homework

Chapter 12

Diversity and Equity Today Defining the Challenge Chapter Overview Chapter 12 begins by defining the differences be- tween two similar concepts: equity and equality. It then reviews the history of efforts to address educational equity since the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Current social inequalities are explained, including such political–economic dimensions as income, employment, housing, and political power differences among different ethnic and gender groups. The chapter then turns from social inequalities to educational inequalities among various so- cial groups. The social construction of different ethnic, gender, and economic groups’ status in schools is considered. While particular attention is paid to African Americans and Latinos, Asian Americans and students with disabilities are also considered. The Primary Source reading points out specifics regarding socio-economic, ethnic and racial dimensions of the “achievement gap. Educational Aims in Contemporary Society Analytic Framework Diversity and Equity Today IIdeollogy Equal opportunity Meritocracy Genetic deficit theory Cultural deficit theory Racism Sexism Class bias Disability bias Social construction of which human differences matter Political Economy Social inequalities: Racial and ethnic Gender Economic class Diversity across and within groups Inequalities in employment Effects of poverty and racism on families Income versus wealth differences Education for All Handicapped Children Act Schooling Inequalities in educational resources Inequalities in educational expectations Standardized achievement test differences Educational attainment differences Language differences and school achievement Inclusion of students with disabilities in “mainstream” classrooms Gender and learning differences No Child Left Behind Introduction: Inequity and Inequality From its very origins American society has struggled with questions of equity and equality. Although these terms derive from the same linguistic stem, they carry sub- stantially different meanings. Equality denotes “equal”; equity, “fair.” Even as an ideal, democracy does not call for an identical existence for each citizen or promise to equalize outcomes. In theory, democratic ideals of freedom marry well with ideals of economic freedom. Robert N. Carson wrote the original draft of this chapter. Those who have the most skill and talent, work hard- est, and have the best luck are expected to prosper in a free market economy. The free market is supposed to structure a system of rewards that bring out the produc- tive best in people. In practice, however, this theory is questionable. It assumes that the starting conditions for everyone allow for fair competition or, at the very least, that social institutions treat everyone fairly. British economic historian R. H. Tawney draws the distinction in this manner: [To] criticize inequality and to desire equality is not, as is sometimes suggested, to cherish the romantic illusion that men are equal in character and intelligence. It is to hold that, while their natural endowments differ profoundly, it is the mark of a civilized society to aim at eliminating such in- equalities as have their source, not in individual differences, but in its own organization, and that individual differences, which are the source of social energy, are more likely to ripen and find expression if social inequalities are, as far as practicable, diminished. . . . it is by softening or obliterating, not individual dif- ferences, but class gradations, that the historical movements directed towards diminishing inequality have attempted to attain their objective.1 Liberal Ideology: Meritocracy Reexamined Social theorists and educators have long been con- cerned with the origins of inequality. Does inequality stem from deficiencies within certain individuals or groups or from external social and economic condi- tions? It is important to remember that inequalities which have their source in social organization mean that some, the socially privileged, have advantages which are denied to others in the society. The privi- leged often find it comforting as well as expedient to interpret these socially derived inequalities as intrinsic personal qualities. Not only do they claim personal ownership of their advantages, they often charge the socially disadvantaged with personal ownership of their deficiencies, justifying the low socioeconomic benefits accruing to the disadvantaged. In addition to frequent misuses of the terms equity and equality, much confusion has resulted from inad- equately analyzing the implications of inequality. What sorts of educational and social policies are needed as a result of inequality, whatever its origin? Are some in- dividuals so unequal that they cannot benefit from the kind of education others receive, and if so, should they be denied access to decision-making authority? As we have seen, these equity and equality issues were settled during the first decades of the 20th century as psychologists such as E. L. Thorndike and Lewis Terman along with sociologists such as E. A. Ross and Charles H. Cooley convinced the American public that African Americans and the “new immigrants” were innately in- ferior to Anglo-Saxon Americans.2 This conclusion led to the development of different and inferior educational programs for these groups. Thus, differentiated curricu- la soon became standard in American schools and were seen as a major component in the American system of meritocracy.3 Diversity and Equity Today Chapter 12 359 The meritocracy issue reemerged during the 1960s, as we saw in the cold war era of Chapter 5, and remained at the center of educational discussions for the next 20 years. Fueling the new debate, as we shall see, was the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision and the ensuing Coleman study. These in turn led to several “cultural deprivation” studies, which will be analyzed briefly in the next section. The cumulative effect of these works was to reestablish the idea that some individuals and groups are inherently unequal. The source of inferiority was not considered to be social or economic conditions but flaws residing in some in- dividuals and groups. Moreover, because their inherent deficiencies were considered to be of such magnitude, it was argued that they could not benefit from the kind of education their superiors received. Thus, the 1960s debate appeared to confirm the fairness of America’s meritocratic economic structure. If some children suc- ceeded in school while others failed, it was believed, the fairness of the system ensured that children succeeded due to their own individual merit. Social Conditions behind the New Debate It is instructive to examine the social conditions out of which this new meritocracy debate emerged. Perhaps the first major challenge to the meritocratic conclu- sions reached at the beginning of this century resulted from the “GI Bill,” which appeared near the end of World War II as members of the Roosevelt adminis- tration began planning for the demobilization of the American armed forces. Their primary concern was to entice GIs to enter college rather than the labor market and thus help prevent massive unemployment. Many of these GIs came from poorly educated families that earlier had been judged inferior, and so they were not expected to succeed in college. In accordance with prevailing meritocratic ideas, many educators were horrified at the prospect of this horde of unprepared and ill-suited students leaving their lower-class back- grounds and crashing the citadels of learning. Educa- tors forecast widespread failure for these new students. Much to their surprise, however, most of the GIs were very successful. As a group, they graduated at a higher rate than did the regular students and achieved higher grades en route to their diplomas. This success presented a new reality, a new set of social facts that most social analysts and educators chose to ignore. Nevertheless, it represented a potential chink in the armor of the meritocratic ideology. In 1954, immediately after the positive experience of the GI Bill, came the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which stated, “It is doubted that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education . . . [and such opportunity] must be made available to all on equal terms.”4 This reopened the debate about equity in American society. Michael Harrington’s 1962 best-seller, The Other America,5 added fuel to the debate as he reminded the middle class that one-third of Americans were still ill fed, ill housed, and ill clothed. Apparently, the umbrella of the “middle class” did not cover as much of the populace as conventional wisdom had assumed. This awareness of widespread inequal- ity and inequity was heightened by the growing civil rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the urban riots that followed his murder in 1968. Meanwhile, the nation was becoming increasingly entangled in the Vietnam War and the social inequi- ties that the war protest movement uncovered. And if the preceding events were not enough to unsettle the national psyche, President Lyndon Johnson, in an attempt to secure a political coalition of urban ethnics, African Americans, and liberal intellectuals, declared a war on poverty that found domestic foes almost as in- tractable as those in the rice paddies of southeast Asia. To round things out, events in the area of industrial labor relations were equally contentious, as seen in the conflict at General Motors’ Vega plant, where workers demanded democratic control of the workplace. It became clear to many that such events were caus- ing a major reassessment of the modern liberal ideology undergirding meritocracy. Many critics questioned the “new liberal” faith in scientific expertise and scientific rationality as the best ways to organize the workplace and plan domestic and foreign policy. Expert and elite control of social institutions did not seem to be producing the progress that modern liberalism promised. Further, the uncritical nationalism that modern liberalism had fos- tered in so many Americans was being questioned. And the promise of freedom for all Americans seemed to be an illusion, given the pervasive conditions of poverty that seemed to constrain millions of Americans who simply didn’t have an equal chance at the American dream of a self-sufficient life. As if these concerns were not enough, there were simultaneous attacks on the schools that were prepar- ing children for their future roles in the meritocracy. These attacks ranged from Admiral Hyman Rickover’s demand for a technological elite to defend America from the onslaught of world communism,6 to Arthur Bestor’s charge that the schools were an intellectual “wasteland”7 that threatened the very existence of American democ- racy, to Nat Hentoff’s assertion that the inner-city schools were so underfunded that they could not edu- cate.8 Thus, education, the major institutional support for meritocracy, was also under severe assault. The Coleman Report To fulfill one of the provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the U.S. Office of Education commissioned James Coleman to conduct a survey “concerning the lack of availability of equal educational opportunity for indi- viduals by reason of race, color, religion, or national origin.” This study initiated the new debate on equity. Coleman’s team of researchers gathered data on over 6,000,000 schoolchildren, 60,000 teachers, and 4,000 schools across the United States. His findings were star- tling. To summarize them briefly: 1. Most African American students and White students attended different schools. 2. According to “measurable” characteristics (e.g., physical facilities, curricula, material resources, and teachers), these schools were quite similar. Diversity and Equity Today Chapter 12 361 3. Measured student performance on standardized tests showed considerable differences, with White students well ahead of African American students in test results. 4. The measured differences in school resources seemed to have little or no effect on the differences in students’ performance on standardized tests; that is, educational inputs (facilities, curricula, teachers) seemed to make no meaningful differ- ence in outcomes (academic achievement). 5. The only variable that seemed to affect educational achievement (“outcomes”) was “quality of peers.” 6. Minority children, especially African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans, entered school with lower achievement scores, and this gap increased throughout their stay in school. Although it was profoundly influential in the national discussion about schools and inequality, the Coleman study was seriously flawed. According to Samuel Bowles and Henry Levin, for example, the statistical method used to analyze the data grossly underestimated the positive effects of schooling on student achievement.9 In other words, if the study had been conducted dif- ferently, it would have shown that schools do matter a great deal—that different levels of school input produce very different outcomes in student learning. In addition to flaws in the statistical method used, the data collect- ed by Coleman’s team were in themselves misleading: Teacher quality, for example, was measured primarily by years of schooling and years of teaching experience. Despite its flaws, the Coleman Report succeeded in focusing attention away from educational inputs (what schools bring to students) and toward what children bring to school. It seemed to invite the scientific investigation of unequal education achievement by looking for flaws in the children rather than in the schools or in society. The Cultural Deprivation Studies During the winter of 1966–1967, the Carnegie Foun- dation sponsored a seminar at Harvard University to examine the implications of the Coleman Report. Two books were conceived during the seminar: On Equality of Educational Opportunity, edited by Daniel P. Moynihan and Frederick Mosteller, and Inequality, by Christopher Jencks and his associates. Both books reanalyzed the Coleman database; that is, they used the data collected by the Coleman researchers rather than gathering new data. Thus both books suffered most of the same flaws as the original Coleman study. The Moynihan–Mosteller work10 concluded that since educational inputs are roughly the same for all children, America had achieved equal educational opportunity. The authors argued that educational expenditures were already high, and since further expenditures were not likely to raise educational achievement for minorities, such increases would be economically unwise. America, according to these writers, had already reached the point of diminishing returns regarding educational expenditures. In retro- spect, it is interesting to note that the argument for a halt in rising educational expenditures did not origi- nate with the conservative Nixon or Reagan admin- istrations but with liberal Harvard social scientists who were supported by the Carnegie Foundation. This occurred because the Moynihan–Mosteller work reinforced the Coleman Report’s suggestion that the achievement problems faced by minority students rested not with the schools but with the students and their cultural backgrounds. More money for the schools, in that interpretation, would provide little benefit. By implication, the book also bolstered the notion that poverty stems from personal problems within the poor rather than from problems within the social system.11 Christopher Jencks and colleagues’ Inequality12 was even more explicit, although perhaps unintentionally so, in its attempt to rescue the economic system from charges of inequity. The authors began by arguing that the Coleman data showed substantial equality of inputs in public schools. They also asserted that cognitive in- equality was not affected by schooling but was largely dependent on the characteristics of the child upon en- tering school. Like Moynihan and Mosteller, they noted that unequal achievement was caused by deficiencies in the child, not in the school. The conclusions of Jencks et al. regarding economic inequality were not as predictable as their assertions about educational inequality. They argued that noth- ing in the Coleman data could be shown to affect future economic success. According to Jencks et al., family background, schooling, IQ, and cognitive skills had little or no predictive value on future eco- nomic success. They did hazard a guess, which they acknowledged lacked data support, that economic success was probably related to “luck” and special competencies, such as the ability to hit a baseball. Nevertheless, they recommended that society spend more money on schooling—even though schools do not make any difference in a person’s future—because most people spend 20 to 25 percent of their lives in school and thus schools should be “pleasant.”13 Dur- ing the following decade many educators worried, talked, and planned about making schools more “pleasant” places. The real cost of this kind of activity was to deflect attention away from questions about how to make schools more effective learning centers for children. Henry M. Levin’s review14 of Jencks and colleagues’ work points out many of its major flaws. Levin notes that the authors’ conclusion that family background has little effect on future income, especially for the rich and the poor, defies the results of many stud- ies of intergenerational mobility which show that the effect of family is quite significant. Regarding their conclusion that schooling has only a small effect on income, Levin suggests that their interpretation of what constitutes “small” may be open to interpreta- tion. The data showed that the difference in annual income between high school graduates and elemen- tary school graduates who were otherwise identical was 16 percent in favor of the high school graduates; between college graduates and elementary school graduates, the difference was 48 percent in favor of the college graduates. Levin notes, “Jencks appar- ently believes that such differences are small, but two men separated by such income disparities might not agree.”15 In light of the massive flaws in these studies and the fact that they nevertheless exerted, and continue to exert, considerable influence on educational and social policy, the question arises, How did this happen? The most reasonable explanation seems to be that these ideas were congenial to the powerful in our society because they served to justify and explain their own positions of privilege. In other words, these ideas were powerful because they accorded well with the dominant ideology: modern liberalism. They reinforced and appeared to jus- tify a meritocratic arrangement of society and schooling. They deflected arguments that questioned the validity and fairness of such arrangements. Regardless of the reasons these studies became so influential, they con- tinue to affect the way Americans think about equity and schools. Let us now examine some of the data concerning income, race, social class, gender, and schooling. Sub- sequently, we shall examine theories that attempt to explain the relationships found in these data.

