Closing the Gap

When the black-white test score gap was first detected in data collected from World War I Army recruits, biological determinists claimed it proved that whites had a genetic edge on African Americans when it came to learning skills.

Wrong, all wrong, argued some social scientists, who responded with data showing that the gap was rooted in social class and a variety of other circumstances.

Ever since, those same arguments and challenges have raged in predictable 20-year cycles.

The undisputed facts about the puzzling disparity are provocative--and heartbreaking. African Americans, on average, score lower than whites on vocabulary, reading and math tests. The gap emerges before kindergarten and persists into adulthood. Although the gap has narrowed since 1970, the average African American still scores below 75% of whites on most standardized tests.

Can schools restore hope for African American children? In her book “The Black-White Test Score Gap” (1998, Brookings Institute Press), Meredith Phillips, assistant professor of policy studies at UCLA, insists that they can and suggests that eliminating the gap would do more to promote racial equality than any other strategy.

Phillips and co-editor Christopher Jencks, professor of social policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, concede that wiping out the gap would require an enormous commitment involving costly intervention programs and almost certainly more than one generation.

In an interview in her office, Phillips argued that the stakes are too high not to try. Shrinking the gap, she said, would reduce inequality in educational attainment and earnings, which might in turn lower racial differences in crime, health and family structure.

Q: Social scientists have been trying to determine the exact causes of the black-white test score gap for more than 80 years. What’s taking so long?

A: Generally, people tend to avoid studying the gap because it’s a politically sensitive issue. Typically, a conservative author brings it up every 20 or 30 years and says it’s genetic in origin. That in turn encourages less conservative people to investigate the evidence and determine whether the conservatives are right or not.

Some people wonder whether it is dangerous to even talk about it at all.

Claude Steele, who is chair of the psychology department at Stanford University, has a theory that “stereotype threat” reduces black students’ performance on tests.

This theory basically says: If you’re in a situation in which it is possible for you to confirm a stereotype about your group, you perform less well. So you can imagine that even talking more about the gap might increase the amount of stereotype threat, which might negatively impact what black kids think about their academic potential.

Then, too, if you keep telling whites there’s a gap, it might reinforce prior beliefs, causing some to treat black kids as though they have less potential than whites.

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Q: Isn’t the gap already shrinking?

A: The gap has shrunk considerably in both math and reading since the early 1970s--in reading by almost half and in math by a third. That implies that it is malleable, that there is something we can do about it.

There are a number of possible reasons for this. Black parents’ education rose considerably between 1971 and 1996, and that may have improved black kids’ skills. It’s also possible that more demanding course work at the middle and high school levels can explain gains of older students since the 1980s. Smaller classes may also have raised black children’s scores.

Other contributing factors include racial integration in the South in the early 1970s and an increase in the number of blacks moving into the middle class.

But we don’t know as much as we should.

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Q: What can parents do to help reduce the gap?

A: Our analysis suggests that half the gap we see at the end of 12th grade is due to the gap that already exists at the first grade. So besides what’s going on in schools, we need to think about what’s going on in the homes.

We know from national data that most parents want their kids to finish college; there’s no real big cultural gaps in people’s values.

But we do seem to find gaps in behavior. Although all parents want to promote their children’s achievements, they don’t know exactly how to do that. We need more research on the parenting practices that affect children’s cognitive skills. Right now we don’t have a cookbook that spells out what parents can do to raise children’s test scores.

At the very least, parents should read to their children often--and read a variety of books. They should converse with their kids--ask them questions, teach them about shapes and sizes, teach them to count and to fit puzzle pieces together.

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Q: What can schools do?

A: We think that competent teachers are very important. Teachers who have higher skills produce students who have better skills.

So we should test teachers for competency before they enter the classrooms. We should implement teacher training programs for existing teachers to make sure they have adequate skills.

Raising teachers’ skills would help both blacks and whites, but it’s going to help black kids more because they tend to be in schools where teachers are less competent.

There’s no question that both black and white teachers have lower expectations for kids who perform at a lower level than other kids. So we may also have to come up with intervention programs that teach teachers that children’s scores are more malleable than they think.

Preschool is important. We know that intensive, cognitively oriented preschools raise kids’ test scores by the time they reach kindergarten and first grade.

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Q: You have said successful approaches to this problem will require new ways of thinking. What does that mean?

A: Instead of asking whether schools are responsible for the gap, successful studies will ask what schools can do to reduce it. Instead of looking at schools’ resources, we should examine how they spend available resources. Instead of emphasizing a family’s economic resources, we should study how parents and friends interact with their children.

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Q: What are the biggest obstacles to eliminating the gap?

A: One of the largest obstacles is our own cultural stereotype, which may encourage us to think that the gap is permanent. It is not. Another is that state and federal governments have not shown an interest in using large-scale experiments to determine what programs are most effective at reducing the test score gap.

But this is not only a problem of resources and political will. Social scientists have chosen safer topics in hopes the gap would just go away. It won’t without a rigorous, concerted effort.