Achieving High Educational Standards for All Conference Summary (2002) / Chapter Skim
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Part III: Conference Papers:
Part III: Conference Papers:
Trends in the Educational Achievement of Minority Students Since Brown v. Board of Education
Pages 147-182
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Part ITI Conference Papers
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From page 148... ...
Although family structure and poverty status are important correlates of educational outcomes that covary with group membership, parental education is a key socioeconomic attribute that directly shapes racial and ethnic differences in children's scholastic performance and educational attainment (Duncan et al., 1972; Hauser, 1971~. Parental education drives the expectations set for children and determines financial, material, and intellectual resources deployed to promote achievement in school.
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This landmark Court decision gave a strong impetus to the civil rights movement and a spate of antidiscrimination and affirmative action legislation designed to equalize educational opportunity and, ultimately, eliminate racial gaps in education and economic outcomes. The decade of the 1960s inspired great hope that the War on Poverty and the civil rights movement would yield high social dividends toward the twin goals of reducing socioeconomic inequality and promoting racial and ethnic integration.
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Two disturbing developments set the stage for changing educational opportunity in the United States. First, despite impressive gains in educational attainment since the 1960s, more recent improvements since 1980 have been very modest, especially for Hispanics, who continue to leave school before graduating at four times the rate of non-Hispanic whites (National Center for Educational Statistics, 1999a; Current Population Surveys, 1999, 2000~.3 Second, gaps in graduation rates of majority white and nonwhite youth have widened at all education levels, but especially among the college-educated (U.S.
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increased regional and urban concentration of minority students. The spatial dimensions of population distribution are important for appreciating how segregation continues to delimit educational opportunity to the present day.
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areas (Long, 1988~; in the diversification of educational institutions (Barron's Educational Series, 1992; National Center for Education Statistics, 1999a) ; and in the structure of employment away from manufacturing and toward the service sector and technical jobs requiring higher levels of skills (Levy, 1987; Danzinger and Gottschalk, 1993~.
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Not only are minority youth geographically concentrated, but they are also disproportionately more likely than their white peers to be in central-city school districts (Current Population Surveys, 2000~. If all schools afforded equal educational opportunity, differences in geographic location would be irrelevant for the contours of racial and ethnic inequality.
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At the state level, the impact of recent demographic trends on population composition has been highly uneven. According to the 2000 Census, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and American Indians combined comprise half of California's population and over half of New Mexico's population (`Newsweek, 2000~.
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Although only 14 percent of American Indians live in urban school districts, the vast majority of the remainder attends rural schools rather than higher performing suburban schools where white youth are disproportionately concentrated. These differences in the geographic distribution of students would be inconsequential if the quality of schooling afforded in central-city, suburban, and rural school districts were roughly comparable.
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SOURCE: Current Population Surveys (2000~. more likely to attend highly segregated and low-performing schools where educational opportunities are limited (Orfield et al., 1996~.
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Living arrangements are crucial for understanding racial and ethnic differences in educational opportunities and outcomes, because youth reared by a lone parent have considerably lower educational achievement than those reared by two parents (Teachman et al., 1997; Thomson et al., 1994) , and because minority youth are more likely than whites to reside with a single parent (U.S.
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If current trends in family structure continue, the shares of minority youth residing in vulnerable families will grow, potentially widening racial and ethnic gaps in school attainment even more. Past research also indicates the important role of siblings in determining the educational attainment of youth (Blake, 1989; Powell and Steelman, 1993~.
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In fact, Hispanic and black youth poverty rates converged during the late l990s, when black poverty fell more precipitously than Hispanic poverty. This is worrisome, because the Hispanic population is growing more rapidly than the black population (see Figure 1)
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Although family structure and poverty status are important correlates of educational outcomes that covary with group membership, parental education is a key socioeconomic attribute that directly shapes racial and ethnic differences in children's scholastic performance and educational attainment (Duncan et al., 1972; Hauser, 1971~. Parental education drives the expectations set for children and determines financial, material, and intellectual resources deployed to promote achievement in school.
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Trends in mothers' education are very similar to those reported for fathers, except that mothers tend to have even lower levels of attainment (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2000~. At the other end of the educational continuum, as Figure 9 shows, only a small fraction of Hispanic youth have college-educated fathers.
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This is encouraging news, yet the parental education gap vis-a-vis whites remains substantial, as white youth are two times more likely than black youth to have college-educated fathers and more than three times more likely than Hispanics. The racial and ethnic differences in mothers' education parallel those of fathers, except that the story is even more bleak because fewer mothers hold college degrees (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2000~.
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Inasmuch as minority youth are more likely than whites to attend poorly endowed schools, these differentials in access to information are reproduced and reinforced. Taken together, these selected socioeconomic differentials raise a crucially important question about the changing contours of educational opportunity as well as the meaning of racial and ethnic differences in educational outcomes.
