Black Students Need Better Schools, Not Lower Standards

The fixation on racial parity at any cost will doom yet another generation to educational failure.

By Jason L. Riley. Excerpts:

"It’s been clear for decades that this obsession over a school’s racial mix is misplaced, yet it remains one of the political left’s favorite explanations for the achievement gap. After assessing the huge body of research on school integration dating back to the 1960s, social scientists David Armor and Christine Rossell concluded that “there is not a single example in the published literature of a comprehensive racial balance plan that has improved black achievement or that has reduced the black-white achievement gap significantly.” Whether black students attended schools that were 10% black or 70% black, the racial achievement gap remained roughly the same.

“The racial composition of the school may matter, but the academic culture of the school matters more,” Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom write in their 2003 book, “No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning.” “Creating the right academic culture does not depend on the racial backgrounds of the students who attend it.”

Some of the best public schools in the country are charter schools full of low-income black students who regularly outperform wealthier white peers on standardized tests."

"Similarly, gifted and talented programs have come under attack for their elitism. There have been calls to eliminate them outright or at least broaden the definition of “gifted” to get a more desirable racial mix. Because the programs often enroll more whites and Asians than blacks and Hispanics, they’ve been accused of driving school segregation, but a new study published in Harvard’s Education Next magazine concludes that there is little merit to that claim.

“I find essentially no impact from gifted and talented programs on a Black or Hispanic student’s likelihood of having white or Asian students as classmates,” writes Owen Thompson, a professor of economics at Williams College. Nor does starting or ending a gifted and talented program affect a school’s racial composition, as critics allege. “I do not find any consistent evidence that gifted and talented programs have a causal effect on schools’ race-specific enrollments.”"