Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Most objective book on the topic, still room for a classic, though, December 24, 2005
This book could have been a classic. Following "The Bell Curve", a provocative mid-90s book that argued for underlying genetic causes to black-white achievement gaps, a rigorous, articulate rebuttal was necessary to show that gaps do exist, but there are causes beyond genetics that can be addressed to reduce inequality. "Black White Test Score Gap" is certainly a rigorous rebuttal, but this book is really, really hard to understand unless you have completed a quality statistics course. This book is clearly written for a purely academic audience, and I struggled with it, despite having a strong nonstatistics math background and a hunger for reading social science books such as William Julius Wilson's "The Declining Significance of Race".
Many of the conclusions are pertinent and do shed light on the subject, however. The article that argued *against* the disadvantages of acting white for black students was very insightful and weakened my support for the conventional wisdom that black students do not achieve largely due to peer pressure. The article comparing black students and white students performance at highly selective colleges rang true with my experiences as a black, Ivy league college student. An article focusing on teacher's expectations confused me, but it did help me appreciate the magnitude of the problem and that ultimately, all of the numbers in this book must be complemented by risky narrative research as well. We can perform regression analysis forever and identify that high teacher expectations and teachers with high test scores yield better student performance. But if we lack the psychological will to fight and the human stories to inspire, much of the accurate research in this book will be in vain.
One essay that I strongly disagree with is the Claude Steele essay documenting "stereotype threat". For me, this study is a boutique research project. A very small sample of Stanford students does not convince me that stereotype threat, a theory that black students perform worse when they are informed that a test assesses their intelligence, is a major problems for the majority of black high achievers. Several authors in this book herald this study as a breakthrough in potentially addressing the gap. Short of training teachers to be psychologists and motivational speakers, I do not see how we can address this problem if it is a large cause for the black-white test score gap. Even worse, I challenge Steele to replicate his findings amongst a more representative sample of black high achievers, such as those who attend some east coast scores, those at historically black colleges and universities, and those who receive full scholarships at less selective and state colleges. The high achieving black student is not the high achieving white student, I agree. But I don't think that Steele is helping issues with putting this research in this book.
This book is still helpful for those with a strong research background and understanding of the subject. It should be required reading for any educational professional Masters level and above who works with black students. For the layman, however, there are better books out there perhaps, or at least room for a book that translates the conclusions of "The Black White Test Score Gap" into more articulate, clearer language and analysis.
3 stars
--SD
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An Almost Solid Meta-Analysis of a Persistent but Not-So Perplexing Educational Problem, November 29, 2005
The editors of this collection of carefully worded journal articles have brought the public (and often less informed) debate about racial disparity in test score results back to the academic arena at a critical juncture. As another reviewer noted, the quantitative analysis can and does indeed distract from the thrust of the arguments being put forward, but not overly so unless one is a lay reader uninitiated in this lingering debate. If you have grown weary of ideologically-charged elements in this debate, you will welcome this collection. The editors have included articles that address with varying degrees of success the many issues and causes which come to the fore when the topic of the test score gap is broached. My only criticism is that more should have been offered by way of a contrasting viewpoint about how the current phenomenon of the decline (and in many instances) disintegration of the nuclear black family has exacerbated this racial learning gap. Concern for a lack of social and economic capital is legitimate fodder for discussion but one should not ignore the elephant in the parlor--the fact that 7 in 10 black children are now born out of wedlock.
Cook and Ludwig's article on the burdens of acting white should be well noted as it gets at the most overlooked source of the problem. Few articles over the past two decades have appeared in either the academic or popular press about this pernicious trend in the black community.
Steele and Aronson's social psychological study at Stanford University in the early 1990s that led to their promulgation of a stereotype threat deserves special attention if only because the study has not been replicated on a comparable or larger scale. Yet the existence of such a threat is now taken as a given by many eager to assign blame beyond the home. Yet few who embrace this factor will publicly admit that the very affirmative action policies, for instance, that include "National Black Achiever" categories for PSAT test takers continually remind black high school juniors that they have not and do not need to achieve at the same level to receive some semblance of national academic recognition. Low expectations emanate as much if not more from political decisions beyond the school door as behind it.
It is this last point that the reader should most bear in mind as he or she reads these articles. A previous reviewer from Cleveland and a college minority affairs officer would have us believe that most white teachers in the inner-city are biased in their regard for the academic potential of their black students and are themselves relatively incompetent. As one who taught for a decade in the inner-city at a predominantly black SWS (school-within-a-school) high school (and taught some of the participants in the Steele-Aronson study) and had occasion to visit dozens of schools with similar demographics, I must take issue with his point. Indeed, as this volume neglects to address, perhaps inadvertently, many of the most indifferent teachers are themselves black and, to the contrary, many if not most of their white colleagues are anything but complacent. In magnet (re: college preparatory) inner-city schools, in particular, the bulk of the teaching staff is well-trained in addition to being highly motivated.
So after reading this much needed compendium, one would do well to read John McWhorter's "Losing the Race" (he is a young black linguist at Berkeley) for an eloquent appraisal of the victimhood mindset that besets many would-be civic leaders in the black community nowadays--a mindset also overlooked in this otherwise solid collection.
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16 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Honest and Reflective Essays on the Test Score Gap, February 8, 2001
I work in the minority affairs at a major univerity. One of the questions I often get from majority and minority students and faculty is, "why are the scores--on average--so much lower for minority students than other students". Sometimes the implied message is, are the Black students dumber? The Black-White Test Scoe Gap is the best source I know for answering this and questions without getting defensive. The book makes plain that their is not just one "answer", but many theories. I have always thought a big chunk of the problem had to do with so many lower middle class white teachers who had low expectations for Black children. Interestingly, one of the writers agrees that the gap has something to do with the teachers, but notes a different problem: teachers (regardless of race)in urban areas tend to have low standardized test scores themselves and therefore may find it difficult to improved the scores of their students. I highly recommend this book.
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