The Political–Economic Context The Demographics of Modern American Society The United States has been known from its beginning as a “land of opportunity,” and today it ranks near the top of all industrialized nations in per capita purchasing pow- er.16 The United States is also one of the most schooled countries, in terms of years of schooling per capita. Per capita education spending in the United States com- pares well with other countries: Over 85 percent of U.S. students graduate from high schools, and U.S. college and university systems enroll nearly 20 million students, attracting applicants from all over the world.17 These statistics give an encouraging picture of American society. Unfortunately, this picture is mis- leading. For example, almost half of those who go on to college will drop out. And of those who drop out, a dis- proportionate number are from minority backgrounds. For example, six different states have school districts where the high school dropout rate is over 25 percent, and nationwide the dropout rate for African American and Hispanic students far exceeds the dropout rate for other populations. Although the nation is prosperous overall, income inequality is among the highest in the industrialized world. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, recent median income for White and Asian American families ranged from $55,000 to $60,000, Diversity and Equity Today Chapter 12 363 while for Black and Hispanic families it ranged from $33,000 to $34,000.18 These are huge differences not only in paying for college, but even for buying ade- quate clothing and housing a family in neighborhoods where good public schools prevail. To gain a more detailed picture of how wealth and pow- er are distributed in society, social scientists examine data on income, educational level, childhood mortality, teen- age pregnancy, substance abuse, home ownership, capital stock, and other social indices. These variables are then matched against different demographic groups organized by age, race, ethnicity, social class, gender, and so forth. (See Exhibits 12.1 and 12.2 for years of school completed related to age, through 2000, with 2010 census verifying continuation of those trends.) The next few sections step back from this larger picture of general prosperity to examine outcomes for several different demographic groups. The intent is to reinforce with statistics what is already common knowledge: Social, economic, and political outcomes generally favor men over women, White people over people of color, and upper- and middle-class people over the urban poor and the work- ing class. Race, Ethnicity, and the Limits of Language In this section we examine data for specific minority groups. Bear in mind that both race and ethnicity are so- cially constructed terms that are difficult to define. There is, for example, no definition of race that will stand up to scientific analysis, and so it must be understood that race is not a purely biological term. For example, the distinction between White and African American is largely determined by legal ruling, as is the case in Louisiana. There the courts have held that a person is African American if the equivalent of one great-great- great-great-grandparent was African American (i.e., if a person is one sixty-fourth African American). Hispanics are usually classified by virtue of a Spanish surname— clearly a cultural rather than a biological distinction. The important point is that these terms refer less to innate biological differences than to socially constructed dif- ferences in how people are perceived to be members of various groups (see the American Anthropological Association Statement on “Race” in Table 12.1). There are several difficulties with trying to talk or write about issues of race and ethnicity. One, as the Dictionary of Race and Ethnic Relations points out, is that every time we use the word race, we appear to be perpetuating a concept that has no basis in science.19 The Human Genome Diversity Project, for example, has demonstrated that the darkest-hued African and the lightest-skinned Scandinavian are 99.99 percent identi- cal in their genetic composition.20 Yet the concept of race has historically operated as if the differences among large groups of people (traditionally “Caucasoid, Mon- goloid, and Negroid”) are so significant as to identify us as subspecies of the larger human species, a division that has no scientific basis. To continue to use the term race seems to perpetuate that mistaken notion. It might be better, it seems, to eliminate the term altogether from the way we refer to ourselves as humans—unless to affirm that we are all one race. However, the term race has been historically used to differentiate us from one another, not to unite us. (For the African and the Scandinavian to say they are of the same race seems like nonsense to most people, as if the language were being used in a way it was not meant to be used.) Therefore, focusing on race draws our attention to the differences among us rather than to the similarities. The same might be said for ethnicity, a term which does have a strong basis in social science. Focus on this term, too, can make people uncomfort- able, because in the middle of the effort to affirm what we have in common with one another—our essential humanness—social scientists and educators use a term that emphasizes our differences. This may be perceived as divisive. It separates us by different languages and dif- ferent cultural histories. In short, focus on ethnicity, like focus on race, seems to divide us rather than unite us, but for different reasons. There is still another difficulty with the language of race and ethnicity: Our terms of ethnic identifica- tion are disputed and often inaccurate. There is not full agreement among Native Americans (or American Indians, or Indians, or indigenous peoples) about which identifying term to use. Some of these terms (Indians, Americans) are the historical legacy of conquering Europeans, and most cultures resist having their names

imposed by other cultures. One’s identity is in part shaped by one’s name, and we resist having our own names for ourselves replaced by someone else’s names for ourselves. Similarly, most Asian Americans now resist be- ing called “Orientals,” and most African Americans resist being called “Negroes.” While some African Americans and Hispanics and Asian Americans use the term people of color to refer to non-White, non-Hispanic people in the United States, this obscures the fact that some Hispanics in the United States identify strongly with their European origins, are in all outward respects “White,” and do not want themselves described as “peo- ple of color.” In their view, they are as “white” as any other U.S. language or ethnic group (Polish, German, Irish) of European descent. Alternatively, some Hispan- ics would choose to self-identify as Latino or Chicano (about which more later), terms that are chosen in part to make specific political statements about identity and Table 12.1 AAA Statement on “Race” Diversity and Equity Today Chapter 12 365 self-representation. The term white is itself a cultural construction with ideological baggage. Even when we respect the names different peoples pre- fer for themselves, our efforts to talk about ethnicity are stymied by the fact that broadly inclusive terms are mis- leading. For example, to generalize about Hispanics or Asian Americans overlooks profound cultural differences, even historical hostilities, within each of those subgroups. While Japanese and Chinese and Cambodians are very different culturally and economically in the United States, the term Asian American seems to allow us to generalize about them as if they were basically similar. Similarly, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans have different histories and important differences in their sta- tus in the U.S. economic and educational system, but they are all Hispanics in our use of the language. If our language is such a clumsy tool for talking about these matters, why talk about them? Why can’t we all be The following statement was adopted by the AAA Executive Board, acting on a draft prepared by a committee of representative American anthropologists. It does not reflect a consensus of all members of the AAA, as individuals vary in the Page 366 starts here one and stop emphasizing differences among us? (In fact, some would prefer that U.S. Census Bureau and other official documents would stop requiring us to identify ourselves as African American, Asian and Pacific Island- er, American Indian, and so on.) One very important reason, as indicated in Cornel West’s Race Matters,21 is that people in the United States are deeply affected— privileged, damaged, even killed—according to their perceived membership in one racial or ethnic group or another. To stop talking about race and ethnicity is to lose an important tool for understanding why some people are treated differently from others in our society. Without race and ethnicity as categories, we can’t find answers to important questions about whether schools are serving all children equally well—or whether skin color or cultural background might be factors in why some children perform better than others. We would not be able to learn that Minnesota, a state with a highly regarded school system, ranks “dead last of all the states among African American fourth-graders,” to cite a 1996 study of academic achievement. If we take away race and ethnicity as tools for analysis, we can’t notice that African American males are more likely to be killed or to go to prison in our society than they are to graduate from college. Without the tools for noticing that this is happening, we cannot begin to ask why. Without asking why, we cannot begin to do anything about it.22 On the one hand, our language about race and eth- nicity is imprecise and often misleading. The very use of the term race seems to perpetuate a wrong-headed idea about human beings. Yet these seem to be the best tools we have for pointing out one huge category of problems that must be addressed if a school system seeks to serve democratic ideals. Those problems exist when children experience different educational outcomes not on the basis of their individual talents and interests but on the basis of their membership in a cultural group—whether that group is defined by race, ethnicity, family income, gender, or another characteristic. Even when the tools of language are clumsy, they are often sufficient to help us inquire into whether all children are receiving the education they deserve in a democratic society. Put dif- ferently, race may not be a coherent concept, but racism is a real phenomenon. Ethnicity, Income, and Wealth If race and ethnicity were of no consequence in American society, we would not expect great differences in income among different racial and ethnic groups. Where income varied among individuals, we would expect the differences to be due not to race and ethnicity but to such factors as educa- tion and individual talents or interests. Where income varied among families, we would consider such factors as the number of income earners in the household. In fact, as Sheldon Danziger points out, educational differ- ences do not explain very much of the disparity between income earnings among non-Hispanic Whites, African Americans, and Hispanic individuals; correcting for educational differences does not eliminate most of the income differences.23 Other differences, such as age, region, and racial bias in employment and promotion practices, are among those which must be examined. Similarly, Andrew Hacker has found that the difference between the number of two-income White households and two-income Black households does not explain the large gap in household income between those two groups, especially because a higher percentage of Black married women than White married women work out- side the home.24 What is most salient for our purposes here is that the income differences are very real for different racial and ethnic groups, and these income differences Diversity and Equity Today Chapter 12 367 lead to different life chances for children in different groups. Further, family income correlates highly with school achievement, which means that children from low socioeconomic status (SES) families will tend to perform less well in school than do high-SES children. Harold Hodgkinson pointed out more than 15 years ago, for example, that high-SES African American eighth-graders perform better in an advanced math- ematics than do low-SES White or Asian American eighth-graders.25 Given that SES and race interact in complex ways, income disparities among different ethnic groups can have great consequences for children. And income dis- parities among different racial and ethnic groups are sig- nificant in the United States today. The U.S. Bureau of the Census reported, for example: • While the income median of White families was well above the median household income of the United States overall ($57,073 in 2003 dollars), median earnings of African American and Hispanic families were much lower: respectively, $38,674 and $38,718.26 • Over 21 percent of White households earned over $100,000 in 2003, while 9 percent of African American households earned over $100,000 and 7 percent of Hispanic households of any race earn over $100,000.27 • At the opposite end of the income distribution, 12 percent of White households earn below $20,000, while 26 percent of African American households and 21 percent of Hispanics of any race earn below this figure. Only 15 percent of Asian/Pacific Islander households fall below this figure.28 • When family wealth is measured, which considers not just annual income but a family’s full financial assets, such as real estate and stocks, the differences are much greater. In 2001, White families had a median net worth of $117,722. African American families had a median net worth of $18,510 and for Latino families it was $11,149.29 • The poverty level in 2000 was established at $17,650, well under half the median household income for the nation. Among Asian/Pacific Islander families, 12 percent fell below poverty level, compared to 10 percent of White families. In contrast, 22 percent of Hispanics and 24 percent of African Americans fell into this poverty category.

