November/December 2006
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How lifestyle factors
and classroom culture affect black-white differences
An Interview with Ronald Ferguson
For more than a decade, economist Ronald
Ferguson has studied achievement gaps. In 2002, he created the
Tripod
Project for School Improvement, a professional development initiative
that uses student and teacher surveys to measure classroom conditions
and student engagement by race and gender. The findings inform strategies
to raise achievement and narrow achievement gaps. A senior research
associate at Harvard’s Kennedy
School of Government, Ferguson is director and faculty cochair
of the Achievement Gap
Initiative at Harvard University. He spoke with the Harvard
Education Letter about the most recent findings from the Tripod
Project surveys.
How do you define “achievement gap”?
There are a lot of different achievement gaps.
The achievement gap that I focus the most on is the gap between
students of different racial groups whose parents have roughly the
same amount of education. It concerns me that black kids whose parents
have college degrees on average have much lower test scores than
white kids whose parents have college degrees, for example. You
can take just about any level of parental education and we have
these big gaps.
How much progress has been made in closing
black-white achievement gaps?
Huge progress since 1970, not much progress since
1990. Sixty-two percent of the overall black-white reading-score
gap for 17-year-olds disappeared between 1971 and 1988. About one-third
of the math-score gap disappeared during the same period. Over the
last several years the gap has narrowed significantly for both 9-
and 13-year-olds, but there’s been a bit of backsliding for
the older teens.
There’s been enough progress to establish
firmly that these gaps are not written in stone. Even IQ gaps are
narrowing. Measurements of the intelligence of kids less than one
year old show virtually no racial or social-class differences, yet
racial and social class achievement gaps are firmly established
by the time students start kindergarten. Something happens before
kindergarten that produces differences in proficiency.
Achievement gaps are not facts of nature. They
are mostly because of differences in life experience. We’ve
got to figure out how to get all kids the kinds of experiences that
really maximize access to middle-class skills. That’s the
challenge.
Some say that social inequities must be
solved before we can close achievement gaps; others say it’s
the schools’ responsibility to close them. Where do you stand?
First of all, it’s not an either/or question.
If you are talking about having black achievement levels and white
achievement levels that are completely the same, then yeah, you
have to deal with quite a few challenges in the domain of wealth
and social capital, but that’s in the long run. In the near
term, I think we can make substantial progress by affecting home
intellectual climate and lifestyle as they affect achievement. The
big idea that frames my thinking these days is lifestyle. Even in
school, the notion is to try to provoke lifestyle changes that cause
people to be a bit more focused on cultivating a love of learning
among kids.
Isn’t talking about lifestyle factors
a way of blaming the victim?
Your motivation can be to explain why we have
achievement gaps or it can be to seek levers to pull in order to
reduce achievement gaps. I’m seeking levers to pull in order
to reduce the gaps. I don’t care whose fault it is really.
If it’s the case that reading scores could rise if parents
pushed their kids to do more leisure reading at home or took the
television out of the bedroom, why not do it? Or why not at least
tell parents that that’s an option that they have? I think
most parents would want to know.
Still, virtually every school can make progress
even if the family achieves zero change. They’ll do better
if parents do more, but no school, no institution, none of us is
as good as we can be. Pretty much every school has a way to improve.
I’ve been working in schools for almost a decade, paying a
lot of attention to teacher-student relationships and some of the
ways that teachers understand or misunderstand kids. There’s
a spiral of mutual causation that can lead classrooms to be either
terrible places or really nice places. A lot of it you can characterize
as lifestyle.
How does your research help schools change
their lifestyles to support achievement?
The project that I run is called the Tripod Project
because we address three pieces: content, pedagogy, and relationships.
And what vexes me most in the schools that I work with is that it’s
so hard to get people to spend time studying the work of the students
who don’t do very well. Because if our main concern is material
on which students don’t do well, then why don’t we look
at where the breakdown is and work on that? Just take the assignments
of the students who have done poorly, sit down together, and figure
out what it is that they didn’t know; why we think they didn’t
know it, and talk about how to alter instructional approaches to
help them.
We use a protocol called Teaching the Hard Stuff
to talk about whether success was feasible for the student, whether
the kids were focused or not, and why they may not have been focused.
People like the protocol, they enjoy using it and they almost always
get up from the table with new insights, but they don’t set
aside more time to do it more frequently.
What does Teaching the Hard Stuff involve
and what do teachers learn?
It’s an hour-long protocol for looking at
student work. Teachers discover all kinds of things. At least half
the time the problem is with the way the assignment was written:
The assignment wasn’t really testing what the teacher was
trying to test; or there was a vocabulary word that had two meanings;
or the context for the problem was a context the students weren’t
familiar with and so the student couldn’t solve the problem.
