The article tells us that cognitive ability can’t possibly be a factor because black women and white women raised in affluent households have roughly equal incomes. Therefore, the authors claim, tests of cognitive ability must not work for blacks.
For white people, cognitive ability as measured by standardized tests is the absolute most important factor in determining adult income, and is far more important than parental SES, particularly in cases of low cognitive ability. Among the things we know through both studies and simple observation is that white women from wealthy families are more likely to be stay-at-home moms than their black counterparts. As someone else has noted, white women are far less likely to take over family farms or some types of family businesses. This would work to depress their income in relation to that of black women. On a personal level I have known many white people who grew up in wealthy families but who have struggled financially because of low cognitive ability. I know others who came from relatively poor homes but who have prospered because they are very smart. This tendency is so common and so observable that it is more than mere anecdotal observation, although my personal observations are backed up by data.
Instead of telling us that cognitive ability can’t be a factor the authors should have at least looked behind the curtain and checked. The information is out there. We know that white children from families making $20- to $40,000 per year have higher ACT and SAT scores than black children from families making $200,000 per year. To publish a study such as this one and completely ignore the one factor that is most influential in predicting white success because, well uh, just because is not science or analysis. It’s just random observation.
@RightCoaster – you’re assuming that the parents have control over the school. But since American schools are funded locally, if you happen to live in a poor neighborhood, odds are your schools may suck. How do you hold a school accountable if it pays so little it gets only the worst administrators and teachers? How do you hold a school accountable if it has to adjust its standards every year because a huge percentage of its student population changes every year as parents are forced to move to cheaper neighborhoods or for better jobs?
Michelle Obama came from a family that set a good example for their kids – and she still had to travel more than 45 minutes one way to a high school that would prepare her for the selective colleges she wanted to attend. Lucky she lived in a city that had public transportation that allowed her to do so, however hard that was. Most poor Americans – and that includes huge numbers of people of color – don’t have that luxury.
It’s true that parents with means will try to offer opportunities to their children. But that doesn’t explain the result of this study at all.
The study shows that the sons of rich black parents tend to drop in socioeconomic status much more than the sons of rich white parents. Both the rich black parents and the rich white parents have education, connections and security, and wish to provide the same to their children. But the rich black parents are vastly less successful at doing it.
If you don’t want to read the article, just click on it and look at the top animation. We see black boys (blue squares) and white boys (yellow squares) starting out in rich families. See the yellow squares traveling straight across your screen? Those rich white boys mostly end up as upper middle class or rich men, just as their parents wanted them to.
But look at those blue squares dropping like stones! The rich black boys mostly DON’T end up as upper middle class or rich men, even though their parents also wanted them to be affluent.
We’ve finally achieved perfect equality of opportunity: for rich black boys, but no one else.
The thing about Mr. Smith’s internship is the personal connection.
As I’ve said countless times on this forum, I work as a literacy volunteer and have done so for decades. Mots of my students are illegal immigrants, mainly Spanish speaking, although some are Chinese.
I could demand that society provide services and call it good. I could even march to demand that.
But I choose to spend my time doing what I am very good at, and making the connection with people whom I might have not otherwise met. I choose to do things beyond the acts involved in tutoring - so far as to having had students staying in my home when they were in crisis. Because I think that’s the best way to create change and to make things better.
For starters you don’t simply ignore the tests. Any relatively endogamous group that can be identified is going to have test scores that are either lower or higher than other groups. That alone doesn’t indicate that the tests are “biased.” It would be a fairly simple matter to compare life outcomes of students who had roughly identical SES and test scores. I would hypothesize that such a study would find that test scores are not equally predictive for all groups, but that they are nevertheless highly predictive for all groups.
There is more to life than being “smart.” A sometime business partner of mine made the equivalent of a 21 on the ACT, and when I see things he’s written I cringe. But I admire his judgment greatly, and he’s doing just fine in life. I have another friend who never got out of remedial math in college, but he makes more money than Carter has Liver Pills. Hard work, thrift, and “people” skills do make a difference.