In seeking explanations for such marked differences among different ethnic groups, we should avoid the simple suggestion that the higher levels of education attained by Whites and Asian Americans provide the answer. It is instructive, for example, that while the edu- cation gaps between Blacks and Whites have steadily narrowed since the late 1960s, the poverty levels for Whites have remained between 9 and 11.3 percent, while for Blacks they have remained much higher, be- tween 21 and 30 percent.31 Furthermore, Blacks and Hispanics with the same level of education as Whites, whether a high school diploma or a college or gradu- ate degree, continue to earn less than their White counterparts.32 The discouraging message here is that differences in employment and income are due to fac- tors other than a person’s education. While additional education can create opportunities for individuals in all ethnic groups, the historical record shows that it is not likely in itself to overcome differences among groups as long as various forms of ethnic discrimination exist. Ethnicity and Employment Hacker shows that for the last 30 years unemployment rates for African Americans have remained steadily at two to two and a half times the unemployment rates for Whites. Again, we are tempted to look for an explanation in education- al differences. But as Hacker tells us, African Americans with college degrees have even worse unemployment, compared to college-educated Whites, than African Americans who have only a high school diploma as compared to their White counterparts. Perhaps even more discouraging to African Americans is the com- parison of their recent unemployment rates with those 20 or 30 years ago. In the 1960s, Black unemployment went above 11 percent only in one year and stayed at or below 8 percent for the last half of the decade. In the 1980s and early 1990s, despite dramatic educational increases for African Americans, Black unemployment rates never went below 11 percent and for most years hovered in the range of 14 to 18 percent.33 The mes- sage is that unemployment differentials, like income disparities, are dependent on socioeconomic conditions other than education. While additional education can create opportunities for individuals in all ethnic groups, it is not likely in itself to overcome differences among groups as long as various forms of discrimination based on ethnicity persist. Discrimination interacts with cultural practices and traditions differently in different ethnic groups. In the sec- tion on social theory and education in the next chapter, for example, we will see a theory suggesting a certain amount of resistance to school norms among children in some ethnic groups but not in others. A group’s cul- tural practices, together with how groups are differently perceived by people who hire and fire in the workplace, have different consequences for different groups. The nation’s unemployment rates for Whites and Asian/ Pacific Islanders in 2004, for example, were 4.5 and 6.3 percent, respectively. Regarded as the “model minority” by employers as well as by some educators, Asian/Pacific Islanders do not encounter the sort of discrimination directed against African Americans or Hispanics, the unemployment rates for whom in 2004 were 10.7 and 7.0 percent, respectively.34 Such data tell us some important differences among groups but obscure important differences within groups. For example, the relatively high household income levels cited above for Asian/Pacific Islanders hide dif- ferences among different Asian groups. A 2006 study, for example, shows that median family income in the United States ranged from $70,849 for Japanese and $70,708 for Asian Indians to about half that for Cambodians and Hmong. Among “Hispanics,” unem- ployment rates for Puerto Rican men tend to be double those for Cuban American men.35 The general labels Hispanic and Asian/Pacific Islander can cause us to over- look important cultural and economic differences among the many different groups comprised by them. Similarly, discouraging data about Black poverty and unemployment can obscure the reality of the growing Black middle class, which has more in common with the White middle class than with the Black underclass in terms of economics, employment, and education. Ethnicity and Family We are learning from many quarters that changes in the American family affect all ethnic groups, but some more severely than others. The great majority of the 17.5 million children living in single-parent households, for example, are White non- Hispanic. It might seem, therefore, that information on the changing family structure in our society might better be discussed as a subtopic of economic class or gender rather than ethnicity. We mention family characteristics here largely because of the particular significance that single-parent families have for African American chil- dren. For 80 years, from 1880 to 1960, the proportion of Black children living with a single parent held steady around 30 percent, according to the new research by the University of Minnesota. During the same time, the pro- portion of White children living with only one parent stayed at about 10 percent. But in recent years, those fig- ures have climbed—to 63 percent for Black children and 19 percent for White children. In data averaging from 2000 to 2002, 25 percent of White children were living in low-income or poverty-level families. This figure is 58 and 62 percent for African American and Latino fami- lies, respectively. The federal poverty level is $18,400 per family of four. Low income is below 200 percent of that level.36 As Hodgkinson notes about correlations between poverty and single-parent families, “when both par- ents work, family income does not double; it triples.”37 Single-parent families are thus a significant reason that over 8.3 million White children, 4.6 million Black chil- dren, and nearly 3 million Hispanic children were listed as living in poverty in 1991 by the U.S. Bureau of the Census. Put in percentages, 16.1 percent of White non- Hispanic children, 45.6 percent of African American children, and 39.8 percent of Hispanic children lived in poverty in 1991. There is little doubt that these deep economic differences will contribute to different educa- tional and life outcomes for these children.38 Some of these life opportunities are eliminated very early, even before birth. Hodgkinson reports that one- fourth of pregnant mothers receive no medical care dur- ing the crucial first trimester of pregnancy, when some 20 percent of disabilities might have been prevented by early prenatal care.39 The United States has the highest infant mortality rate of any industrialized nation, due signifi- cantly to the effects of racism and poverty on African Americans. African American infants die at a rate twice that of White infants, and in some inner-city areas (such as Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia), infant mortality rates exceed those in Jamaica, Costa Rica, and Chile.40 Compared with White children, African American children are twice as likely to be born prematurely, suffer low birth weight, live in poor housing, have no parent employed, and see a parent die. Compared with White children, African American children are three times more likely to be poor, live in a female-headed family, be placed in an educable mentally handicapped (EMH) class in school, die of known child abuse, and have their mothers die in childbirth.41 Ethnicity and Housing Half the nation’s African Americans are concentrated into just 25 major metropoli- tan areas. Two-thirds of all African American youth still attend segregated schools.42 Patterns of segregation in hous- ing nationwide have changed surprisingly little in the past 30 years despite the rise of a highly visible African American middle class and laws aimed at desegregating society. Diversity and Equity Today Chapter 12 369 The job market has changed, however, shrinking the middle class by eliminating manufacturing jobs and shifting many of the remaining jobs away from the cen- tral city to the suburbs or overseas to sources of cheap labor. Many African Americans in the inner city have been left behind without jobs and without opportunities for upward mobility. The breakdown of the family, the exit of African American professionals from the inner city, the erosion of the tax base, and the increase in drug use, violence, and crime have all served to leave the inner city a disastrous place to grow up. By the early 1990s hous- ing and employment problems had actually worsened as the Bush administration tightened budgetary restraints on social spending. For the purposes of illustrating socioeconomic inequalities, many of the examples presented here have contrasted African Americans with non-Hispanic Whites. This is partly because of the status of African Americans as the largest American ethnic minority group but also because discrimination against African Americans is uniquely grounded in a history of enslavement and subsequent related prejudice and op- pression. As Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, wrote in an open letter to her own children: It is utterly exhausting being black in America— physically, mentally, and emotionally. While many minority groups and women feel similar stress, there is no respite or escape from your badge of color. . . . It can be exhausting to be a Black student on a “white” campus or a Black employee in a “white” institution where some assume you are not as smart as compa- rable whites. The constant burden to “prove” that you are as smart, as honest, as interesting, as wide-gauging and motivated as any other individual tires you out.43 While the African American experience in the United States has been distinctively oppressive, the fastest-growing minority groups in the nation are Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans, groups with great internal variation that are affected by different kinds of discrimination. More will be said about Asian Americans and Hispanics as we move later to the is- sues of education and ethnicity. Gender Originally, political representation in America excluded women. The family rather than the individual was as- sumed to be the political unit, and men represented the family unit. Remaining single for men and for women was discouraged by social censure and at times by political and economic means as well. As documented in Chapter 5, paternalistic social arrangements drawn from European society dated back through medi- eval times to the classical formulations of Greece and Rome. Paternalism refers to a male-dominated social arrangement embedded in traditional family, state, and church structures. When the purpose of education is seen as preparing individuals for places in society, there are clear implications for the education of females in a male-controlled society. Although the proportion of women completing high school and college and ascend- ing to positions of responsibility, power, and wealth has increased dramatically since the days when women were legally subordinate to men, significant differences still exist between the conditions and experiences of modern men and women. A closer look at some of these differ- ences will establish a foundation for later discussions of gender issues in American education. Gender and Employment Most people, men and women, feel that an occupation is important to their well-being. In a survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Education 20 years ago, 84 percent of males and 77 percent of females indicated that being successful in work was far more meaningful to them than having a high income. Furthermore, most of those surveyed felt that a woman could successfully balance career aspirations and family obligations. And an impressive 98 percent of the respondents felt that a woman should have exactly the same educational op- portunities as a man.44 Almost as many felt that women should have the same pay for equal work as well as the same opportunity for management and other posi- tions of responsibility. In attitude at least, the public seems to have adjusted to the notion that women are entitled to equality in the workplace. Most women felt that the equal rights movement had made their lives better. One important trend is clear: Women of all races are closing the education gap with men, and in some cases outperforming men in completing col- lege.45 This is expected to have a significant effect on who gets hired for which jobs in the future, even if employment discrimination persists. There seems to be a “glass ceiling” that prevents women from reaching the top positions in the economic world, although it does not prevent women from seeing the top echelon. Most commentators agree that this barrier has been constructed by the materials of gender discrimination rather than by any inherent deficiency in women. Nevertheless, some gains are clearly visible. Women have entered into the ranks of lawyers, doctors, and other professionals in numbers unparalleled in previ- ous generations. Between 1972 and 1990, the proportion of lawyers who were women rose from 4 to 21 percent. In the same period, the proportion of women physicians nearly doubled, to 19 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics.Page 370 ends here Despite these gains, many occupations remain pre- dominantly female. Dental hygienists, preschool and elementary teachers, secretaries, receptionists, practical nurses, day care workers, domestic servants, typists, dressmakers, registered nurses, dietitians, speech therapists, teacher’s aides, and bank tellers are still over 93 percent female, and some of these jobs are nearly 100 percent female. Some 59 percent of all female workers are employed in sales, clerical, and service work. Conversely, some jobs remain over 95 percent male: loggers, auto mechanics, tool-and-die makers, skilled building tradesmen, millwrights, engi- neers, mechanical engineers, aircraft mechanics, car- penters, civil engineers, industrial engineers, welders and cutters, machinists, and sheet metal workers. And of course, in the U.S. Congress, males constitute the overwhelming majority of the senators and represen- tatives who make the laws of the land. Gender and Income Income differences between men and women have persisted since the beginning of the industrial era. That gap had been shrinking until recently. In 1980, for example, full-time year-round women workers earned 60 percent of what men earned, while in 1991 women earned 70 percent of men’s sala- ries. But in 2006, full-time year-round working women earned 70.7 percent of men’s salaries, which is essential- ly zero progress in 15 years. This rate of progress would not be encouraging to millions of women who are heads of their households.46 More recently, Census Bureau data give us more de- tailed ways to examine male–female income differences. For example, in 2006 the majority of full-time women workers earned less than $35,000 annually, while only 37 percent of men earned such a low salary. At the other end of the scale, more than 20 percent of men earned $75,000 or above, a figure surpassed by some experienced teachers in well-funded school districts. Nationwide, 6.3 percent of women make that amount or more. Perhaps more distressing is that women with a college degree make less than men who did not graduate from college, and women with a graduate degree make less than men who only graduated from college.47 Gender and Parenting The 56.5 million working women in America represent 45 percent of the entire labor force over age 16, and over 10 million of these women are heads of households. Having children can be economically dangerous for working women, since Diversity and Equity Today Chapter 12 371 the United States is the only Western democracy that fails to protect the careers of young working mothers. By the mid-1980s, for example: • Swedish working women received a nine-month maternity leave at 90 percent of pay. • Italian working women