In the South, the SAT deliberately was given in a way hindering blacks' success

Parent Cafe
1

<p>This probably is why many black students even now assume they won’t do well on the SAT. They assume the test is stacked against them, so they don’t do anything to prep for it.</p>

<p>"When Jan Bates Wheeler, a researcher at the University of Georgia, was preparing for her doctorate dissertation a few years ago, she never suspected she’d uncover a secret mission to stamp out racism and segregation in education during the 1960s.</p>

<p>While examining nearly 10,000 pages of letters, memos and reports in a box of old files, she discovered that two workers for the American College Board, Ben Cameron and Ben Gibson, had been sent to nearly every school district in five Southern states to make sure that black students were given the same opportunity as white students to take SAT college entrance exams…</p>

<p>But in the segregated South, black students were turned away from most testing sites, which almost always were all-white high schools and colleges. Wheeler says it was a tactic to keep black students from gaining admission to some colleges and universities that required prospective students to submit SAT scores.</p>

<p>In the few cases where black students were allowed to take the exams, they often were tucked away in a separate — and often inferior — location. Wheeler pointed to an example of an unfair testing environment in Columbia, S.C. While white students took the 3-hour exam in standard classrooms, black students had to take the test in a poorly lit room in the basement. Wheeler says students complained they could not see very well and the administrator talked loudly to an assistant during the entire exam."
[FOXNews.com</a> - Researcher Unveils Decades-Old Campaign to Desegregate College Testing in the Deep South - Local News | News Articles | National News | US News](<a href=“http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,493006,00.html]FOXNews.com”>http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,493006,00.html)</p>

2

<p>NSM: Interesting resconstruction. But, allow me to present real facts. The district I live in (second or third largest in TX) has gone through tremendous demographics shift. In many schools whites are less than 30%. Blacks and hispanics make up the rest. Many elementary schools that were top performing (Exemplary rating) in the standardized testing have gone down by two notches to Acceptable rating. I have heard that the high school my son went to was Exemplary and now is on academic probation. This has nothing to do with lack of resources. Many schools are brand new with all the available technology. All class rooms have 3-6 desktops and each grade level has a pool of 25 laptops. The district has army of teacher aids to work individually or in small groups to students with needs.</p>

<p>During my substituting I have seen most minority kids have no interest in learning. In High schools all kids (blacks, hispanics, asians, whites) have ‘attitude’. In elementary schools the low performing non blacks don’t have ‘attitude’, but (many) blacks do. </p>

<p>The institutional discrimination you talk about could be a factor for blacks scoring low on SAT, but the bigger factor is lack of interest in doing anything related to education starting in first grade.</p>

3

<p>Read the entire article and put a little more emphasis on the last couple of paragraphs–How two men fought hard to desegregate the testing sites. It seems as though focusing on one part of the article rather than its entirety is a bit misleading.</p>

<p>This same thread could read: 2 Brave Men Risk their safety to right a wrong.</p>

4

<p>I heard someone on the local NPR radio station the other day talking about a study involving test taking attitudes and outcome. When black students were told they were working on a puzzle, they did much better than when they were told they were to take a test. Apparently, it was coompletely predictable, that the students would perform poorly (and not up to their usual capabilities) when told to prepare to take a test. That’s an interesting “attitude problem”. I wish I could remember more details. Did anyone else hear it?</p>

5

<p>bela, I did catch some of that, but don’t remember too much more. It might have been a Science Friday segment?</p>

6

<p>I heard it, and I have heard of a previous study that bore the same results. Blacks did not do as well when they felt they were under pressure to do well on a “test.” The impression I got from the study was they felt pressured to show how well blacks could do, that they were representing their race. </p>

<p>That is a kind of stressful set-up.</p>

7

<p>"Over the years, reseachers have documented persistent gaps in the performance of different groups on the SAT and other standardized tests. For example, the College Board reported that the average score for women bound for college this Fall is 43 points below the average score for men. The average score for Asian Americans, Asians and Pacific Islanders on the SAT I math was 32 points higher than that for whites. But the greatest disparities have been documented between African Americans and whites…</p>

<p>The gap cannot be easily explained. Contrary to what might be expected, Meredith Phillips and her colleagues suggest in The Black-White Test Score Gap that parents’ income differences by themselves have almost no effect on children’s test scores. Rather, they urge us to look further back in a child’s family tree.</p>

<p>Whether or not a parent follows the middle-class parenting practices that are most likely to increase a child’s chances of doing well in school–having books at home, reading to the child, taking her on a trip to the museum, for example–depends on how the parent was raised. Even when black and white parents have the same test scores, educational attainment, income, wealth and number of children, black parents are more likely to have grown up in less-advantaged households. So part of the explanation for the gap may lay in the widespread discrimination in housing, education and employment that African American children’s grandparents faced…</p>

<p>Recent studies have shown that later in life, when those students who make it to college and post-graduate studies are faced with standardized tests such as the SAT and the GRE, new factors come into play which might contribute to the gap. Stanford psychology professor Claude Steele and his colleagues have described what they call “stereotype threat.” According to their research, a student who feels he is part of a group that has been negatively stereotyped is likely to perform less well in a situation in which he thinks that people might evaluate him through that stereotype than in a situation in which he feels no such pressure.</p>

<p>Steele has conducted experiments in which he brings in black students and white students to take a standardized test. The first time, he tells the students that they will be taking a test to measure their verbal and reasoning ability. The second time, he tells them the test is an unimportant research tool. Steele has found that the black students do less well when they are told that the test measures their abilities. He also believes that the effects of stereotype threat are strongest for students who are high-achievers and care very much about doing well. They care so much about doing well, Steele says, that they feel that if they don’t they will be confirming the negative stereotypes associated with black students. (Read FRONTLINE’s interview with Claude Steele and, Steele’s article in The Atlantic.)</p>

<p>In another experiment, Steele brought in white and Asian men who were strong in math. He told them the math test they were about to take was one in which Asians do slightly better than whites. The white men performed less well when they were told this, than when they were not. Another experiment showed that stereotype threat also brought down the performance of strong female math students…"</p>

<p>[frontline:</a> secrets of the sat: the test score gap](<a href=“http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/etc/gap.html]frontline:”>http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/etc/gap.html)</p>

8

<p>That’s a story about prior practices. How are things done today? Any current segregation, etc? Discrimination within a school district?</p>