A 1-hour fix for the racial achievement gap?

[dkf]

April 24, 2011|By David L. Kirp
April is the time when students across the nation are being diligently prepped for the dread exams mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act. The fate of thousands of public schools turns on how well their charges do. Now there's a study that appears to show that a simple one-hour exercise can halve the racial achievement gap, while also making minority students healthier and happier. Although this claim sounds as preposterous as a pitch for a potion to cure baldness or to erase wrinkles, it's made in a recent issue of the journal Science.

The researchers, psychologists Geoffrey L. Cohen and Gregory M. Walton, don't claim that their intervention is a miracle cure for the problem of 17-year-old black and Latino students whose average reading and math skills are comparable to13-year-old white students. But their experiment — one of numerous scholarly studies examining the relationship between self-esteem and achievement that have reached the same conclusion — confirms an important, if often ignored, fact: Success in school doesn't necessarily result from ceaselessly drilling students to prep them for achievement tests. "Noncognitive" factors, such as students' sense that they fit in and are capable of doing the work, profoundly affect what they learn. Whether they believe they have the brainpower and the social skills to make it in the achievement-oriented world of school can shape how well they actually do.

Though many youngsters lack self-confidence, the research shows that minority students are especially prone to the fear of failing. As early as kindergarten, nearly a quarter of African American boys — three times more than whites — are convinced that they lack the innate ability to succeed in school. There's ample evidence that such fearfulness, which psychologists have labeled "stereotype vulnerability," undermines their performance. These students do badly, their fears are confirmed, and the cycle repeats itself.

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/apr/24/opinion/la-oe-kirp-esteem-20110424

[Igel]

1. Probably not.

But it certainly helps. (Note that the kids were already in college.)

I watched the kids in my classes put each other down and put themselves down. I watched them try to convince me that it didn't matter, that whatever they did there's no way they'd get a job or get into a decent school. Those who were going to college had low-balled their chances of getting into a mediocre school. They were convinced that effort didn't matter--that if they didn't get it at once, they were stupid. They required that everything be relevant to their lives as they currently are. They required that they learn more about themselves (meaning, in other words, those that share a skin color or whose genes spent time a few hundred years ago where their genes spent time a few hundred years ago). Many tried to express more kinship with a Nigerian villager or Soweto dweller than with somebody who was born and raised a couple of miles down the road. Lynching was real to them. Working all their lives for mininum wage. Being discriminated in college, in careers, in buying a house. They had too many problems of their own, were too intensely into multiculturalism to even think about being interested in anybody or any culture other than their own.

It was pure idiocy. These kids were 15-17. Now, exactly where did they put in 60 hours a week in a scuzzy job? When were they shut out of good schools? At what point were they the subject of a lynching? When did they work as braceros, only to be deprived of their incomes by a racist power structure in the late 1940s and 1950s?

In 2nd language acquisition studies one important factor in whether you develop fluency is how much you respect the culture where the language is spoken, how much you want to be part of that culture. If you loathe Latin America, you're going to do sucky at learning Spanish. If you are a Sinophile you'll find learning Chinese easier than learning Spanish.

Unfortunately, that's termed "assimilation" and its routinely derided.

The same kinds of results are reported not just for "self-esteem" raising, but for showing that things like effort matter more than smarts, for demonstrating that even if you're black or Latino or whatever the effort you put in now will pay off. There's no bump for whites. There is for blacks and Latinos.

It's probably the same kind of effect seen in having girls' math and science scores increase when there's a woman math or science teacher. (Of course, boys' scores decrease. Just not as much as the girls' scores increase.)

[dkf]

2. On page 3 they have 2 middle school studies.

"In an earlier study of minority middle-school students, Walton demonstrated that an even less intense experience could work wonders. Simply writing an essay about a personally important value, like relationships with good friends, seems to have changed attitudes toward school and, consequently, how well the essay writers did in a particular course. Only 3% failed the course for which they wrote the essay, compared with 11% of the control group. That's critical because data show that students who fail classes in middle school are prime candidates to drop out before graduating."