received a five-month maternity leave at 80 percent of pay. • Hungarian working women received 20 weeks’ leave at 100 percent of pay. In 1992, Shapiro reported that the United States was the only industrialized nation without a mandated maternity leave policy; paid leave at 60 to 100 percent of salary is the norm in most of the other nations. In 1993, the United States passed the Family Medical Leave Act, which partly closed the gap with other nations by pro- viding workers with up to 12 weeks of paid leave for specified family medical emergencies. U.S. employers continued to resist paying for advanced education and additional training for female employees on the grounds that they may subsequently have children and quit. This ignores the fact that male employees also quit: Men change jobs every seven years on average and are encour- aged to do so to keep from stagnating.48 Since the 1990s, maternity leave has increased in other nations. USA Today recently reported that Canadian women can receive up to 14 months of family leave, with up to a year in Australia. USA Today reports: “Out of 168 nations in a Harvard University study last year, 163 had some form of paid maternity leave, leaving the United States in the company of Lesotho, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.”49 By 2006, reports the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, only 8 out of 100 companies offered the full 12 weeks encouraged by the 1993 law, while 14 out of 100 offered 2 weeks or less. Sixty-two percent of the 100 best companies for working mothers offered 6 weeks or less, half what the law encourages.50 Why does the United States lag so far behind the rest of the industrialized world in supporting women’s time off for infant care? Students are invited to reflect together on what dimensions of ideology and political economy in the United States best explain such differences. Socioeconomic Class Socioeconomic class is an arbitrary designation intended to group people whose social interests coincide by virtue of similar levels of wealth, income, power, occupation- al responsibility, social prestige, and cultural identity. Although it is difficult to establish criteria separating one class from another, the notion of class is still useful for noting group differences. As we saw in Chapter 4, the dominant ideology of American society derives from an essentially middle-class, Enlightenment vision of prog- ress which holds that rational people can control their own destiny and get what they deserve. Some social critics now charge that this vision is deeply flawed. The world is not as rational as was once believed, nor is hu- man society so easily perfected. These critics also main- tain that modern liberalism cannot protect the interests of certain groups in society. The values and worldview of one class do not necessarily apply to people situated elsewhere in the social structure. The myth that virtually all Americans are middle class obscures what the numbers say. It neatly hides the fact that a small percentage at the top is fabulously wealthy and obscures the reasons why a disproportionate num- ber of people at the bottom are truly distressed. Finally, our long-cherished faith in social mobility is not very well supported by the evidence. Class structure tends to be more rigid than most of us realize or care to admit. This rigidity has been maintained partly in the interest of social stability.51 The news media do depict a poverty class, but all too often as a problem of minority populations. Although African American poverty rates are three times White poverty rates, White non-Hispanics still account for 23.7 million of the more than 40 million people living in pov- erty in the United States. And though 32.7 percent of African Americans and 28.7 percent of Hispanics live in poverty, most members of both groups do not. Still, pov- erty is a problem that hits ethnic minorities and women, as well as the young, at disproportionate rates.52 These poverty rates are particularly disturbing on two counts: their stability over time and their resistance to the increasing educational attainment of all the groups involved. After 1969, for example, White poverty rates increased from 9.5 to 11.3 percent in 1991. During that period African American poverty rates remained essentially stable: In 1969 poverty among Blacks stood at 32.2 percent, and in 1991 it was 32.7 percent. Since 1975, when the government began keeping records on Hispanics, the Hispanic poverty rate remained relatively stable at about 27 to 29 percent, with some slightly better years in the late 1970s. It would appear that in economic periods, good and bad, poverty is a fact of life for large segments of American society, par- ticularly minority populations. Yet for all three of these broad population groups, the educational levels have improved considerably since 1969–1970. White high school graduation rates since then have increased from 54 to 81 percent, while White poverty has increased. Black high school graduation rates have increased from 31 to over 67 percent, while poverty has not abated. And Hispanic graduation rates have increased from 37 to 52 percent, while poverty among Hispanics has slightly deepened.53 Class, Income, and Power If the middle class is defined by income level, it is shrinking. However, if it is defined according to the percentage of white-collar jobs, it has grown overall, since many well-paid manufactur- ing jobs are being replaced with white-collar jobs at or near the minimum wage. Perhaps the simplest and most common way to designate class is by income bracket. Many economists define the middle class by income levels between $25,000 and $100,000, which includes about 60 percent of the American population, accord- ing to the nonpartisan, nonprofit Drum Major Institute for Public Policy.54 But there is something very limiting about the em- phasis on income shared by liberal and conservative treatments of class differences today. Although the con- cept of different “classes” of society goes back hundreds of years, and Ben Franklin used the term freely in de- scribing how little class difference existed in American colonial society, a new conception of class was intro- duced in 1848. In that year, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels declared in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle,” which may be the most famous single remark on class in the history of social science.55 Marx and Engels had a view of class that was very much about power and conflict. It was at once an eco- nomic concept, defining classes in terms of who did the wage labor to produce goods versus who owned the pro- duction facilities and profits—and a power concept that emphasized the power of one class over the other, and the resulting conflicts between them (see Chapter 4). Within 100 years, Marx’s notion of class as the power of one economic group over another was essentially replaced in American social science. One example of this is W. Lloyd Warner’s 1949 book Social Class in America, subtitled A Manual of Procedure for the Measurement of Social Status. Warner replaced Marx’s two opposing classes with multiple gradations of class that would be- come known as socioeconomic status (SES): upper class, upper-middle class, lower-middle class, upper-lower/ class, and lower-lower class. These gradations were based on family income, educational attainment, occupation, and type and location of dwelling. The Marx–Engels notion of class was based on division of people into two classes according to their different plac- es in the production of goods: either owning the means of production or working for those owners. The SES version is based more on the idea of people as consumers of goods, defined by their incomes, their purchases, and their ability to buy such social goods as education. Education: Ethnicity, Gender, and Class We now turn to the issue of social equity in school- ing. Do schools promote the success of some members of society while hampering the success of others? Do schools uniformly serve the needs of all children, or do they contain mechanisms that subtly and system- atically discriminate against some students? We do know, contrary to the conclusions of the Coleman Report, that schools in poor areas where academic achievement is low tend to be poorly staffed, overcrowded, under- funded, undersupplied, and wrought with physical and emotional dangers. These conditions represent one form of social inequity. Are there others, perhaps more subtle and even more effective in maintaining the status quo? Are there fundamental differences in the way African American, White, Indian, Latino, or Asian children experience the institution of schooling? Are there fundamental differences between the expe- riences of male and female, rich and poor? And do schools provide equitable treatment to students who are judged to have physical or psychological disabilities or handicapping conditions? Let us begin this portion of our inquiry by returning to the general demographic categories described earlier to examine the outcomes of schooling for children according to racial and ethnic characteristics, gender, and class differences. Race, Ethnicity, and Education In examining the data on schooling, bear in mind the distinction between equality of results and equity of social conditions. Inherited talents and dispositions may vary from student to student, and so different outcomes can be expected for different students. What intrigues and disturbs social scientists is the situation in which whole groups of people systematically perform below the levels of other groups. We must question the Diversity and Equity Today Chapter 12 373 institutional arrangements that produce unequal results for certain groups. We should also bear in mind that much progress has been made in spreading formal education to broader segments of society. This tells us that reform is not futile and that problems can be addressed. In 1900, for ex- ample, only about 10 percent of the population gradu- ated from high school. In 1940, 24.5 percent graduated from high school and 4.6 percent completed college. In 1998, in one century’s time, 78 percent of White students graduated from high school, while 56 percent of African American students and 54 percent of Latino students graduated from high school.56 With each suc- cessive stage of formal schooling, the pool of minority students eligible for the next stage gets further reduced. About 38 percent of White students enter and 23 per- cent complete college; 29 percent of African American students enter and only 12 percent complete college. Notably, for African American students entering the nation’s 100 highest-ranked institutions, the graduation rate is over 40 percent.57 Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Native Americans complete college at the rate of roughly 9 percent of the population. Completion of graduate or professional school is 8 percent for White Americans, 4 percent for African Americans, and 2 percent each for Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Native Americans.58 Admission to higher education depends on standard- ized tests such as the SAT and the ACT.59 These tests do not measure intelligence. They measure the acquisi- tion of ideas, information, and patterns of thought that are representative of the dominant culture and, as such, are used as predictors of first-year success in college. What they correlate with most strongly is the economic background of the student, with some differences also attributable to gender and ethnicity.60 This economic variable helps account for the fact that the average SAT score of African American students is 200 points lower than that of White and Asian students on a scale rang- ing from 400 to 1600. Desegregation has not succeeded in bringing minority students into sufficient contact with the White majority—that is, with the culture that the system rewards. Both neighborhood segregation and school segregation result in isolation from a cultural norm whose values and icons are often different, for example, from those of the African American culture. The following details are illustrative: • Unbelievably, a recent Harvard study showed that racial segregation in America’s schools has been growing, not shrinking, since the 1980s.6 In 1968, when the United States first began to survey racial and ethnic population of its public schools, 80 percent of students were white. Today, 44 percent of public school children are minori- ties. School desegregation reached its peak over 20 years ago. In 1988, one-third of black students attended schools that were at least 90 percent black. Today, partly due to more a more conserva- tive judiciary, 40 percent of black students attend such a school. Black and Latino children are more segregated in 2009 than they were at the time of Martin Luther King Jr.’s death. • Many desegregated schools display de facto in-school segregation. The upper-level courses enroll almost all White students, while the lower-level courses enroll mostly Latino and Black students. • And finally, while the percentage of minority students grows in American schools, and while segregation increases, most teachers are White, whether experienced or new to the profession. Despite a great deal of talk about increasing the diversity of the teaching profession in the past 20 years, more than 85 percent of all pre-K–12 teachers are White—a figure that has changed little over time.62 Given the significance of cultural differences and economic deprivation for school performance, it is not surprising that so many African American children en- counter difficulty in schools and on standardized tests. But other ethnic groups also lag behind the performance of the non-Hispanic White majority in ways that must be attributed to socioeconomic factors rather than to native learning ability. Since the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, national concern about educational equity has focused largely on the education of African Americans, the second largest American minority group, behind Hispanics. In 2005, the nation’s minority population totaled 98 million, or 33 percent of the country’s total of 296.4 million. • Hispanics continue to be the largest minority group at 42.7 million. With a 3.3 percent increase in population from July 1, 2004, to July 1, 2005, they are the fastest-growing group. • The second largest minority group was Blacks (39.7 million), followed by: • Asians (14.4 million) • American Indians and Alaska natives (4.5 million) • Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders (990,000) • The population of Non-Hispanic Whites who indi- cated no other race totaled 198.4 million in 2005. Of the national population increase of 500,000 in 2005, about 300,000 was because of natural increase, with 200,000 attributed to immigration.63 Because the track record of American schools in dealing with some minor- ity groups has not been good, the challenge to educators in the next 10 years is considerable. Page 375 starts here Already, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 2.9 million U.S. households, or 3.2 percent of the nation’s total, are linguistically isolated, meaning that “no person above age 14 speaks English fluently.” Of these house- holds, 1.6 million speak Spanish and 0.5 million speak an Asian language. The greatest growth since 1980 has been in Asian languages, which are now 4 of the top 10 spo- ken. Chinese has doubled, and Korean and Vietnamese have more than doubled; with the addition of Tagalog (spoken in the Philippines), they represent over 3 million people. Nationwide, 13.8 percent of all residents speak a language other than English at home.64 The Model Minority Historian Ronald Takaki writes that “today, Asian Americans are celebrated as America’s ‘model minority.’ ” Takaki cites feature sto- ries in Fortune and the New Republic applauding Asian Americans as “America’s Super Minority” and “America’s greatest success story.” Takaki objects to this charac- terization as inaccurate, however. “In their celebration of this ‘model minority,’ the pundits and the politi- cians have exaggerated Asian American ‘success’ and have created a new myth. . . . Actually, in terms of personal incomes, Asian Americans have not reached equality.” Income inequalities among Asian American men were evident in Takaki’s data: Korean men earned only 82 percent of the income of White men, Chinese men 69 percent, and Filipino men 62 percent.65 Takaki explains: The patterns of income inequality for Asian men reflect a structural problem: Asians tend to be located in the labor market’s secondary sector, where wages are low and promotional prospects minimal. Asian men are clustered as janitors, machinists, postal clerks, technicians, waiters, cooks, gardeners, and computer programmers; they can also be found in the primary sector, but here they are found mostly in the lower-tier levels.66 Takaki notes that although they are highly educated, Asian Americans are generally not represented in posi- tions of executive leadership and decision making. A comment that appeared in the Wall Street Journal is telling: “Many Asian Americans hoping to climb the corporate ladder face an arduous ascent. Ironically, the same companies that pursue them for technical jobs of- ten shun them when filling managerial and executive positions.”67 We are reminded that Asians have a long history of discrimination in the United States, includ- ing the Chinese Exclusion Act of the 1880s and the imprisonment of Japanese American citizens during World War II. Diversity and Equity Today Chapter 12 375 Counter to the view that Asian Americans are uni- formly successful in school, a Seattle study showed that one-fifth of the school population was Asian American and that as a whole over 39 percent of this group scored in the “at risk” category on the district’s standardized reading test, about the same as the Hispanic students. Some Asian American subgroups, notably the Vietnamese, Samoan, and Southeast Asian students, did appreciably worse than the Hispanic students in reading and language skills together, while other groups, such as the Japanese and Chinese, did nearly as well as or better than the White American students.68 The effects of economic, cultural, and linguistic differences are further revealed in the 1993 study, Adult Literacy in America. This mas- sive inquiry shows White non-Hispanic adults to be significantly more proficient in all three literacy areas under investigation than all other population groups, including African Americans, Asian/Pacific Islanders, American Indians, and five different groupings of His- panic origin.69 As we have seen, a term such as “Asian American” can usefully draw our attention to a general classification of people even if there are significant differences among cultural histories within that larger classification. Those cultural histories need further attention. Historian Sucheng Chan notes that almost a million people from China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and India came to the United States and Hawaii from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s (in contrast to 35 million European immigrants from 1850 to 1930). Of those Asian and Pacific immigrants, the Chinese (about 370,000) came first, pushed out by poverty and strife in China and at- tracted by California gold and jobs in Canada and the American West. Next, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, about 400,000 Japanese came, followed by 180,000 Filipinos and less than 10,000 Koreans. They were recruited by Hawaiian sugar plantation owners who needed thousands of workers, and these workers and their families often migrated east to the United States, which soon created an independent flow of immigra- tion from the Asian and Pacific countries.70 These immigrants, like immigrants from Europe, took jobs, started businesses, sent their children to school, and over time began to assimilate into the mainstream culture, language, and values while still retaining some cultural values and practices from their home countries. After a sharp reduction in Chinese and Japanese im- migration brought about by the world wars and the sub- sequent cold war, Europeans, Canadians, and Mexicans constituted the great majority of new immigrants to the United States. Then a new source of Asian American im- migration developed during and after the war in Vietnam. The 1965 Immigration Act and its amendments, the 1975 Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act, the 1980 Refugee Act, and the 1987 Amerasian Homecoming Act have facilitated increased immigration from Southeast Asia. Since 1965, Asian/Pacific immigration has increased to the point where it now constitutes half of all immigra- tion into the United States.71 Today, the fastest-growing minority group in the na- tion is Asian and Pacific Americans, more than doubling in size since 1980. It is projected to more than double again by 2020, resulting in an Asian/Pacific popula- tion of nearly 20 million in the United States (see Table 12.2). By the early 1990s there were nearly 2 million Asian American children and youth between the ages of 5 and 19 in school in the United States, with heavy concen- trations of that population in major cities, where Asian languages are spoken in the home and the community. Interestingly, it was the 1970 class action suit brought by Kinney Lau and 11 other Chinese American students against Alan Nichols and the San Francisco Board of Education that led to the historic Supreme Court case Lau v. Nichols. The Court’s ruling provided the basis for the nation’s bilingual education mandates, which in turn have had a profound effect on the education of Hispanic Americans. The Court unanimously ruled that there is no equality of treatment merely by providing students with the same facilities, textbooks, teachers, and curriculum; for students who do not understand English are effectively foreclosed from any meaningful education.72 The public at large, and perhaps some educators as well, perceive Asian Americans to be high achievers in school, students who don’t need the support of the courts. We have seen, however, that different Asian American groups perform differently in school, and language can be an element of the problem for some students. It will be important for educators not to make assumptions about the growing number of Asian American students in their schools and classrooms other than that all chil- dren will need our best educational support. The Asian American experience has been a difficult one even when success is apparent for some families. As Chan writes: Thus the acculturation process experienced by Asians in America has run along two tracks: even as they acquired the values and behavior of Euro-Americans, they simul- taneously had to learn to accept their standing as racial minorities—people who, because of their skin color and physiognomy, were not allowed to enjoy the rights and privileges given acculturated European immigrants and native-born Americans. In short, if they wished to re- main and to survive in the United States, they had to learn how to “stay in their place” and to act with def- erence toward those of higher racial status. . . . Asian Americans, more so than black or Latino Americans, live in a state of ambivalence—lauded as a “successful” or “model minority” on the one hand, but subject to con- tinuing unfair treatment, including occasional outbursts of racially motivated violence, on the other.Page 376 ends here 73 Table 12.2 Asian/Pacific Americans: Population by Ethnicity: 1980 and 1990 *The 1980 number for Asian/Pacific Americans in this table is slightly higher than that used in other published reports because it includes the count for “oth Page 377 starts here The Asian population rose by 3 percent, or 421,000 people, between 2004 and 2005. • Of the increase of 421,000 in the Asian population between 2004 and 2005, 182,000 was because of natural increase and 239,000 was attributed to immigration. • The Asian population in 2005 was younger, with a median age of 33.2 years compared to the popula- tion as a whole at 36.2 years. About 26 percent of the Asian population was under 18, compared with 25 percent of the total population.74 Hispanic American Diversity Just as it is an error to generalize about the experience of all 17 different Asian immigrant groups now part of the American cul- ture, it is a mistake to think of “Hispanic” as describing a single people. As Holli and Jones write: Hispanic is an umbrella term encompassing Spanish- speaking people of different races and twenty separate nationalities. Hispanics come from as far as Uruguay, at the edge of South America, or as near as Texas, once a part of Mexico. Some have been here since the First World War, while others arrived only yesterday. They include high skilled professionals, political refugees trying to regain what they have lost, and peasants who never had much to lose. They share a language and a culture.75 Diversity and Equity Today Chapter 12 377 These regional differences remind us of the very dif- ferent cultural histories of different Hispanic groups. While Cubans began making their presence felt in the 20th century, for example, most heavily immigrat- ing after the communist revolution in Cuba in 1959, Mexican Americans had a long history in the South- west before it became the southwestern United States. Thousands from Texas to California did not immigrate to the United States at all but found themselves inside this nation’s borders when their lands were conquered. It has sometimes been said of that historically Mexican population that they did not cross the border but the border crossed them. Yet people readily assume that most Mexican Americans and other Hispanics are im- migrants, if not “illegal aliens.” However, three-fourths of the Hispanic population in this country was born in the United States.76 Different Hispanic groups have very different migration histories. They have come from different parts of the hemisphere—North America (Mexico), Central America, the Carribean (Puerto Rico and Cuba), and South America—and they have tended to concentrate in different parts of the United States. Carrasquillo writes: In general, Mexicans settled in the southwest, the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in the northeast, the Cubans

in the southeast and northeast, and South and Central Americans have spread out in the United States with large numbers found in the west and south (Nicaraguans) and in the northeast (Colombians, Peruvians and Ecuadorians) of the United States.77 Immigration and migration patterns have had a pro- found impact on the U.S. population. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly one-fifth of Americans, or 47 million U.S. residents aged 5 and older, spoke a language other than English at home in 2000. That was an increase of 15 million people since 1990, and most of them were Spanish speakers. Spanish speakers increased from 17.3 million in 1990 to 28.1 million in 2000, a 62 percent rise.78 And in 2008, the Official Census Bureau count is that the Hispanic population has reached 45 million in the U.S., 15 percent of the population. Then in 2006, the Census Bureau released data on the most comprehensive survey of immigration in the United States ever performed. Immigrants liv- ing in U.S. households increased by 16 percent, to a current total of 35.7 million foreign-born residents in the country. The dramatic increase is from 2000 to 2005, with many newcomers moving to states that traditionally have not had many immigrants. The number of immigrants living in American households rose 16 percent, fueled largely by recent arrivals from Mexico, according to fresh data released by the Cen- sus Bureau.79 Despite their common language and some shared cultural practices and despite their grouping under the designation “Hispanic” for political purposes, differenc- es among these cultures are significant. Referring to the Hispanic experience in Chicago, where half a million Hispanics reside, Holli and Jones write: As a result of migration history, each Hispanic group holds deeply felt concerns and attitudes not shared by others. For example, many Cubans share a strong anti- communist sentiment reflected in several organizations formed to oppose Cuban leader Fidel Castro. . . . Cubans, therefore, are suspicious of communist influences in the community-based development efforts that are prevalent in Mexican and Puerto Rican areas. . . . Immigrants from Cuba and South America, because many are affluent, are dismissed by some Mexicans and Puerto Ricans as not really Hispanic.80 Such social class differences can influence the ex- periences of Hispanic children in schools. Those from the lower economic rungs are all too often struggling academically even if they are born in this country. As Laura E. Perez points out in quoting the National Council of La Raza, Hispanic undereducation has reached crisis proportions. By any standard, Hispanics are the least educated major pop- ulation in the United States; Hispanic students are more likely to be enrolled below grade level, more likely to drop out, less likely to be enrolled in college, and less likely to receive a college degree than any other group.81 Yet Perez notes different experiences of different sub- groups within the Hispanic population and notes that the largest group, Chicanas and Chicanos (Americans of Mexican descent) have the lowest educational attain- ment. Cubans, in contrast, have the highest, with Puerto Ricans falling closer to the Mexican Americans. The low educational attainment is paralleled by low socio- economic measures for the Mexican American commu- nity. The per capita income cited by Perez for Mexican Americans is about 60 percent that of Whites, and about 38 percent of Mexican American children live in poverty. Perez cites research showing that “Chicanao primary and secondary students are in significant dis- proportion held back grades and tracked into programs for slow learners or the mentally retarded or ‘special’ inferior academic or vocational tracks.”82 Not only economic class differences but language dif- ferences as well influence the school experiences of His- panic young people. Limited English Proficiency (LEP) refers to a level of listening/speaking and/or reading/ writing in English that is not at or near native-level proficiency, and by far the largest group of these in the United States is Spanish-speaking. Cisneros and Leone report that of the 2.2 million LEP students in U.S. schools, federal bilingual program funds are provided only for 251,000 of them, or about 11 percent. These authors believe that bilingual programs would assist LEP students’ success in schools and that the problem of developing a sound bilingual educational policy will increase as numbers of LEP students rise in the com- ing years. If the data cited by Cisneros and Leone are reliable, as much as 20 percent of the population of the United States will be Hispanic by the year 2040, though it is not yet clear how many of these will be LEP. Table 12.3 indicates the 10 states with the highest LEP enrollments today. Chapter 13 will address the ques- tion of whether we are prepared to meet the challenge of educating these young people in our schools. Page 378 starts here Socioeconomic Class and Education Thomas Toch has observed that the links between fam- ily economic status and school labeling are significant: Diversity and Equity Today Chapter 12 379 By far, the nation’s economically disadvantaged students pay the highest price for the pervasiveness of tracking in public education. . . . In other words, disadvantaged students [as measured by an index that includes paren- tal income and education, parental occupation, and the presence of consumer goods in a household] are three times less likely to be in the academic track than afflu- ent students are, but three times more likely than affluent