Likewise, I’m aware that racial pressures can make a difference, particularly for black boys. My son, who is quite bright, was explaining a low algebra test score to me when he was in seventh grade. He listed all of his friends who had made substantially lower scores. I then asked about one of his friends that he missed and he response was, “DAD, he’s Asian!” In other words, my son refused to even compete with the Asian students. Also, although my son’s best friend in high school was Asian, to the best of my knowledge my son was not invited to participate in the Asian math study group taught by one of the Asian parents (a mathematics professor). So I have personally witnessed the tendency of racial cohesion to cause students to limit their own ambitions as well as to sometimes limit opportunities.
Back to your original question. Test score differences between groups are not evidence of bias unless such scores show themselves to be unreliable in predicting academic or other outcomes. A study that refuses to consider test score data doesn’t make such data invalid or non-predictive. It just makes the study worthless.
Frankly, there are so many considerations that a single study can’t cover them all. I would venture a guess that “white privilege” isn’t the only factor.
Just so we understand how the study worked, it focused on 94% of US children who were born in the US in 1978-83, and same-aged people who came to the US as children. In other words, this is a comprehensive study of Americans who are now 35-40 years old; it includes almost all of them. It does not include undocumented immigrants.
Here’s an interesting statistic from the paper:
“Black women have higher college attendance rates than white men, conditional on parental income.”
Here’s another: “[W]hen we compare the outcomes of black and white men who all grow up in two-parent families with similar levels of income, wealth, and education, we continue to find that the black men still have significantly lower incomes in adulthood.”
Here’s where the authors discuss, and dismiss, the idea that the outcome differential between black men and white men is due to cognitive differences:
“Black-white gaps in test scores – which have been the basis for most prior arguments for ability differences– are substantial for both men and women. The fact that black women have incomes and wage rates comparable to white women conditional on parental income despite having much lower test scores suggests that tests do not accurately measure differences in ability…”
They also say: “[W]e show below that environmental conditions during childhood have causal effects on racial disparities by studying the outcomes of boys who move between neighborhoods, rejecting the hypothesis that the gap is driven by differences in innate ability.”
So white women and black women have virtually the same outcomes. It’s the male factor that is different. What seems to be the difference is that the black boys were either raised in homes without a father or in neighborhoods in which many homes had no father.
Let me repeat: “[W]hen we compare the outcomes of black and white men who all grow up in two-parent families with similar levels of income, wealth, and education, we continue to find that the black men still have significantly lower incomes in adulthood.”
Yes, but (without going back) didn’t the article say that there was a difference in the number of fathers in households in the neighborhoods, hence fewer intact families and fewer male role models.
I don’t know how they could accurately measure the last on that list. And that would presumably impact girls as well as boys. As would the poverty rates. But boys are more impacted by the lack of father role models in the neighborhood.
Is there social pressure among peers to not appear too smart or too studious? As in, it’s not cool to be a geek? I know that I’ve seen that in some schools in the past (for all kids), but not in the schools my kids have gone to. Then again, we’ve made a tremendous effort to help them get into the best schools possible from very early ages.
They used two different measures. First, they used results from the Implicit Association Test, which measures how well a participant can match favorable and unfavorable adjectives with black and white faces. (Everyone can take this test. I recommend it, though I predict most of us white people will be disappointed in our results. https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/) People who are slower to match a “good” adjective with a black face than a white fast, and faster to match a “bad” adjective to a black face, are said to have implicit bias. By now, there is a huge database of results from that test, by area.
Second, they used the Racial Animus Index, which measures how frequently people in different media markets do Google searches for racial epithets. If a media market has many people who do searches containing the n-word, that market is deemed to have more racial animus.
Odd to offer this hypothesis to explain white boys doing so much better than black boys, white girls and black girls. We know that girls have better grades than boys.