An article by Stephan Thernstrom in the Wall Street Journal last week caught my eye. I respect Steve immensely (along with his wife Abigail) and found this paragraph intriguing, especially the sentence in bold:
As for African Americans, black students in their final year of high school have reading and math skills no better than those of whites and Asians who are still in the eighth grade. Their prospects of going on to graduate from college and to earn a decent income are inevitably not good. One obvious cause of the sharp disparities is the overwhelming preponderance of black single-parent families, a pattern that would not magically disappear if every scintilla of remaining racism vanished overnight.
That got me wondering: is it possible that family structure could explain some, maybe even most, of the black-white achievement gap? That if white and black families had children out of wedlock at the same rate, the achievement gap would close?
This struck me as plausible; I can't imagine how hard it must be to parent a child by yourself. Surely that shows up in academic results. Plus, it's no secret that the rate of white out-of-wedlock births has increased dramatically in recent years?from five percent in 1970 to one-third of all births in 2006. Of course, the black rate is much higher, going from 38 percent in 1970 to 70 percent in 2006. But here's the difference: the white rate continues to climb, whereas the black rate hit a plateau about fifteen years ago. Maybe the fact the whites are ?catching up? to blacks in having babies out of wedlock helps to explain why the black-white achievement gap has narrowed over the past decade.
To find out, I had Intern Daniela did up some numbers from the NAEP database. Take a look; while this picture is hardly definitive, it sure makes a compelling case that family structure matters?but not as much as you'd think.
So what's my bottom line? We all know that differences in families, communities, and culture all impact student achievement, and help to explain the test score gap. But schools with a ?preponderance? of single-parent families need to face the music: it's not much of an explanation for low achievement. And reducing the number of black single-parent families would not, it appears, narrow the achievement gap by much.
?Mike Petrilli
