Soc 3901 Week 12
I. More of the argument from Thernstrom and Thernstrom, No Excuses
A. "Culture Matters"
1. Asians.
a. Key contention: "Impoverished Asian students at inferior inner-city schools outperform their black and Hispanic classmates."
b. Asian advantage partly a matter of the high proportion of well-educated parents in many Asian immigrant families since 1965 (but not some of the refugee groups).
c. Asian students study more, hang out less, take harder classes, and achieve higher test scores; much of this seems to reflect parental pressures and expectations. (A key question, T&T suggest: how low would your grades have to be to upset your parents? For many Asian students, it's anything less than an A.)
2. Hispanics.
a. "The Italians" of this generation, in that many immigrants come from rural backgrounds where schooling was not a big advantage.
b. The numbers about Hispanic schooling and work achievement are distorted by the continuing high influx of immigrants; if we look only at second generation and later, education and earnings gap is much lower and there's been a great deal of progress in the last 50 years.
c. A crucial gap emerges relating to college graduation: close to half of all whites who start college earn their bachelor's degree vs. only 1/4 for Hispanics and blacks. (Instructor: what happens if we control for whether someone starts in a 4-year school or a community college?)
d. Language may also be important. "An analysis of 1990 census data reveals that 90-95% of third-generation children (ages 6-15) from various Asian groups speak only English at home, but only 64% of Mexican third-generation youths do so." (See also Portes and Rumbaut, Legacies: the Story of the Immigrant Second Generation on the benefits of "selective acculturation")_
3. Blacks.
a. T&T: "The cultural inheritance of African Americans today is the product of a very long history of racial oppression.... It was difficult for African Americans to get much education and when they entered the world of work, determination in school paid off very little." (Instructor: Lieberson, A Piece of the Pie; DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro)
b. "Black children from well-off families, as well as those who are disadvantaged, tend to do more poorly in school." Shaker Heights example. (Instructor: what if we control for wealth instead of income? Or, to put it another way, what if we control for the sum of multi-generational advantage?)
(Instructor: This might be a good place to add peer pressure and self doubt as a factor; see Kozol, p, 36... also Denton and Massey, on the cultural results of hypersegregation... )
c. "After taking full account of poverty rates, parental education, and place of residence roughly two-thirds of the troubling racial gap (in reading and math scores) remains."
d. Racial gap already apparent in pre-schoolers
1). blacks more apt to be born to single mother, more apt to be low-birth-weight babies (Instructor: result of nutrition and prenatal care), more apt to be born to young mother (Instructor: although births to teen mothers have gone down steadily since the 1950s)
2). "37% of black children live with two parents, as compared with 77% of whites, 65% of Hispanics, and 81% of Asians" (Why the very large "marriage gap?" Edin/Kefalas, Promises I Can Keep)
e. Behavioral differences among kindergarteners. Black children on average less ready. "Indeed, one can predict a group's discipline index quite reliably simply by knowing the proportion of its children living with two parents."
f. Absenteeism rates: middle school, high school
g. "Changing the way parents deal with their children may be the single most important thing we can do to improve children's cognitive skills." )
(Instructor: Is this a matter of values or a direct reflection of 3d above? And if so, don't we need to push back our search for causes another level? And don't we already know some of the social policies that could help to compensate--e.g. the Elmira Program? ... If we aren't willing to look at any other kind of compensation to African Americans for our history of slavery, segregation, and officially sanctioned inequality, don't we as a society have a moral obligation to help black children in light of 200 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow?
h. Television and Homework. Nearly half of African-American fourth graders spend five hours or more watching tv on a typical day, vs. less than 1/5 of whites, and the discrepancy also turns up among older kids . (Instructor: Isn't this another simple derivative of single parent families, as opposed to a big value difference between white and black, or a reflection of "the special role of television in the life of black teen culture and the low expectations of their parents..." ... try some cross tabulations from the General Social Survey using the University of California's Survey Documentation and Analysis web site
Dependent variable: tvhours (r: 0-3; 4-24)
Independent variable: race
Control variables: class, marital (r: 1; 2-5)
For marital, 1- married, 2=widowed, 3=divorced, 4=separated, 5 = never married.
B. Changing the schools
1. There are public schools that are making large progress in reducing the racial gaps. These are mostly charter schools, and they tend to be addressing the culture issue head on, promoting "desire, discipline, and dedication (the slogan of KIPP)."
Rafe Esquith at Hobart Elementary School in central Los Angeles one of the main the inspiration for KIPP... Hobart's student body half Hispanic, half Asian, mostly from low-income families.... Esquith opens his doors every morning at 6.30 and most of his students are working by 7. He also has optional after-school programs until 6; Saturdays he works with former students on algebra, Shakespeare, and SAT prep. His students continue to meet with him during the summer, although his regular classroom is not available (and of course, he is not paid).
November 2, 2006: Star Tribune: "Twin Cities Selected for New KIPP Public School Expansion Site in 2008"... now 57 locally-run public schools in 16 states serving over 14,000 students... begin with 5th grade and expand one year at a time to become a 5th-8th middle school.
II. Evaluation Research
a. What are the requirements for valid evaluation research?
1) Ideally, pre- and post-testing
2) Random assignment to treatment and control groups... it could be random assignment of kids or random assignment of schools
3) If random assignment isn't possible, matching the treatment group to a control group that is similar on important dimensions may be a good second best.
4) Evaluation may include process: Is the program being run competently so that it is doing what it purports to be doing? If the program claims to be designed to help a particular population, are those the people actually enrolled in the program?
5) Evaluation may include cost-effectiveness. A program may get results but only at costs that make it unlikely to ever be implemented on a larger scale.
b. Educational Policy Institute: "Focus on Results: An Academic Impact Analysis of the Knowledge is Power Program"... who is EPI?
Evaluation based on 3 5th grade cohorts at 24 schools who were tested with the Stanford Achievement Test in Fall 2003, Spring 2004, and fall 2004. Result: substantial gains in reading, language, and math... tests are normed in terms of standard deviations above or below the mean, so that a change of 0 represents average performance... KIPP students averaged from fall to spring a 10.1 pts gain in reading, 10.9 points in language, 17.4 points in math (the standard deviation on the test is 21)...
What is missing from this evaluation?
What about selection effects and drop-outs?