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These issues are trivial for blacks and whites but quite salient for Asians and especially Hispanic youth, among whom the foreign-born population shares have been rising. As Figure 11 demonstrates, nearly 1 in 3 Hispanic children between the ages of 5 and 17 has difficulty speaking English, compared with less than half as many Asian youth.
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In fact, white, black, Hispanic, and Asian youth enter the school system at very different starting points. Figure 12 shows that unequal educational opportunity begins to take its toll at the beginning of the educational pipeline.
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It is noteworthy that the Asian-white math proficiency differentials generally lead to less social concern than the white-black or whiteHispanic gaps, for surely all children should be able to achieve at levels comparable to those of Asian youth. The time trend in reading scores also shows considerable improvement for minority students, which results in narrower racial/ethnic gaps over time.~° Specifically, black students witnessed a 20-point improvement in reading scores during the 1980s and Hispanics a 14-point gain.
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SOURCE: National Center for Educational Statistics (l99Sa)
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. One plausible explanation for Hispanics' resistant dropout rate is that the influx of poorly educated immigrants from Central and South America lowers the graduation rate for the total Hispanic population.
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55 50 45 ~n 40Q 35o ~ 30s 25s 20.= I 15i~ 105O53 44 8 9 ~ ~ ~ 1 ~ 13 22 17 23 18 r White Asian Black Hispanic Mexican ~ 1 st Generation ~ 2nd Generation ~ 3rd+ Generation FIGURE 16 High school dropout rates by immigrant generation for persons ages 16-24: 1996. SOURCE: Current Population Surveys (1996~.
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Elevated high school dropout rates do not bode well for the economic prospects of Hispanic students, not only because their labor market prospects are greatly compromised by their truncated educational careers, but also because failure to complete high school restricts access to college and good jobs (Carnevale, 1999; Trejo, 1997~. Because the wage returns to college education rose appreciably after 1973, the constriction of the secondary and postsecondary educational pipeline has more deleterious socioeconomic consequences today than in the past (Levy, 1987; Danzinger and Gottschalk, 1993~.
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SOURCE: National Center for Educational Statistics (1999a) ; Current Population Surveys for 1989 to 1999.
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Further research is required to understand why high-status blacks are less likely to attend college than white and Hispanic youth with similar backgrounds. However, these differentials suggest that corrective measuressuch as race-sensitive admissions policies may be necessary to narrow the college enrollment and graduation gaps of blacks and Hispanics vis-avis whites that appear in Figures 16 and 17.
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However, this promise will be severely compromised if the elimination of race-sensitive admissions policies forecloses higher educational opportunity for talented students whose socioeconomic circumstances may otherwise restrict access to selective institutions. Improvements in minority representation in higher education since the civil rights era notwithstanding, the differentials in college graduation
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That blacks and Hispanics must swim upstream faster to catch up with their white and Asian peers is a tall order, given the trends in scholastic performance and educational attainment documented above coupled with recent demographic trends. For Hispanics the challenge is even more formidable because they must do so as their numbers swell at the lower rungs of the socioeconomic distribution.
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SOURCE: Current Population Surveys for 1971 to 2000. izing opportunity to reverse troubling trends that generate widening gaps among demographic groups.
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Ironically, this has been occurring since the landmark Supreme Court decision that banned segregated schools as a step toward equalizing educational opportunities. Although discrimination has been legally outlawed, architects of the Great Society appreciated that more was required to create a just society.
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The youth of 2020 represent the children of the generation that is currently in college one in which whites and Asians are greatly overrepresented relative to their population shares, while blacks and especially Hispanics are underrepresented. While high performance standards and merit-based rewards should remain important criteria in structuring college admissions, the legacy and persistence of urban residential segregation forecloses equal educational opportunity to students whose family circumstances cannot purchase access to quality elementary, middle, and high schools.
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For instance, the average standard errors for reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress are 3.3, 2.2, and 1.1 for Hispanics, blacks, and whites between 1971-1999, respectively (National Center for Educational Statistics, l999b)
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Washington, DC: Federal Interagency Forum of Child and Family Statistics. 2000 Difficulty Speaking English: Children Age 5 to 17 Who Speak a Language Other than English at Home, and Who Are Reported to Have Difficulty Speaking En glish by Race, Hispanic Origin, and Region, Selected Years 1979-95.
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National Center for Education Statistics 1996a Dropout Rates in the United States: 1994. [Online]
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. 2001b Dropout Rates in the United States: 1999.
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1994 The Diverse Living Arrangements of Children: Summer 1991. Current Population Reports, Series P-70, No.
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