The Race Factor

According to Laurence Steinberg’s book Beyond the Classroom: Why School Reform has Failed and What Parents Need to Do:

• Studies show that school achievement (unlike performance on IQ tests) is far more influenced by environmental factors than by genetic ones.  However, level of academic achievement does consistently fall among racial lines with American students.
• One of the most consistent observations reported by social scientists who study school achievement in this country is that Asian-American students perform, on average, substantially better than their White peers, who in turn outperform their Black and Latino counterparts.
• This is consistent, whether the index in question is based on school grades or performance on standardized tests of achievement.  Ethnic group comparisons hold up even after taking into account other factors that might contribute to ethnic differences in performance, such as differences between ethnic groups in family income, household composition, or parental education.  Nor can the differences be attributable to differences in the schools youngsters attend, since we find these ethnic differences even among youngsters enrolled in the very same school.

So, what explains this “Race Factor.”  According to Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom in their book No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning. Simon & Schuster:

• In a 1999 report, the College Board’s “National Task Force on Minority High Achievement” pointed to the culture in East Asian homes in comparison to non-Asian minorities.  This report described the problem of underachievement as emerging “very early” in a child’s life, and it referred to the “cultural attributes of home, community, and school,” talking at length about the views toward school and hard work that Asian parents transmit to their children.
• According to the report, “East Asian American high school and college students…spend much more time on their studies outside of school and are far more likely to be part of academically oriented peer groups.”
• In addition, “East Asian parents are more likely than Whites to train their children to believe success is based on effort rather than innate ability,” and thus they instill in their children the values of hard work, “diligence, thoroughness, and self-discipline.”
• Neither poverty nor culture determine educational destiny.  But in exploring the current racial gap in academic achievement, we cannot dismiss cultural explanations.  It’s tempting to ignore race and talk about social class--the disadvantages of poverty, low levels of parental education, and urban residence.  But taking into account all of these factors leaves roughly two-thirds of the gap in achievement unexplained.