Education and race: the performance of minority students in affluent areas refutes the prevailing educational shibboleths

National Review, Sept 15, 1997 by Arthur Hu

Desegregation is at a crossroads. As many analysts are declaring the integration experiment a failure, Harvard's desegregation guru, Gary Orfield, keeps telling us that minority education could be fixed if only we desegregated more. Educators and the media routinely slam city schools for poor minority performance while holding up affluent suburban districts as models because of their better test scores. Yet, if Orfield is right that segregated districts don't produce equal outcomes, no one has answered the more important question, which is whether "integrated" districts produce equal outcomes.

Oddly, while the courts have used inequality as the justification for busing, Orfield himself notes in his 1991 book The Closing Door that there isn't much direct evidence that busing creates more equality. Almost as a footnote, he concedes that you would have to examine data broken down by race within mixed districts to prove that busing actually resulted in better performance for minorities.

After some cursory research -- a few phone calls to local school districts, a ride on the Internet -- I tracked down reports that do chart test scores and grades against race, not only in the worst but also in the best districts. The reason that people like Gary Orfield don't have the numbers is that it's safer to uphold the myth that minorities will perform as well as their white peers in good suburban schools than to expose the reality that the racial gap exists even in the best suburbs.

Test scores and grades for blacks in integrated urban neighborhoods aren't any better than those in predominantly minority ghetto areas. Some affluent suburbs did no better than nearby urban areas, and even at the best suburban schools blacks on average lagged behind their white classmates. But a bigger secret is that even the poorest Asians tended to get better grades -- if not test scores -- than more affluent whites. Asians from poorer suburbs consistently outscored Euro-Americans in nearby more affluent suburbs. For all the talk about the superiority of schools in Japan or Korea, Asian-Americans are also nearly two years ahead in math, just as far ahead of their classmates as students in their ancestral lands are, even when they go to the same schools that fail other American minorities.

In short, predominantly minority schools have low test scores because minorities have lower test scores regardless of the segregation factor, not the other way around. And American schools would match Asian schools if they were dominated by Asian students. Perhaps that chilling reality is the reason that every newspaper I have contacted has chosen to ignore these data.

California's 1994 CLAS (California Learning Assessment System) test introduced massive multiculturalism and had several questions for which more than one answer was counted as correct. Yet nobody noticed that elementary-school blacks and Hispanics did just as poorly in predominantly minority areas of Oakland, East Palo Alto, and Alum Rock as in legally integrated San Francisco. At Grade 10, only 10 to 15 per cent of black students got 3 or better in math whether they went to integrated San Francisco, the segregated communities of Contra Costa County, Oakland, or Silicon Valley's Santa Clara County. Asians continue to stampede into Cupertino, home of the founders of Apple Computers, because of its excellent schools. But US News (April 21, 1997) highlighted the poor performance of blacks there, and they lagged the state average on the CLAS.

Meanwhile, the Asians of the Chinatown ghettos in San Francisco scored as well as children of affluent engineers in Santa Clara County. Asians in Santa Clara County scored as well as whites in posh San Ramon Valley or Cupertino. Asians in Cupertino scored as well as whites in Palo Alto, the best district in the Bay Area. Blacks in San Ramon Valley scored no better than state average for all races, while Asians there outscored every other race and community.

The Seattle Times annually slams Seattle's math scores (just the 50th-percentile for Washington as a whole) compared to suburban Bellevue's 67th-percentile performance, and highlights the race gap as an urban problem. But broken down by race, whites score at about 67 in either city, but blacks score worse in Bellevue, at 34 compared to 40 for Seattle. Seattle has an "African-American Academy," but its test scores are virtually indistinguishable from the city average. Suburban inequality is much the same at nearby Issaquah (41) and Redmond (35), even though there are no minority ghettos in the suburbs, and there has never been any news coverage of racial differences in performance there.

Seattle is one of the few cities where Asians are so poor and white parents so highly educated that white students score better even in math. But Asians still have the highest grade-point average in the city. In the suburbs, Asian 8th-graders score 74 in 59th-percentile blue-collar Renton, hopping rungs over whites in 67th-percentile Bellevue. Asians in Bellevue score 82, equal to top-ranked Mercer Island's 83. Asians in Mercer Island score an astounding 90, not far below the average at the best Lakeside private school.