Schools -- Confronting The Race Gap
Levy: The data don't support his excuse.
March 29, 2002

By Abigail Thernstrom

It’s heartbreaking: The racial gap in academic skills is still very wide. New York's white and Asian students are doing much better than blacks and Hispanics on English and math on the state's standardized tests.

Would that these results came as a surprise. In fact, in New York and in every other state, disparities are the norm. The scores, when they're broken down by race, ethnicity and social class, are almost always heartbreaking.

In New York City, only 41 percent of fourth-grade black kids and 45 percent of those who are Hispanic met the state standards. Over 80 percent of Asians and 77 percent of whites, on the other hand, did OK.

For all groups, the picture in English was a little worse. By eighth grade, there was a general slide, but again a wide gap. The percentage of black and Hispanic students meeting the math standard fell to under 14 percent, while 54 percent of Asians and 45 percent of whites had acceptable scores.

What to do? Send money, Schools Chancellor Harold Levy has said. "The data lay out - again - that children in better-funded districts across the state perform better on standard tests," he noted.

Well, no, that's not what the data show.

Some schools with meager resources beat the demographic odds, suggesting it's the quality of the teaching, not the quantity of funds, that makes the difference. Roosevelt and nearby Hemstead have been cited as good examples; the passing rate for black students in these two school districts is markedly higher than that in affluent Lawrence and Port Washington.

The gap - larger in some places, smaller in others - is a statewide story. But not all states look the same, and therein lies an important tale.

Take North Carolina and Texas. The Empire State spends 70 percent more per pupil than either. (Their spending is roughly 12 percent below the national average, while New York's spending is 50 percent above.) The cost of living is higher in New York, of course, but adjusting these figures to take that into account still leaves a huge spending gap.

And yet, despite that much lower spending, consider the contrast in performance on the most recent National Assessment for Educational Progress tests. (NAEP is often called the nation's report card; the recently passed federal "No Child Left Behind" legislation made it the gold standard against which all other testing is to be judged.)

In the NAEP 1998 reading assessment, black and Hispanic fourth-graders in both Texas and North Carolina outperformed their counterparts in New York state, and the gap between their scores and those of their white classmates was a little smaller. The black-white difference was 34 points in New York, for example, but about 20 percent less in North Carolina.

Texas and North Carolina look even better on the 2000 4th-grade math assessment. Black students were 7-9 points ahead of those in New York, the equivalent of more than half a grade. Hispanic youths in Texas were about a year ahead of those in New York. And the gap between the races was smaller for both groups in both states.

At the 8th-grade level, the picture was more mixed. But the black-white gap in reading was a quarter smaller in North Carolina than in New York, and so too was the Hispanic-white gap in Texas.

In 8th-grade math, black students did about the same in all three states, and were equally far behind their white peers. But Hispanic pupils in the other two states outperformed Latinos in New York by half a year or more, and the gap between them and whites was a quarter less than in New York.

What are these states doing right? They've had real academic standards for some time and have held students to them, to begin with. In North Carolina, tests in the 3rd, 5th and 8th grades determine grade promotion. Texas has a whole system of rewards and penalties for the schools themselves.

In Massachusetts, where I'm on the state board of education, passing the 10th-grade statewide exam will become a graduating requirement in 2003, and schools across the Commonwealth are working hard to improve instruction. And with gratifying results, according to our first re-tests of students who failed last spring.

New York can get its students' scores up and reduce the racial gap in achievement, but it's not likely to do so if it simply falls back on tired excuses - with a lack of money the most tired excuse of all.

Abigail Thernstrom is, most recently, the co-editor of "Beyond the Color Line: New Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America" (Hoover Press and The Manhattan Institute).

©2002 New York Post

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