The 2007 California Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) results were released in August, and according to State Superintendent of Education Jack O’Connell, “This year’s results offer both encouragement and reasons for serious concerns.”
The encouraging part is that over the past six years of testing, student achievement has either increased or held steady statewide. In the Gilroy Unified School District during the same period, White and Hispanic students scoring proficient or advanced grew about 10 percentage points in both English and math exams. “If you’re all about remediation and fixing things that are broken, how can you set your sight on where you want to go?” said assistant superintendent of educational services Basha Millhollen. I agree. When it comes to closing the achievement gap, the best or optimum method to do so is to ensure that all subgroups show improvement.
The area of concern, besides the existence of a gap between the performance of various subgroups, is that when economic factors are taken into account, minority students that are not poor scored below their white counterparts who are poor. “These are not just economic achievement gaps, they are racial achievement gaps. We cannot afford to excuse them; they simply must be addressed. We must take notice and take action,” said O’Connell.
What racial factors contribute to these gaps and how can we address them?
Back in the 1990s, a Stanford University psychologist, Claude M. Steele, performed some research on mostly college students to find out why minority students and women in math-oriented courses performed worse on tests in comparison to White students. What Steele discovered was that these students experienced an elevated level of anxiety when taking tests, believing that somehow their performance would reinforce negative stereotypes about themselves. The cultural stereotypes that contribute to one’s sense of intellectual inferiority was given a name – “stereotype threat.”
Stereotype threat may shed some light, not only on why Johnny can’t read, but more on why Johnny is so defensive.
A few years ago, I volunteered to drive a group of kids to a birthday party for one of my son’s friends. The first child I picked up immediately caught my attention because he spoke with such a heavy British accent. I asked him where was he from, and he answered England, London to be exact. His family had moved here recently because his father’s work brought them to Silicon Valley.
The second child I picked up en route to the party was your regular mainstream kind of kid, and I asked the same question: Where are you or your family from? He replied that he was part Irish and German. His great-grandparents migrated to the United States during the depression in the 1930s. He went on to share with us more of his family’s history.
The third child was a Hispanic boy, and when I asked him the same question, he became very defensive. “I’m an American!” he said. “Okay,” I responded, “America is pretty big. We have North, Central and South. Which part is your family from?” He answered quickly, “My parents were born in California. I was born here, too!” Obviously, I had hit a nerve, so I dropped it.
Why was this boy so defensive? Did he feel threatened by my question that somehow we might judge him solely based on his appearance and link him to some unfavorable negative stereotypes that might be perpetuated in the media, in the community, and at school? How do these feelings impact a child when he is being evaluated, not on appearance in a social setting, but on his intelligence and his performance when taking standardized tests in an academic setting? According to Steele, these feelings translate into underperformance on tests.
The answers to these questions are not easy nor are solely present in minority students. Anyone can be susceptible to stereotype threat.
In a study by Steele and his colleagues in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology entitled “When White Men Can’t Do Math,” a group of top engineering students were given a difficult math test and were told that the purpose for the test was to understand the mathematical superiority of Asian students. Given those conditions, the white students performed significantly worse on the test than they had on previous tests. The conclusion of this study was that the feelings of being compared to a supposedly superior group is a condition that negatively affects the performance of minority students.
However, while stereotype threat is a portion of the problem that contributes to the achievement gap in our schools’ test scores, we cannot underestimate the value of parents, teachers, and schools in creating an inclusive environment where students thrive.
Until we as a society are proficient or advanced in our acceptance of others and are able to reduce negative stereotypes, many students will be susceptible to underperformance. Closing the achievement gap will take time and persistence on all of our parts.
Mario Banuelos has lived in Morgan Hill for 19 years. He has served on the South Valley Dayworker Committee and is a member of the Morgan Hill Community Foundation. He is married and has four children. Reach him at mb*******@ch*****.net.
