Controversy In One School Over the Asian-Hispanic Achievement Gap

15 October 2005

If you missed this excellent article in the Los Angeles Times (as I had until a reader sent it to me), go read it now.

It discusses, very well, what happened in a multicultural southern California high school when an Asian-American student wrote a well-researched column for the school paper about the achievement gap between Asian and Hispanic students.

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  1. Chetly Zarko October 19, 2005 at 11:48 pm | | Reply

    John, more interesting than the politically correct outrage the student faced is some of the science the remainder of the article presents.

    Quoting:

    The first variable wasn’t parental involvement, as Zhou concluded, but something more subtle: parental expectation. Steinberg asked students what was the worst grade they could get without their parents getting angry. For Asian children, it was a B-plus; for Latino and African American children, it was a C.

    WOW! If it is “expectations” more than “involvement,” then race preferences (lower expectations for an entire group) are exactly the opposite of what is needed. That’s a powerful indictment of preferences — I’d like to see the study now.

  2. John Rosenberg October 20, 2005 at 12:27 am | | Reply

    Chetly – Good point! I made a similar point in criticizing Claude Steele’s theory of “stereotype threat,” here:

    “Stereotype threat” means that blacks don’t do well on standardized tests where they believe graders are aware of racial differences in performance on standardized tests. Thus it would seem to follow that race-blind testing, where graders don’t know the race of test takers, and race-blind admissions, where the “graders” did not know the race of the applicants, would be a reasonable solution, if “stereotype threat” is the problem.

    Steele, of course, favors no such thing and in fact supported not only soft preferences but hard racial bonuses at Michigan and elsewhere.

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