The Effects of Historical and Modern Racism on Student Achievement: Analysis of the Achievement Gap

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore the complex relationship between the racist policies of America’s past and the “achievement gap” as coined by James Coleman in his 1966 eponymous report, also referred to as the “Equality of Educational Opportunities” report (EEO) (Coleman et al 1966). By tracing the history of the treatment of African Americans in the United States, we can identify and address the long-lasting effects of de jure and de facto racism, such as slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation, incarceration, and villainization of the rich creative culture of African Americans, all of which further perpetuate the achievement gap. Finally, this paper will also offer potential solutions to address these root causes, rather than the isolated remediation of superficial factors that alone cannot cause positive and potent change.

Since the 1966 Coleman Report first introduced the term “achievement gap” to the nation’s collective academic vocabulary, researchers, politicians, and educators have all sought to challenge, dissect, and repair the disparities the term represents. The focus of these efforts has largely been on the quality of classroom instruction and curriculum, but such efforts are misguided (Banks et al 2000). The achievement gap cannot be alleviated by factors such as schools or teachers, nor can we address deeper sociological causes such as socioeconomic background. Instead, we as a nation must recognize the deeply entrenched systemic racism as the most pervasive, multifaceted, and enduring cause to African American underachievement. Only then may we begin to narrow the gap and dismantle the social structures that keep power imbalances and racism alive. By understanding the historical context of the slavery and Jim Crow eras, we can better understand their residual effects on the academic achievement of African Americans today and on modern racist practices that perpetuate further disenfranchisement of their collective community.

The Achievement Gap

The term “achievement gap” was first coined by James Coleman in his 1966 report on “Equality of Educational Opportunities.” This 749-page report was commissioned by the U.S. government to fulfill section 402 of Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1964, which required “a survey and report to the president and Congress ‘concerning the lack of availability of equal educational opportunities for individuals by reason of race, color, religion, or national origin in public educational institutions” (Dickinson 2016). Over the course of the following year, Coleman and his team collected data from 600,000 students and 60,000 teachers from 4,000 schools, a mammoth task unlike any research conducted before it (Hill 2016).

The results of the report validated some researchers but shocked most. Researchers anticipated, for example, the sizeable gulf between the achievement of white students and non-white students due to the privilege granted to the dominant group. What wasn’t expected and what greatly contradicted commonly accepted knowledge was how little the quality of schools affected student achievement in comparison with the far more significant factors of the child’s family background and the concentration of low-income students in schools, creating a new modus operandi of segregation, this time by socioeconomic class (Dickinson 2016).

The Coleman Report saw many adversaries in the years following it. Some wished to disprove it; others, merely to dissect and understand each piece. In 2016, a news organization, Chalkbeat, wrote of the Coleman Report: “A group of academics tried to disprove the report--and couldn’t” (Hill 2016). In 2010, researchers Borman and Dowling reaffirmed Coleman’s findings (Reardon 2016). As is natural with the age of Coleman’s findings, it hardly takes updated research to prove that a child’s home life plays a role in his or her academic success, as does the diversity of their school demographics, so perhaps it’s time that researchers ask different questions:

1. Why are African Americans four times more likely to live in poverty? (Bowman, Comer, and Johns 2018).
2. Why do African Americans underperform on measurements of achievement, even when compared to other students within the same socioeconomic class?
3. Are standardized tests written specifically to measure proficiency with white culture and standards of achievement, or do they see the value in inclusivity of student diversity?

The Problems of Poverty

Poverty is one of the largest barriers to student success. A child’s socioeconomic background often yields statistical probabilities of their eventual adult levels of educational attainment. In the 2015 Condition of Education report, data from 2012 demonstrates that children from low socioeconomic backgrounds are seven times more likely to drop out of high school than their peers from high socioeconomic backgrounds. In the same study, 60% of students from high socioeconomic backgrounds were able to attain a bachelor’s degree or higher, while only 29% of middle class and 14% of lower-class students completed a bachelor’s degree program (NCES.gov 2015).

There are many factors that lead to these outcomes. Living in poverty is known to stunt brain development due to stress, malnutrition, and low educational attainment level of the child’s parents (NAEYC 2018). Factors tied to stress, such as violence and neglect, are more prevalent in high-poverty households, which in turn hinder brain development, as well (Graham-Bermann and Sing).

Chronic absenteeism, a mainstay of educational underachievement, is more prevalent in low-income families due to lack of healthcare and reliable transportation due to affordability concerns. Children living in poverty are also less likely to participate in extracurricular activities, summer programs, or travel, meaning they have fewer opportunities to build schema that may assist with literacy and learning. Another concern with literacy is the lack of books present in the homes of low-income families, as well as the availability of public libraries or bookstores in high poverty neighborhoods (Neuman and Moland 2019). Between the lack of reading materials at home and the potentially low educational attainment level of adults in low-income families, children who live in poverty tend to be exposed to less complex language and academic vocabulary, which sets them behind their same-age cohorts from different social classes.