students to be in the vocational track.83 Social class may prove to be a more effective determi- nant of future opportunities than either race or gender. With the breakdown of housing segregation, minority families that succeed financially can now move into the suburbs, where their children will experience life very much as the children of White middle-class families do. And girls born into middle- and upper-class fami- lies now tend to experience a climate more supportive of personal autonomy and professional aspirations than did their mothers and grandmothers. In the case of poor and working-class children, however, the evidence strongly indicates that neither the processes nor the out- comes of schooling are the same as they are for children of the upper classes. Social scientists are now exploring several evident patterns. Children who are poor tend to go to schools with other children who are poor. Minority students attend school with other minority students of similar socioeconomic background Page 379 ends here . The suburbs, where the wealth tends to be located, are not part of the general tax base that supports inner-city schools, and so there is little or no cross-fertilization of resources or equalization of condi- tions. The “better” schools get more qualified teachers and the best science labs, computer systems, reading materials, and other resources. Poor children are not ex- pected to be as smart or to work as hard as middle- and upper-class children. They are not expected to know as much or learn as much. They are not expected to do as well in life.84 These lower expectations lead to differen- tial treatment by teachers. Parents of upper- and middle-class standing are more likely to become involved in the process of their children’s education. They tend to feel welcome in the school environment and to feel that they are equipped to make a contribution.85 Conversely, the parents of lower-class children tend to feel alienated from their children’s schools and education. The cultural pat- terns and icons of poor and working-class children are different from those of the dominant class, are not a part of the school’s culture, are not rewarded, and are not generally understood by teachers whose back- ground differs from that of the students. Disputes over bilingual education further illustrate the sepa- ration of culture between schools and their minority students.86 Chapter 13 will revisit bilingual education as a response to the needs of LEP students. Diversity and Equity Today Chapter 12 381 Equity, Education, and Disabling Conditions We have seen how membership in an ethnic or economic group can influence how individuals in that group per- form and are evaluated and rewarded in schools and in the larger society. Questions of equity arise, as noted early in the chapter, when individuals’ standing in school or society seems to be influenced by their group membership rather than by their individual merits. Such questions apply to children and adults with physically or psychologically disabling conditions. It is not always clear whether such individuals are allowed to succeed on the basis of their own merits, especially when they are labeled and treated as a group for whom expectations of success are lower than for others who have not been so labeled and grouped. In 1975 Congress sought to address such equity ques- tions with the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA). As Judith Singer and John Butler write: Hailed as a “Bill of Rights” for children with handicaps, the law outlined a process whereby all children, regardless of the severity of their handicap, were assured the same educational rights and privileges accorded their non- handicapped peers: “a free appropriate public education.” EHA was to transform special education practice across the nation by bringing all states up to the standard that some states, prompted by court action and advocacy by handicapped rights groups, already had adopted.87 One result of this act, for reasons soon to be mentioned, has been to increase the number of students designated by the schools as disabled. Currently, 4.3 million stu- dents out of a total K–12 public school population of over 47 million students have been designated as stu- dents with some sort of special needs. Between 1991 and 2002 there was a 35 percent increase in the number of children designated as “special needs,” adjusted for general enrollment increase. Page 381 ens here The largest and fastest- growing of these categories throughout the 1980s was “learning disabled,” which grew from 32 percent of the special education population in 1980 to 46 percent by 1991. In 1991 there were 2,129,000 of 4,710,000 and in 2003 there were 2,846,000 of 6,407,000. That figure has remained stable between 1991 and 2003. According to the American Almanac, “speech impaired” was the next largest group, with 22.8 percent of special needs students in 1991, followed by “mentally retarded” (12.4 percent), “emotionally disturbed” (9.0 percent), and then several categories each with no more than 2.2 percent of the population of students designated with disabilities: hard of hearing and deaf, orthopedically handicapped, other health impaired, visually handi- capped, multihandicapped, and deaf-blind.88 Education analyst Thomas Toch explains part of the reason why learning disabled has become the largest of these categories. First, it “has proven particularly hard to define.” Toch elaborates: The U.S. Department of Education’s definition of the term, “a disorder in one or more basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using lan- guage spoken or written . . . ,” is broad. And it is only one of approximately fifty official but often vague and overlapping definitions of the term in use in public education today. As a result, in many school systems “learning disabled” has become a catchall category, and an increasing number of disadvantaged but otherwise “normal” students are being relegated to it, even though P.L. [Public Law] 94-142 prohibits inclusion in the cat- egory of students whose learning problems stem from “environmental, cultural or economic disadvantages.”89 Even Madeleine C. Will, the U.S. Department of Edu- cation’s official in charge of special education between 1983 and 1989, acknowledged that the “misclassifica- tion” of learning-disabled students has become a “great problem.”90 Toch also cites Alan Gartner, a former di- rector of special education in the New York City school system, who wrote, “The students in such programs are not held to common standards of achievement or be- havior.” Toch elaborates, noting that “only rudimentary skills and topics are taught in classes for the learning disabled, homework is rarely if ever assigned, and the in- structors for the learning disabled typically have little or no background in the academic subjects they teach.”91 The issue of labeling is a critical one in the delivery of services to children with disabling conditions, real or perceived. Certainly some children have such obvious physical challenges—sightlessness, cerebral palsy, or an- other multidisabling condition—but the growth of the learning-disabled category suggests that some students are being labeled as disabled who in another social envi- ronment might not be perceived as different from other children. Yet with extra funding tied to the identifica- tion of students as disabled, there is an incentive for well-meaning educators to label students in ways that might prove damaging. Toch addresses both the label- ing and the incentive issues as follows: There is a powerful stigma attached to “special education” in the school culture; to be labeled a learning disabled stu- dent in a public school is to suffer the disparagement of peers and teachers alike. And rarely do students who have been labeled learning disabled return to the mainstream of school life. Indeed, since schools receive additional fund- ing for learning-disabled students, . . . they have an incen- tive to continue classifying a student as “LD.”92 Another incentive for schools to identify more students as learning disabled is that the performance scores of these students will then not be averaged into those of the school district when standards of accountability are im- plemented as part of the educational reform movement. Even the U.S. Education Department has issued a warning that raised standards may be “exaggerating the tendency to refer difficult children to special education.”93 Gender and Education94 We have discussed how race, ethnicity, economic class, and disabling conditions may influence the experience of schooling of different groups of students. The largest of all “minority” groups (often a majority) is females. In studying the relationship between gender and education, we need to ask, (1) Are the processes of education dif- ferent for girls than for boys? and (2) Are the outcomes of schooling different for women than for men? The answer appears to be yes on both counts. During most of Western history, as we saw in Part 1, women were characterized differently from men and those characterizations were used to certify their in- ferior and subordinate status. Generally women were characterized as emotional, affectionate, empathetic, and more prone to sensual behavior. Men were charac- terized as rational, just, more directly in the “image of God,” and susceptible to seduction by women’s sensual intrigues. Thus, men were seen as naturally more fit for social and family leadership roles. Educational insti- tutions and ideals usually reflected these male–female

characterizations. Consequently, women were often relegated to education at the mother’s side rather than in schools. Societal Definitions of Gender Chapter 5 presented a historical account of exclusions and limitations on the education of girls and women in American schools and colleges. The central issue of female education in the last quarter of the 20th century was not de jure equal access to educational institutions and curricula. Girls and women are no longer denied equal access to education by law; indeed, since Congress enacted Title IX in 1972 and the subsequent Women’s Educational Equity Act in 1974, sex bias in school ac- cess, services, and programs has been illegal. However, women are still in practice excluded from educational opportunities through processes more subtle and com- plex than those prior to Title IX. This de facto exclusion of some women from educational opportunities revolves around gender definitions. The central issue in female education today is therefore the problems related to gender and the way those problems affect women’s self- concept and academic performance. Sex refers to the biological characteristics of males and females; gender refers to societal expectations, roles, and limitations placed on a person because he or she is male or female. It is the socially sanctioned expecta- tions and limitations, not the fact of biological sex dif- ferences, that cause the greatest difficulties for females in contemporary educational settings. Gender definitions compose a complex and sometimes subtle set of prob- lems. The powerful impact of gender definitions may be more easily understood when one considers that gender definitions result in learned or socialized “roles.” Most of our social behavior stems from learned roles. There are roles associated with race, social class, occupa- tions, and religion as well as gender. All humans begin to learn some of these roles almost at birth. Other roles are Diversity and Equity Today Chapter 12 383 learned at other life stages. It is important to understand that individuals are not entirely passive recipients in this socialization process. Each brings somewhat different experiences to the process. Thus, different individuals will learn slightly or even vastly different roles when exposed to the same socializing conditions. It is also vital to understand that the socialized roles and the resulting expectations become “reality” for individuals, groups, and society. For example, many 19th-century White southerners believed the role as- signment to African American slaves that designated them as happy, passive, shiftless, lacking rationality, and needing direction. The fact that society or a group in society assigns a role to a particular group and be- lieves the reality of that role does not make the role assignment natural, fair, or moral. Nevertheless, it does make it very difficult for anyone to renounce or reject it because one seems to be contradicting reality. The process of role socialization reflects what social theorists call “social construction of reality.” One of the factors that contributes to the strength of this social construc- tion of reality regarding roles is that the content of a role always serves a social function. The role content assigned to African American slaves provided the struc- ture of justification for slavery and for the labor system of the antebellum South. The fact that the role assign- ment serves some social function should not lead one to assume that it is therefore desirable or fair. This assump- tion is made especially often in the case of gender roles. Early in the 20th century George Herbert Mead and other social psychologists explained how an individu- al develops her or his sense of self primarily through interaction with groups. It is the way that others react to the individual which helps define that person’s iden- tity. On a simpler level, the nursery story “The Ugly Duckling” demonstrates the process. As long as the baby swan was in the company of ducks who responded to her as if she were ugly, she believed and acted as if she were ugly. Only when she grew into a swan and was confronted with other swans who reacted to her as if she were truly beautiful did she change her understanding of herself. Unfortunately, for most humans it is much more difficult to move from the society of ducks to that of swans. Sex Roles in Infancy It is instructive to examine the messages contemporary American society provides for girls at every stage of their maturation. Barbara Sin- clair Deckard provides a revealing account of social in-

