EDUCATIONAL DISPARITIES DUE TO RACE IN AMERICA

Educational Disparities due to Race in America

Educational Disparities due to Race in America

Introduction

This paper examines racial discrepancies in education, with particular attention to those that might be attributable to discrimination. I focus on what we know, how we know it, and what we need to know. The goal is to provide information on educational behaviors and outcomes that, taken together, constitute a causal model of educational achievement, taking account of both the actions of teachers and other school district personnel, and those of students and their parents.

The paper is organized as follows.

This provides a framework within which to understand the causes underlying the cognitive and behavioral development necessary for school success. It also serves to identify both those teacher and school district actions that may be discriminatory, and those student performance and behavioral variables that may need to be controlled if discrepancies are to be shown to result from discrimination. The third section uses the results of the prior section to discuss in greater detail the most likely sources of discriminatory behaviors by teachers and other school district personnel. These are prioritized, and an effort is made to focus sharply on what we know about each, and what more we would still like to know. The final section discusses directions for action. This is a preliminary and tentative discussion that attempts to assess the benefits and costs of alternative data collection and analysis strategies that might be undertaken so as to most usefully increase our knowledge in this area.

That racial prejudice and discrimination played a major role in creating past discrepancies between African-American and White housing, education, and employment outcomes cannot be denied. That the fight for equality of educational opportunity was a major goal of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s is a historical fact. That during the current time period, racial discrimination continues to exist in housing and employment has been demonstrated by audit studies (Fix and Struyk 1994. How then, can we doubt that racial discrimination also continues to exist in schooling?

Documenting such discrimination, however, is not an easy matter. Audit studies, in which matched pairs of racially different testers visit either a real estate agent or a potential employer have never been tried, and are difficult to conceive of, in the education field. A more common social science methodology, in which data generated internally by an organization are analyzed statistically to search for evidence of discriminatory behavior, has for many years been used by both plaintiffs and defendants in employment discrimination cases brought under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

This sort of methodology applies in a quite straightforward manner to issues of possible discrimination in education. For example, Mickelson (2001) has recently used this methodology to show that, in one urban school district, Black students are placed in lower educational tracks than otherwise identical White students.

Thus, three paths are open to investigators who wish to test for racial discrimination in ...