Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.
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[Find out The Truth about "Acting White".]
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[This is the second part of a second open letter to John McWhorter, author of Winning the Race.]
Black students’ pro-school and pro-education survey responses are backed up by their test-score trends and increasing educational attainment. It is useful to begin with the middle-class community of Shaker Heights that John Ogbu made famous since you also cite his work as evidence for the “acting white” hypothesis. Ogbu claimed to find academic disengagement in Shaker Heights which he argued explained the lower academic achievement among the black students in this community.
Ogbu made a number of major errors. First, he assumed that because the community was a middle-class community that everyone in it could be considered middle class. This was not the case. In my Black Directions newsletter, I noted:
Ogbu reported that 33 percent of the black households had an income over $50,000 while 58 percent of whites did—a difference of 25 percentage points. If we use the $50,000 as the minimum for defining a middle class household then whites were 76 percent more likely than blacks to be middle class.These are, in fact, large socioeconomic differences.
Further, in another 1990s study of Shaker Heights, Ronald F. Ferguson found that 90 percent of white parents had at least four years of college, but only 45 percent of black parents could say the same. A quarter of the black households had parents with only a high school diploma or less. Fewer than 5 percent of white parents had this low level of education. Also, Ferguson reported, “a larger percentage of parents have postgraduate degrees among whites than have four-year college degrees among blacks.”
Ogbu also avoided explaining why black students in Shaker Heights out-performed black students in other areas. Again in Black Directions, I state:
[Ogbu] observed, “Black students in Shaker Heights perform considerably better than other Blacks in the rest of the state of Ohio and in the rest of the nation” as measured by standardized tests. Also, more than 70 percent of black Shaker Heights high school graduates went on to college in the late 1990s. Nationally, about 50 percent of black high school graduates went on to college at that time.”Academic disengagement” or “acting white” does not do a good job at explaining this higher achievement.
Beyond Shaker Heights, there is encouraging news in black student test scores. While it is true that black students score lower on standardized tests than white students. It is important to examine the trends in black students’ test scores. Probably the best measure of black students’ academic achievement trends is the long-term trend National Assessment of Educational Progress exams. These exams show increasing black student scores in reading and math over time.
Not only have black NAEP scores increased, so have black scores on the National Assessment of Adult Literacy and on IQ tests. These increasing test scores do not fit well with the widespread claims that black students are not interested in school, but it does fit with the idea that black students value education.
The increasing rates of black college completion also fits black students’ statements about valuing education. Again, in Black Directions, I reported that
In 1994, 7.2 percent of all bachelor’s degrees went to blacks. By 2004, black students increased their share to 9.4 percent. In 1994, 8.6 percent of all associate’s degrees went to blacks. By 2004, black students increased their share to 12.2 percent.In fact, in The Black-White Test-Score Gap (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998), Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips conduct a very interesting analysis of the likelihood of black and white students to attend college. When they “compare blacks and whites with the same twelfth grade test scores, blacks are more likely than whites to complete college” (p. 7). They add in a footnote that the findings cannot be attributed to affirmative action since they can be found before affirmative action and during affirmative action. Again, this higher college graduation rate controlling for test scores fits the finding that black students highly value education.
The survey evidence indicates that black students highly value education. The test-score evidence indicates that black students highly value education. The college enrollment and graduation rates indicate that black students highly value education. And, yet, one only hears black leaders and the leading black public intellectuals condemning blacks for not valuing education. There is a serious problem here, but it does not lie with black students.
Next Week: What the Pundits and the Media Did Not Tell You about the Roland G. Fryer “Acting White” Study.
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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.
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