teractions that confront girls and from which girls must construct their self-identification: Before a newborn baby leaves the delivery room, a bracelet with its family name is put around its wrist. If the baby is a girl, the bracelet is pink; if a boy, the bracelet is blue. These different colored bracelets indicate the importance our society places on sex differences, and this branding is the first act in a sex role socialization process that will result in adult men and women being almost as different as we think they “naturally” are. . . . Perhaps because sex is such an obvious differentiating characteristic, almost all societies have sex roles. Women are expected to think and behave differently. The societal expectation and belief that women and men are very different tends to become a self- fulfilling prophecy.95 These societal expectations strongly influence the way parents react to children. Deckard reports one study where parents described their girl babies as “significantly softer, finer featured, smaller, and less attentive than boy babies, even though there actually was no difference in the size or weight of the two sexes.” Another clinical study of college students’ descriptions of babies found that the students described a baby as “littler,” “weaker,” or “cuddlier” when informed that the baby was a girl.96 Thus, even at birth our evaluations of a baby are directed by social expectations of gender. Babies are brought home to a gender-directed color- coded world. It is not that blue is better than pink but that all girls are seen as different from boys. This differ- ence continues, according to Deckard, into early infancy as the child begins play activities. Parents encourage boys to take chances and develop independence, while girls are protected and shepherded toward dependence. Boys are praised for aggressiveness, and girls for willing- ness to take direction. Boys are counseled to be like Dad; girls, like Mom. Parents buy dump trucks for their sons and Barbie dolls for their daughters. Research indicates that these gender lessons are learned by children. At age 2 or 3 children use the terms boy and girl as “simple labels rather than the concep- tual categories.” A year or so later they begin to view the sexes as opposite and distinguish between girls’ things and boys’ things. And by age 6 both girls and boys be- gin to enforce sex roles. “Boys more consistently choose and prefer sex-typed toys and activities, and these prefer- ences accelerate with age throughout early childhood.”97 This seems to be the natural outcome of the fact that society generally values male roles and denigrates female roles. Children learn these gender values early. Lawrence Kohlberg found that among 5- and 6-year-old children, “Fathers are perceived as more powerful, punitive, ag- gressive, fearless, instrumentally competent and less nurturing than females. . . . Thus, power and prestige appear as one major attribute of children’s sex-role ste- reotypes.”98 Observers should not be surprised that one of the most hurtful epithets to be hurled at a boy is to call him a girl. Gender lessons are among the earliest and most powerful lessons of infancy and early childhood. Sex Roles in Early Education Sex roles continue to play a significant role in early education. When chil- dren enter preschool, they are confronted with constant reminders of gender differences. Kirsten Amundsen’s study found that teachers encouraged boys to be aggres- sive, assertive, and independent. Girls were discour- aged when they exhibited daring or aggressiveness and were encouraged to be timid, cooperative, and quiet.99 Preschool classroom research shows that girls receive less instructional time, less affection, and less teacher attention than boys.100 This pattern continues in primary school. Studies have found that primary school teachers talk more to boys. They talk to boys even when the boys are in remote classroom locations, but they talk to girls only when the girls are close to the teacher. Boys are asked higher-order questions more often than girls. Teachers tend to give boys instructions about projects, while they often show girls how to complete the work. Boys are praised more frequently for the intellectual quality of their work, while girls tend to be praised for neatness and following direc- tions.101 The lessons are clear: Boys are important and expected to be competent, and girls are unimportant and expected to need help. One study of elementary and middle school students showed that boys shouted answers eight times more often than girls. Moreover, when boys called out answers, teachers tended to listen, but when girls responded in a like manner, they were most often told to raise their hand if they wished to speak.102 More- over, teachers are more apt to ask questions of boys when they do not volunteer.103 Such teacher behavior reinforces the subtle messages girls receive from home and society. One study asked groups to evaluate a variety of items ranging from paintings to résumés. When the subjects were led to believe that the author of the item was male, they consistently valued it more highly. When a second group was asked to evaluate the same items with the supposed authors’ sexes reversed, they consis- tently evaluated the item lower when they believed its

author was a woman.104 A similar study asked college students to evaluate scholarly articles. In this study both women and men rated the articles higher when they be- lieved they were written by men.105 Societal messages reinforce school gender lessons. Women are viewed as less capable, and their work is devalued. The result is to emphasize to girls that they are not expected to be independent, creative, intellectually competent, or aggressive. Surely these messages must contribute to the general lack of self-confidence that researchers find in girls at the secondary school level and beyond.106 Unfortunately, instructional materials communicate many of the same messages to students. During the last few decades several studies analyzing sex bias in instruc- tional materials have been published.107 The seminal work was Dick and Jane as Victims: Sex Stereotyping in Children’s Readers. It analyzed almost 2,800 stories in 134 elementary school readers used in three New Jersey suburbs during the 1970s. Most of the stories were about males: there were two and one-half times as many stories about boys as there were about girls, three times as many stories about men as about women, six times as many male biographies as female biographies, and even twice as many male animal stories as female animal stories. In the stories boys and men were portrayed as brave, creative, smart, diligent, and independent. Girls were most often timid, passive, adventureless, and de- pendent on boys to help them. Men were shown in 147 different occupations; women were shown in 26, mostly traditional female occupations.108 Diversity and Equity Today Chapter 12 385 research, which used studies from 1963 and 1907 as a base line, concludes that, “the lists of most frequently required books and authors are dominated by white males, with little change in overall balance from similar lists 25 or 80 years ago.”110 The report noted that research during the 1980s and 1990s in other secondary school subject areas, such as social studies and foreign languages, showed similar de- velopments. Research on social studies texts indicated that “while women were more often included, they are likely to be the usual ‘famous women,’ or women in protest movements. Rarely is there dual and balanced treatment of women and men, and seldom are wom- en’s perspectives and cultures presented on their own terms.”111 In instructional material for foreign languages the research commonly found “exclusion of girls, ste- reotyping of members of both sexes, subordination or degradation of girls, isolation of materials on women, superficiality of attention to contemporary issues or so- cial problems, and cultural inaccuracy.”112 Linda K. Christian-Smith’s “Voices of Resistance: Young Women Readers of Romance Fiction” highlights an important curriculum issue with respect to young women with low reading ability in secondary schools.113 Since the early 1980s teen romance novels have become the third most widely read young adult books. They are now a $500-million-a-year industry.114 The teen ro- mance novels are designed for “reluctant readers” and are sold through school book clubs to students. Often students are allowed to substitute these works for more traditional English readings that they see as too diffi- cult or boring. The books are gender-differentiated, with mystery and adventure books for males and romance, dat- ing, and problem-solving novels for females. Christian- Smith investigated the use of these romance novels in a midwestern city and intensively studied the reactions of about 30 young women to this literature. Not surpris- ingly, teachers were reluctant to allow their students to abandon traditional literature but quickly acquiesced to pressure from both the students and educational author- ities who demanded improvement in reading scores. The young women reported that the romance novels of- fered “escape, a way to get away from problems at home and school,” “better reading than dreary textbooks,” “enjoyment and pleasure,” and “a way to learn about romance and dating.”115 Christian-Smith found that the young women often developed their own interpreta- tions for the social situations portrayed in the novels. However, because teachers did not require discussion of The problem persists in secondary school curriculum materials. A 1971 study of popular secondary U.S. history texts found that women were almost totally absent and that the little material devoted to women tended to be less than complimentary.109 The 1992 study by the American Association of University of Women, How Schools Shortchange Girls, concluded: Studies from the late 1980s reveal that although sexism has decreased in some elementary school texts and basal readers, the problem persists, especially at the secondary school level, in terms of what is considered important enough to study. A 1989 study of book-length works taught in high school English courses reports that, in a national sample of public, independent, and Catholic schools, the ten books assigned most frequently included only one written by a woman and none by members of minority groups. This these readings, the young women seldom had any op- portunity to understand the novels in a way that would help them “locate the contradictions between popular fiction’s version of social relations and their own lives as well as help them to develop the critical tools necessary to make deconstructive readings that unearth political interests that shape the form as well as content of popu- lar fiction.”116 Thus, “when young women read teen romance novels similar to Quin-Harkins’s California Girl, they become parts of a fictional world where men give meaning and completeness to women’s lives and women’s destinies are to tend the heart and hearth.”117 The teen romance novel issue points to two problems faced by teenage women in American schools. The first is the double burden of gender and class. Working-class and lower-class young women are faced with many cur- ricular choices. Usually they are without guidance. Their families often do not have the experience, information, or knowledge necessary to provide useful guidance. The schools normally abrogate their responsibility to provide the essential guidance. Christian-Smith indicated that teachers did not long insist on providing reading guid- ance, and when students chose romance novels, teachers did not follow with discussions of the materials, which might have provided an educationally sound experience. Carl A. Grant and Christine E. Sleeter note that schools generally provide resources for students but tend to take a laissez-faire attitude toward students, especially working- class students.118 These students often follow the “path of least resistance,” taking the courses or completing the readings that are easiest or require the least amount of time and work. Often the students do not realize what is at stake when they make these decisions. Schools do not help make the issues clear. The second problem highlighted by the teen romance novel issue is related to puberty, dating, and romance. As young women enter puberty, they are presented with gender roles by parents, television, movies, maga- zines, romance novels, and commercials. Most of these sources emphasize the importance of popularity. To be popular in contemporary American society, a young woman must cultivate the interest of young men. This requires both socially conditioned beauty and socially sanctioned demeanor. One of the young women in Christian-Smith’s study put the issue succinctly: “The prettiest and most popular girls have their pick of the boys.”119 Girls are constantly bombarded by television and other mass media with models of beauty. Few in- deed are the young women who can fit the conventional mold for beauty: slim, long slender legs, large—but not too large—breasts, blond, full-bodied hair, clear and fair complexion, between five feet two inches and five feet five inches tall, fashionable clothes, and the latest cosmetics. It is little wonder that most young women spend a large amount of money, time, and energy on their physical appearance. And the results do not lead to self-satisfaction. A 1990 national survey discovered that only 29 percent of high school girls were “happy the way I am.”120 One should not be surprised that many young women are often depressed or that eating disorders are a problem among teenage girls. If appearance concerns are not sufficient to distract many young women from academic matters, the de- mands of demeanor certainly do not contribute to their academic success. By the time young women reach the teen years they have learned the appropriate demeanor for a “popular” girl. Deference to male pride is essential. Girls must never “show up” boys. It is an unusual young woman who does not know that she is not supposed to seem smarter than the boys if she is to be popular. Deckard states, “The really popular, successful high school girl is not a ‘brain’ or even an athlete; she is a cheerleader. She embodies the supportive and admir- ing role assigned to girls. She is defined in terms of her relationship to boys.”121 It is relatively certain that this aspect of gender roles does not contribute to the aca- demic success of young women. How much it detracts is a complex and difficult question. Unfortunately, little research has been devoted to it. Gender and Academic Achievement There is an enormous amount of research data on academic achieve- ment and participation. Much of it is discussed in the AAUW report. Summarizing some significant recent studies, the report states: Despite a narrowing of the “gender gaps” in verbal and mathematical performance, girls are not doing as well as boys in our nation’s schools. The physical sciences is one critical area in which girls continue to trail behind. More discouraging still, even the girls who take the same math- ematics and science courses as boys and perform equally well in tests are much less apt to pursue scientific or tech- nical careers than their male classmates. This is a “gender gap” our nation can no longer afford to ignore.122 It is well documented that as young women advance in high school and college, they increasingly lower their estimation of their academic abilities and lower their goals.123 Although the process leading to this condition Page 387 starts is complex, it is difficult to ignore the central role of gender in the decline of self-confidence among young women. This decline results in many missed academic and career choices. Evidence of Concern for Gender Equity It would be comforting to believe that since the passage in 1972 of Title IX, which mandates equal education- al opportunity for girls and boys, there has been an increased awareness and marshaling of resources to eliminate gender inequality in American education. In- deed, there have been some encouraging signs. Female participation in high school athletics has increased from 4 to 26 percent, and the success of U.S. women in team sports beginning with the 1996 Olympics was directly attributed to the success of Title IX.124 There has been a narrowing of the achievement gap between males and females as measured by standardized tests. In some areas curriculum materials are less gender- biased. Some important research on gender equity and education has been published. On the whole, however, it is fair to say that the effort has been poorly financed and its results have been less than sterling. Between 1983, when the U.S. Department of Educa- tion issued its report A Nation at Risk, and the release of the AAUW report in 1992, there were at least 35 reports by major educational task forces. Only one addressed the question of gender equity.125 At least part of the problem may be the fact that few women were members of the 35 groups issuing the reports. One group had no women. In only two did women constitute at least 50 percent of the membership. The 35 groups had a total of 834 male and only 171 female members.126 Perhaps it should not be a surprise that there was very little men- tion and almost no discussion of gender issues as part of the problems facing American education. Lack of adequate female representation in leadership positions is a continuing problem in American educa- tion. In 1991 only 9 of the 50 chief state school offi- cers were women. Female representation on American Diversity and Equity Today Chapter 12 387 local school boards increased from 10 percent in 1927 to only 33 percent in 1990. Also in 1990, 72 percent of all schoolteachers were women; however, 72 percent of school principals and 95 