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Chapter 7. Culture and Stalled Progress in Narrowing the Black-White Test Score Gap
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250 Chapter 7 Culture and Stalled Progress in Narrowing the Black-White Test Score Gap MEREDITH PHILLIPS B etween 1971 and the late 1980s, the black-white test score gap narrowed considerably in both reading and math. That progress had subsided by 1990, though it may now have resumed. Many scholars have explored why the gap narrowed—concluding that improvements in African American’s socioeconomic circumstances contributed to the narrowing, and that African American students’ increased access to challenging course work, smaller classes, and desegregated educational environments probably did as well (see Berends et al. 2005; Cook and Evans 2000; Ferguson 2001; Grissmer et al. 1994; Grissmer, Flanagan, and Williamson 1998). We know far less about why progress stagnated in the early 1990s, but some scholars have speculated that changes in African American culture may be at least partially responsible (see Ferguson 2001; Neal 2006). Although culture is difficult to define, let alone measure, this chapter uses available data to investigate whether changes in schoolrelated behaviors, or changes in home environments, may have contributed to black students’ stalled progress. Racial Differences in Student Behavior and Home Environments When scholars invoke culture as an explanation for the black-white test score gap, they often mean that African American parents or students share attitudes or behaviors that differ from those of their white counterparts, and that those differences contribute to disparities in academic success (see, for example, Ogbu 1978; see Lamont and Small 2008 for a review of new ways to incorporate culture into our understanding of inequality). We know, for example, that black and white families parent young children differently on average, and that some of those differences are associated with the black-white gap in academic skills that emerges during the first few years of life. In an excellent review of this literature, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn and Lisa Markman (2005) described seven categories of parenting practices (nurturance, discipline, teaching, language, monitoring, management, and reading materials in the home), noted that black mothers tended to rank lower than white mothers on five of these types of practices (evidence does not exist for the other two), and pointed out that ethnic differences in teaching , language, and materials helped explain a important fraction of the black-white test score gap among young children. The evidence on whether black and white families also differ in their parenting of older children and adolescents, and whether differences in parenting styles relate to the achievement gap, is far less conclusive (see Smetana, Campione-Barr, and Metzger 2006 for a review on adolescence and parenting). But we do know that as children age, they gain more control over their environments and behavior. Differences in how older children and adolescents choose to behave and spend their time thus tend to be related to how much they learn. For example, doing more homework and spending more time reading for pleasure are related to learning more math and reading, respectively, even among students with similar academic records and family backgrounds (Jencks and Phillips 1999). Some scholars have argued that black adolescents make poorer choices about how to spend their time than their white peers do. For example, a recent New York Times editorial, “A Poverty of the Mind,” criticized black youth for not having their priorities straight: “Hip-hop, professional basketball and homeboy fashions are as American as cherry pie. Young white Americans are very much into these things, but selectively; they know when it is time to turn off Fifty Cent and get out the SAT prep book” (Orlando Patterson, March 26, 2006, accessed at http://www.nytimes. com/2006/03/26/opinion/26patterson.html). Similarly, Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom have attributed the achievement gap, at least in part, to the way black adolescents spend their time: “Doing well in school requires time on task and concentration, but black students spend an astonishing amount of time on their ‘social homework’—namely, watching television” (2003, 147). Culture and Stalled Progress Because the stalled progress in narrowing the test score gap has defied easy explanation, a few scholars have suggested that cultural changes may have played some role. David Grissmer and his colleagues speculated that “changes in schools and communities that gave rise to increasing violence among black teenagers” may help explain why black teens’ reading test scores fell after 1988 (1998, 219). Ronald Ferguson (2001) conjectured that the explosive popularity of hip hop music in the late 1980s and early 1990s Culture and Stalled Progress 251 [54.227.104.229] Project...