Socioeconomic status is undeniably a massive factor in student achievement, but it fails to account for the gap in achievement between African American and white children: Coleman’s study demonstrated that a gap is present between races at the same economic class (Dickinson 2016). Coleman attributed the disparity to segregation, which concentrated high-poverty students in schools bound to underperform, a de facto segregation to replace the preceding de jure version. While all races can be found in such high poverty neighborhoods, there is a trait that makes African American poverty unique: it is multigenerational (Rothstein 2016). This trait is a direct result of the racism of America’s past.

The Stains of Racism

One of Coleman’s most important findings was the link between a student’s academic success and his or her mother’s socioeconomic background as a child (Rothstein 2014). What is to be said, then, of mothers forbidden from formal education? During the slavery era, African American slaves were originally allowed to read in order to read the Bible, an effort at Christianizing them. Slaves took the opportunity, seeing literacy as a way of communicating more privately. However, the Nat Turner rebellion caused a massive ban from teaching slaves to read or write in order to prevent them from forging their own emancipation papers. According to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, slaves were prohibited from reading beginning in 1831 in all slave states except for Kentucky, Tennessee, and Maryland. At the time, Harper’s Weekly wrote, “The alphabet is an abolitionist. If you would keep a people enslaved refuse to teach them to read” (Smithsonian American Art Museum). Without these fundamental literacy skills, parents lacked the ability to teach their children to read and write, who in turn struggled to teach their own children the same.

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Jim Crow laws also hindered literacy. In the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson, for instance, the Supreme Court reinforced segregated schools, alleging that the facilities were “separate but equal.” What the court failed to recognize until the Coleman Report was that concentrated populations that lack diversity hinder academic achievement.

Despite the landmark Brown vs. the Topeka Board of Education trial, segregation continued to thrive due to the longstanding redlining policies. These policies of classifying neighborhoods as “undesirable” if they hosted a large amount of minority citizens prevented said citizens from receiving mortgage loans to move into better neighborhoods (Badger 2017). Additionally, the policy of paying African American laborers less than their white counterparts reinforced social inequalities between races, enunciated poverty of African Americans, and instilled a sense of futility to rise above their circumstances due to the limitations out of their control (Carruthers and Wanamaker). Thus, despite the best efforts made by African Americans, many began long bloodlines of poverty and underachievement.

“Underachievement” Defined

Of course, the bulk of this work relies on the supposition that the material used to measure students is fair to all students measured, which is inaccurate. African Americans have a rich cultural history of creativity and innovation that has been denounced and criticized by the dominant culture. The “patois” spoken by slaves as a method of communicating evolved into the African American Vernacular English of today, which is largely dismissed as being “ignorant,” despite having its own complex system of rules and vocabulary not understood by its critics. African Americans have also been largely influential in the arts, particularly with dance and music: because of their rich cultural traditions, we have jazz, rap, rock, and many other forms of music. We have also seen athletics progress substantially with the integration of African Americans into sports (NAEYC 2018).

Modern schools also fail to consider the learned cultural behaviors of African Americans based on survival, inherited from the times of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement: “Other behaviors that were fashioned to help African Americans cope with the dangers of slavery continue today because life is still perceived as dangerous” (NAEYC 2018).

The culture and background knowledge of African Americans, as well as all races, needs to be recognized and included in standard measurements of achievement and ability, not only for the purpose of seeing the true achievement levels of African Americans, but to also acknowledge the individualist nature of achievement by students.

Currently and in the past, assessments have largely been homogenized and made to fit the knowledge deemed academically advanced, but by the standards of the dominant group. Patriann Smith et al address this in the Journal of Black Studies: “The normative standards by which such assessments are governed tend to be more aligned with those of the dominant culture that implicitly and inadvertently reinforces an autonomous model of literacy in schools” (Smith et al). The knowledge all students are expected to obtain throughout their education are based on the epistemology of the dominant white culture.

Resolving the Achievement Gap

As previously postulated, resolving the achievement gap is not a matter of simple changes to curriculum or even teacher mentality, but a total social shift to integrate neighborhoods and celebrate diversity of knowledge. As Rothstein wrote in the Economic Policy Institute Journal, “Education policy is constrained by housing policy: it is not possible to desegregate schools without desegregating both low-income and affluent neighborhoods” (Rothstein 2014). If neighborhoods could shift toward desegregation, it could resolve some of the effects of socioeconomic concentrations as reported by Coleman more than 50 years ago. Additionally, there needs to be more resources for low-income mothers to kickstart their children’s education that are accessible and affordable. These mothers should also be made aware of the benefits of educating their toddlers and themselves to give their children a competitive advantage in the academic world.

In the meantime, the epistemology of academia needs to expand to include diverse thoughts, experiences, and knowledge. There has been a recent push for publication by diverse authors in young adult literature, which is a positive shift in the right direction. Incorporating those authors into district mandated curriculum could be essential in making education more inclusive.

Finally, we need to stop disparaging the art and language styles of African Americans. We cannot enjoy parts of African American culture while simultaneously holding it at arm’s length to keep ourselves free from its problems, and we cannot pick and choose which parts of African American culture we should celebrate. As educators, it is our responsibility to let our students know the value in what they already know by integrating it into our pedagogy.

An unabashed celebration of diverse cultures, integration of affluent and impoverished neighborhoods, and a widely diverse epistemology could create an educational utopia where all students have an equal chance to excel.

Works Cited

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