percent of superintendents were men.127 According to research by Professor Linda Skrla of Texas A&M, 90 percent of district superinten- dents are male. Given that 75 percent of teachers are female, the odds that a woman will rise from teaching to the superintendency are 40 to 1.128 These numbers represent only a slight improvement in the percentage of females in administrative posts in the past 20 years: In 1971, 99 percent of superintendents were men and 72 percent of principals were men.129 This disparity does not exist because there are many fewer qualified women available for administrative positions or because men are better educational adminis- trators. One study in the mid-1970s showed that about the same number of male and female teachers had the necessary credentials, the major difference being that the median number of years of teaching experience before appointment to the principalship was only 5 for men while it was 15 for women.130 There is no evidence to suggest that women are less effective than men as edu- cational administrators. Indeed, a 1960s study by Neal Gross and Anne Trask showed that “professional perfor- mance of teachers and the amount of student learning were higher on the average in schools with women prin- cipals. Further, the morale of the staff did not depend on the gender of the principal.”131 Remaining Barriers Many of the obstacles colonial American women faced have been removed. The de jure barriers that kept women from educational institutions and professions in the early eras have been dismantled. Women can now enter primary and secondary schools and institutions of higher education. It is illegal to bar a woman from any educational setting simply because she is a woman. Unfortunately, we have discovered that admission to a school does not necessarily mean equal access to an education. Most of the current barriers that deny women equal access to education involve societal definitions of gender and resulting social and educa- tional practices. Until American society begins to believe that all persons are equal and treats everyone as an individual rather than typing people according to group mem- bership, we will continue to experience problems of equal educational opportunity. As long as we believe that women are different from men, with qualitatively different characteristics and abilities, we will continue to believe that certain occupations are for males and certain others are for females. The corresponding denigration of women’s gender roles will continue to contribute to the vast inequality of income between women and men. The inevitable result is a lowering of self-esteem and a closure of opportunity for women. The fact that societal attitudes and behaviors are central to the problem of equal educational opportunity for women is not an excuse for inaction on the part of schools or teachers. If we believe that every child has the right to the best education she or he can absorb, we must act to counter the damaging educational effects of gender bias. As teachers we have an obligation to under- stand the causes of any problem that inhibits the learn- ing of any group of children. While this is much more easily said than done, schools in several communities throughout the country are showing us ways to teach all groups of children more successfully. We turn to this challenge in Chapter 13. BUILDING A PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION This chapter has challenged a basic assumption underlying 20th-century schooling in the United States. This chapter’s challenge was grounded in a critical examination of social science theories that purport to explain why some racial, ethnic, and social class groups consistently perform more poorly than others in schools and in the economy. In addition, gender differences in school and soci- ety were examined briefly for their contribution to understanding inequality and inequity in school- ing. The belief that in our educational system a person’s success in school and in economic life is based only on his or her innate learning ability has been shown to be unfounded. Yet liberal ideology locates the source of school success and failure in individuals, and some educa- tors are fond of the maxim that treating all students as individuals will ensure equitable educational experiences. Research indicates, however, that the group differences (among ethnicities or social classes, for example) in school performance can- not be attributed simply to individual talent and motivation without taking into account the cultural contexts that shape individuals. If individuals are importantly influenced by their cultures and if stu- dents in American schools come from identifiably different cultural backgrounds, treating all students as individuals requires attention to the cultural differences. There is significant evidence that the content and processes of American schools have been relatively hospitable to the achievement of White middle-class students and especially to White middle-class male students. Certainly, females succeed in schools too, as do a great many children from African American, Hispanic, Native American, Asian, and other racial and ethnic backgrounds. But if members of any of those groups perform disproportionately poorly in schools, educators should become alerted to a possible mismatch be- tween the school culture and the home culture of the student. All too often such an observation leads to two destructive misunderstandings. The first is that students from such mismatched cul- tural backgrounds are culturally (and, it is often thought, linguistically) deficient, and therefore the schools have to correct these deficiencies; the second is that any Native American, African American, or Hispanic child necessarily has cul- tural barriers to surmount in school. The cultural deficiency misunderstanding is grounded in the failure to recognize that students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds are already living in full and rich cultures with cus- toms, histories, and linguistic systems that don’t need correcting. Educators have no reason to be- lieve that such students are not capable of learning rigorous academic material; to the contrary, there are shining examples of how schools can respond to such students to support their academic success. What needs to be recognized is that the American school’s content and processes reflect the values and practices of a dominant culture that devalues the language, values, and practices of many minor- ity cultures. Moreover, such students are too easily judged deficient by inadequate standards that are class- or race-biased. It would be more education- ally sound for educators to examine the interac- tion of the school and the child rather than just the performance of the child as measured by dominant standards. Page 388 ends here Some educators have developed an analysis of school experience which suggests that schools can indeed respond in ways that secure the success of students from subordinated cultures. Such responses demand a conception of cultural pluralism that respects diversity among peoples and among students’ different ways of encoun- tering the school culture. Such a conception may not come “naturally” to a profession that is largely White and socialized by the dominant culture’s value and practices. Gender theory suggests a way to avoid the sec- ond misunderstanding: that an individual possess- es certain characteristics just by virtue of belonging to a racial, ethnic, or gender group. To make such an assumption conforms to the definition of bias, and this is something most educators wish to avoid. Yet to ignore ethnic or gender differences—to be “gender-neutral” or “race-neutral” in the treatment of students, for example—may overlook a variable that is crucial to understanding a student’s experience of the world and of school. If students come to school with very different preparations for success in the dis- tinctively White middle-class school culture, to ignore important differences in the effort to achieve “equal treatment” may lead to very inequitable results. It seems we are caught on the horns of a dilemma: To take account of students’ group differences may be biased, but not to take account of them is to treat dif- ferent learners as if they were the same, which will benefit some learners at the expense of others. To treat students as individuals is, at its best, to try to take account of and respond to differences among students that have consequences for learn- ing. If gender or cultural background is significant in making a student the individual learner he or she is, there are times when that factor needs to be taken into account. Yet to assume that an Afri- can American student should be treated differently simply because he is African American or that a girl needs special treatment because she is a girl is to risk racial or gender bias. Jane Roland Martin’s contribution to the solution of this dilemma has been the notion of “gender sensitivity,” in which the teacher seeks to recognize when gender is a significant variable in student learning and when Diversity and Equity Today Chapter 12 389 it is not. In addition, part of gender sensitivity is learning to celebrate and reward certain social- ized feminine characteristics, such as caring, coop- eration, and nurturance—which are often not well rewarded in society or in schooling—while at the same time helping female students develop the skills and self-confidence to succeed in tradition- ally male domains such as mathematics, science, and community leadership. Similarly, the contribu- tions of all minority groups can be celebrated and affirmed while students from African American, Native American, Asian, and Hispanic cultures are helped to succeed in the linguistic and academic skills that the dominant culture rewards. Culture sensitivity, however, is not just recognizing African American History Month; it is learning to recognize when the subordinating forces of the dominant culture are interfering with a student’s learning potential and then seeking to equip students to respond to those forces. Not all African American students, or all American students, experience such interference, and those who do may not ex- perience it all the time. Being culturally sensitive and pluralistic requires one to learn to recognize when race or ethnicity, just like gender or social class, is a significant variable in a student’s learn- ing experience. The consequences of all this for building a phi- losophy of education are several, but one of the most important is the teacher’s commitment to what has by now become a modern cliché: All children can learn. Well, it might be said, of course they can, and some learn quickly and well, while others learn just a little. But some teachers and school leaders maintain the conviction that when every student isn’t learning well, something is amiss and needs correction. They know that there are schools in which low-income children of ma- jority and minority backgrounds succeed at very high academic levels, and that such schools serve as proof that all children really can learn well. The most successful teachers try to locate the sources of failure to learn not in the child, or in the child’s home, but in the interactions between the child and home and school. With such a conviction, teachers know that the school (and the teacher) bears a major part of the responsibility for improv- ing the learning outcomes. If you were a parent of a low-income minor- ity child, which kind of teacher would you want your child to have: one who was truly convinced of the ability of all children to learn challeng- ing academic material, or one who was not? For a teacher to have such a conviction means that he or she does not begin to doubt it when some students do poorly. Rather, the teacher asks, what are the reasons why these children with so much ability are not learning, and how do we address those reasons? With such a teacher, the classroom becomes a learning environment in which all chil- dren really do learn. How the teacher’s conviction translates into classroom and school practices to support student success is the focus of the next chapter. Primary Source Reading A Public Education Primer: Basic (and Sometimes Surprising) Facts about the U.S. Educational System This report was written by Nancy Kober, a CEP consultant, and Alexandra Usher, CEP research as- sistant. Diane Stark Rentner, CEP’s director of na- tional programs, and Jack Jennings, CEP’s president and CEO, provided advice and assistance. Based in Washington, D.C., and founded in January 1995 by Jack Jennings, the Center on Education Policy is a national independent advocate for public education and for more effective public schools. The Center works to help Americans better understand the role of public education in a democracy and the need to improve the academic quality of public schools. We do not represent any special interests. Instead, we help citizens make sense of the conflicting opinions and perceptions about public education and create the conditions that will lead to better public schools. Introduction Public education matters, whether you’re a student, par- ent, teacher, administrator, employer, or taxpayer. Al- though you undoubtedly know something about public education, you may be unaware of important facts about the U.S. educational system or may be surprised to learn how things have changed in recent years. This edition of A Public Education Primer updates and ex- pands on the version originally published by the Center on Education Policy in 2006. Like the first publication, this revised edition pulls together recent data about students, teachers, school districts, schools, and other aspects of elementary and secondary education in the U.S. Included are facts and figures on the distribution of students, student demographics, educational entities and their responsibilities, funding, student achieve- ment, teachers, and other school services. As much as possible, the data compiled here come from the federal government—primarily the National Center for Educa- tion Statistics (NCES), the data-gathering arm of the U.S. Department of Education. Where NCES data are not available, we’ve carefully chosen data from other reliable sources. This primer is meant to give an overall snapshot of elementary and secondary education in the nation’s public schools. In general, we’ve used data for the most recent year available. In many cases, these recent data are compared with data from ten years earlier or with future projections to show how things have changed or are expected to change. A few indicators, such as those relating to student achievement, show trends going back two or more decades to provide a historical perspective. The data in this report represent national averages. The experiences, trends, and issues in your local community may vary somewhat from the broad picture presented here. We hope this primer will provide you with suf- ficient background information about public education o encourage your interest in education issues and your involvement in your local schools. Since the 1990s, most racial/ethnic groups have made gains on NAEP in reading and math at grades 4 and 8, but not in grade 12 reading. Moreover, progress in narrowing achievement gaps has been inconsistent. At grades 4 and 8, average scores on the main NAEP have gone up for African American, Latino, and white students since 1992 in reading and since 1990 in math. Diversity and Equity Today Chapter 12 391 Much of this improvement occurred before 2005. Asian American students have also made gains in both sub- jects since the 1990s, except in grade 8 reading. Native American students have not made significant progress in either subject compared with 1994. In grade 12 reading, the average 2011 scores for all major racial/ethnic groups did not differ significantly from their 1992 scores. In grade 12 math, average scores for all groups increased from 2005 to 2009.