Race Query Affects Tests, Regents Told

Some African American students resist doing well in school to protect their self-image and avoid taunts from their peers for “acting white,” an influential group of scholars has been asserting.

On Thursday, those arguments were reviewed before the University of California Board of Regents. The scholars were invited by Regent Ward Connerly, who hopes to persuade state officials and voters to do away with current efforts to collect race-based data. Connerly believes the scholarship supports his argument, although the researchers who testified tend to support affirmative action efforts, which he opposes.

The growing body of research showing how race consciousness can influence students includes repeat experiments at Stanford that show how students can live up to negative stereotypes. Merely asking black test takers to report their race or telling them that a test measures intellectual ability lowers their test scores, the experiments have indicated. White engineering students have shown similar dips in test scores when told that Asian Americans are more likely to do well on a test.

Connerly, who led the Proposition 209 campaign in 1996 that abolished affirmative action, would like to launch a new ballot initiative to force schools and colleges and test makers to quit classifying people by race or ethnicity.

“If this is to be believed, that stereotypes drive how students perform, then the government shouldn’t be reinforcing it,” said Connerly, who is black.

“When you sign up to take a standardized test, they require you to check the box next to your race. The effect is to put you at a psychological disadvantage. You start looking for things that are too difficult, even if you are prepared.”

UC officials say that a rule against gathering racial data would make it impossible to tell how any particular racial group fares through the increasingly competitive admissions process for UC Berkeley, UCLA and the seven other campuses.

Furthermore, the university would be hobbled in its ability to determine if its ever-escalating “outreach” programs are working. The programs are designed to prepare more black and Latino students to be academically competitive for the most selective campuses.

“How can you determine if outreach programs are effective without that data?” asked Regent Peter Taylor. “Without racial data, how do we go back to the Legislature and explain that the money was spent wisely?”

This year, the UC system will spend $180 million on outreach efforts to help public school students. Gov. Gray Davis has proposed that the funding be increased to $250 million next year.

Although Proposition 209 forbids programs to target students by race, the university is allowed to focus on poor inner-city schools where most of the students are blacks or Latinos, the two groups that remain underrepresented on UC campuses.

Connerly has already called on the College Board to get rid of “those divisive ‘little boxes’ ” that students check off before they take the SAT or other College Board tests.

“It is time to move beyond these invidious classifications,” he said in a letter to the College Board. “It is time to create a system where character, hard work and personal achievement trump inherited characteristics like skin color.”

The College Board is not likely to strip the racial check box from its student questionnaire unless instructed to do so by the federal government, said spokeswoman Chiara Coletti. The College Board takes its cues from the government, matching the racial question on its tests precisely to those used by the U.S. census.

Indeed, the federal government requires colleges and universities to report the ethnic compositions of their student bodies. So even if Connerly goes ahead with a ballot proposition and it passes, public colleges and universities would still be required to collect the data on students after they enroll.

Connerly’s proposal, however, would bar the University of California from collecting racial data from its applicants.

In his presentation before the Board of Regents, Claude M. Steele, the Stanford psychologist who has done the experiments on students succumbing to “stereotype threat,” said that students don’t have to believe the negative stereotype about their race for their scores to decline. They just have to be put in an uncomfortable situation.

When researchers present a test in a different way--one that lowers the stakes on the test--or if they tell students that the test is one on which all races score similarly, scores by blacks rise to levels that are comparable with their white classmates, Steele’s research shows.

Steele said he believes this is why most blacks score much lower on the SAT than whites. He recommended that the University of California, the biggest customer of the SAT, discontinue using the test in its admissions decisions.

Racial classification boxes could be enough to trigger a “stereotype threat,” Steele said. But he added that the SAT would be laden with stereotype anxiety even without ethnicity check boxes because of the test’s high stakes.

Connerly said Thursday’s presentation--which included education professors Patricia Gandara of UC Davis and Pedro Noguera of Harvard--encouraged him to push for dumping racial check boxes.

“The whole issue of race is becoming outmoded,” he said, citing California’s multiethnic composition and the growing number of interracial marriages and their offspring.

“It’s not just black and white, it’s Hispanic and Asian. Minorities are rapidly becoming the majority,” he said. “Racial classifications are becoming more political and less precise.”