Latino whites.

Many observers blame this disparity on black parents’ inability to pay college bills, black students’ lack of motivation or the hostility that black students encounter on predominantly white college campuses. All these factors probably play some role. Nonetheless, when we compare blacks and whites with the same 12th-grade test scores, blacks are more likely than whites to complete college. Once we equalize test scores, a 16.7% disadvantage in college graduation rates for blacks turns into a 5.9% advantage.

Advocates of racial equality might be more willing to accept our argument that narrowing the test score gap is crucial to achieving their goals if they believed that narrowing the gap was feasible. But pessimism on this front has become almost universal.

In the 1960s, racial egalitarians routinely blamed the test score gap on the combined effects of black poverty and racial segregation. Experience since then has demonstrated that the gap shrinks only a little when black and white children attend the same schools. It also shrinks only a little when black and white families have the same amount of schooling, the same income and the same wealth.

But this does not mean that the black-white test score gap is inevitable. Despite endless speculation, no study has found direct genetic evidence indicating that blacks have less innate intellectual ability than whites. While it is clear that eliminating the test score gap would require enormous effort by both blacks and whites and would probably take more than one generation, it can be done.

This conviction rests mainly on two facts.

First, IQ and achievement scores are not fixed. Scores on IQ tests have risen dramatically throughout the world since the 1930s. For example, the average white scored higher on the Stanford-Binet test in 1978 than 82% of whites who took the test in 1932.

Second, black-white differences in academic achievement have, in fact, narrowed throughout the 20th century. The best data come from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which has been testing 17-year-olds since 1971. From 1971 to 1996, the black-white reading gap shrank by almost half and the math gap by a third.

The question now is not whether the gap can be further reduced but how to do it. The answer will most likely center on schooling and culture.

While the major studies of the late 1960s concluded that a school’s resources had little impact on student achievement, new statistical methods, new data and a handful of experiments now suggest that resources do matter. This cannot in itself explain the black-white achievement gap because most school resources are now fairly equally distributed between blacks and whites. But certain crucial resources, like teachers with high test scores, are still unequally distributed. And other resources, like small classes and teachers with high expectations, seem to raise blacks’ test scores more than whites’.

Equally important is the fact that predominantly black schools enroll far more children with severe academic and behavioral problems than white schools do. Such children consume many times more resources than the average child. The net result is that while predominantly black schools nowadays spend about as much per pupil as predominantly white schools, ordinary black children without special problems are likely to be in larger classes, get less attention and have less academically skilled teachers than similar white children.

Nonetheless, disparities between black and white schools cannot explain why black children enter preschool with, for example, far smaller vocabularies than white children. This must reflect differences between black and white children’s experiences before they enter school. But what differences?

While racial disparities in income, parental education and family size explain some of the test score gap among preschool children, they do not explain most of it. Nor does single motherhood. Once we control for a mother’s family background, test scores and years of schooling, whether she is married has even less effect on her children’s test scores than whether she is poor.

The inadequacy of these traditional explanations has forced many scholars to take cultural explanations more seriously. The Nigerian anthropologist John Ogbu has suggested that caste-like minorities throughout the world tended to do poorly in school even when they were visually indistinguishable from the majority. Jeff Howard and Ray Hammond note that academic competence develops partly through competition and that “rumors of inferiority” make blacks reluctant to compete in the academic arena. Stanford psychologist Claude Steele argues that people of all races avoid situations in which they expect others to have negative stereotypes about them, even when they know that the stereotype does not apply. In experiments with Stanford students, Steele has shown that merely asking test-takers to report their race or telling them that a test measures intellectual ability lowers black students’ scores.

Cutright’s 1964 finding that blacks with high test scores earned little more than those with low test scores may also help explain why blacks did so badly on these tests. The world has changed since 1964, but it takes several generations for any group to adjust to a new reality, especially when the adjustment has significant costs. (spending more time studying). The message that nerds will do well as adults is always hard to sell to children, but it is doubly hard when it has only recently become true.

At present, we have hardly more than hunches about the causes of the black-white test gap. It seems to us that a good explanation of why white 4-year-olds have bigger vocabularies than black 4-year-olds is likely to focus on how much parents talk to their children, how they deal with their children’s questions and how they react when their children either learn or fail to learn something, not on how much money the parents make. We should be promoting better parenting practices not just for black parents but all parents, using every tool at our disposal, from preschool outreach programs and home visits by nurses to television soap operas, sitcoms or anything else that looks promising.

In addition, the United States should be conducting large-scale experiments aimed at reducing uncertainty about the effects of schools’ racial mix, class size, teachers’ test scores, ability grouping and other issues. We do such experiments to determine the effects of different medical treatments, different job training programs and many other social interventions. But the U.S. Department of Education has shown almost no interest in such an undertaking.

We are not optimistic about expanding federal support for these efforts. Popular distrust of federal education programs is now pervasive and shows no sign of receding. We are more optimistic about state and local efforts to narrow the test-score gap. Everyone recognizes that racial inequality is one of the nation’s most pressing and persistent problems. Other strategies for dealing with this problem, which emphasize the use of racial preferences, are clearly in political trouble.

Unfortunately, we do not have a detailed blueprint for reducing the black-white test score gap, and neither does anyone else. But shying away from a sensitive subject will not make it go away.