Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, Simon and Schuster
October 2003
This important new book by the Thernstroms, who also wrote America in Black and White, will be widely noted and much discussed in education circles in the months ahead. The authors judge the achievement gap to be not only "an American tragedy and national emergency," but also "the central civil rights issue of our time." According to NAEP data, there now exists a four-year gap between whites/Asians and blacks/Hispanics. It is already visible when children first enter school and widens as they progress through K-12 education. It is apparent even in more affluent communities, such as Shaker Heights outside of Cleveland, where black academic achievement is good - but still lags behind. These gaps depress the future earnings potential of minority students, limit their ability to matriculate to college and succeed there, contribute to high rates of social dysfunction and help to create a persistent underclass.
A number of factors are at work, including the lingering effects of racism, poor childhood nutrition and prenatal care, single parenthood, crime, etc. Ill-conceived and ineffective government programs, some of them designed to shrink the gap, are also to blame. But the primary factor holding back black and Hispanic academic achievement - and here we approach the controversial heart of this book - is what can be broadly called culture.
For the Thernstroms, culture is a set of "values, attitudes, and skills that are shaped and reshaped by environment." It encompasses a wide range of attributes, including family expectation and general attitudes toward schooling. There is rich data, both quantitative and qualitative, that lays out some of the cultural patterns that militate against minority academic success. The Thernstroms cover that data and add some observations of their own. For example, the effect of youth culture and especially television has enormous implications for academic achievement in many black families. Black children watch an average of five hours of television per school day, almost as much time as they spend in classes. When weekend viewing is added, TV time far exceeds school time. Only one-fifth of white or Asian children view that much television (with Hispanics more like whites in this respect).
Black children are also more apt to report low levels of respect for educators and to be labeled "disruptive" in class. Other measures, such as the number of books in a home, or the quantity of verbal interaction per day between adults and pre-school children, put them at further disadvantage. Low birth weight, poor nutrition, and other social factors contribute. These factors tend to feed on themselves: once they are seen as underperforming in school, minority youngsters are shunted into less demanding classes and are more likely to drop out entirely - exacerbating the achievement gap.
The good news is that none of these factors is immune to fixes. In fact, studies show that once certain factors are removed, the achievement gap shrinks. Cultural traits that contribute to academic success can be transferred. The book's profiles of KIPP and other successful schools - schools that, week in and week out, demonstrate that these gaps can be narrowed - are worth the purchase price. So is the chapter on "roadblocks to change." But there's much more between these covers. The ISBN is 0743204468 and for more information, go to http://www.simonsays.com/index.html and search for "No Excuses."