If the achievement gap is based on the nature of the experiences
that students have, and if schools don’t scaffold appropriately
on the understandings that kids bring from their different experiences,
then kids can’t construct the new understandings.
One of my favorite examples is a Pythagorean theorem
problem: How far does a catcher need to throw the ball in order
to throw out a runner who is trying to steal second base if the
bases are 90 feet apart? If kids don’t know there’s
a right angle at first base, they can’t solve that question.
Where schools may contribute to the achievement
gap is by not scaffolding appropriately for different kids, not
differentiating instruction in ways that are grounded in what kids
actually bring to the classroom. Teachers try to make work interesting
and relevant by using real-world examples. But which real-world
example will your kids understand? And if they don’t understand
it, will they admit it? In our surveys we find that black kids in
particular are concerned all the way through school with whether
people think they are smart or not. If you are concerned with whether
you think people think you’re smart, you are not going to
speak up and show your ignorance as often. So if what the teacher
just said doesn’t make sense to you—particularly if
you are in a racially integrated classroom and you think the other
kids are ahead of you—you are more likely to misbehave and
pretend like you weren’t trying anyway, because it’s
better to look lazy than stupid.
What other misperceptions does your research
point to?
There are sometimes misperceptions about how much
parents care. In our surveys, the higher the percentage of black
kids in the classroom, the lower the teacher’s estimate of
how many kids will say that their parents asked them what they learned
in school that day. When we ask kids the same question, we don’t
pick up racial differences.
Now you do pick up racial differences when you get at parenting
practices more directly: TVs in the bedroom, which our studies show
are associated with sleepiness in class; whether kids say they watch
TV at home more than anything else; how much leisure reading they
do; how many books are provided in the house. Eighty percent of
black kids in our surveys at the elementary level have TVs in their
bedroom. Much smaller percentages of white kids do.
Another misperception that folks often have is
that kids who misbehave don’t want to learn. Teachers see
that black kids misbehave on average more than white kids do. There’s
not much dispute about that—the kids self-report worse behavior.
Also, black kids have lower homework completion rates than white
kids do, which they also self-report. So what do you infer? You
say, well, they don’t care as much and they aren’t trying
too hard.
In my surveys, I find that even though black students
self-report more misbehavior and less homework completion, they
also self-report spending almost exactly the same amount of time
on homework as their white classmates. They also self-report equal
or higher endorsement of the statement “My friends think it’s
important to work hard to get high grades in school.” They
are motivated, but there’s some subtlety to it, because they
have conflicting motivations, conflicting pressures. Sometimes they’re
just trying to fit in with friends, to be liked inside a culture
of behavior that no one student created and no one student can single-handedly
reform. They are part of a peer culture where certain patterns of
behavior do have oppositional elements, but they are not opposition
to high achievement. Paradoxically, their assertiveness is a quest
for respect: It shows opposition to the kinds of subordination and
toleration of disrespect that blacks have had to put up with over
centuries. Kids are saying, “We’re not taking that.…
You can’t face me down in front of one of my friends and yell
at me or fuss at me and have me not say something back to you.”
This seems to challenge the “acting
white” hypothesis —that black kids are afraid to achieve
because high achievement is seen as acting white.
Based on the survey results that I get back from
students, I believe it’s a misperception that kids think getting
high grades is acting white. It’s really a matter of personal
style. Students who get high grades will often have personal styles
that seem to violate the endorsed expressions of racial authenticity:
they may speak proper English too much in informal settings; they
may listen to rock music instead of rap; they may be a little too
happy-go-lucky in their attitudes. In order to fit in with your
friends, you don’t have to be a low achiever or resist high
grades, but you do need to be able to speak in informal settings
the way kids speak in informal settings, you do have to be the kind
of kid who doesn’t tolerate disrespect without a response
even if it comes from an adult in an authority position. Among black
kids, self-esteem rises as grades rise all the way through an A,
except if it’s the kid who doesn’t fit in socially,
in which case—if it’s a male—self-esteem drops
as they move from a B to an A average. This is not true for white
kids.
How do these findings relate to your research
on teasing?
Some of the peer dynamics around achievement,
such as teasing each other for making mistakes, may not be visible
to teachers, but they are problems as early as first grade. In first
grade classes where fewer than 25 percent of the students are white
or Asian, I find that more than half agree that classmates tease
other kids for making mistakes. Teasing for making mistakes in majority
white and Asian classes is about 20 percentage points lower. Kids
who worry that other classmates tease kids for making mistakes report
that they worry more that they may not measure up to their classmates.
Worry is anxiety, and anxiety interferes with concentration.
What can teachers do to foster student
engagement and create a positive peer culture?
I have data at the elementary level that show
that if kids don’t think the teacher both loves to help them
and holds them to a high standard—what I call a “high
help/high perfectionism” classroom—their behavior can
deteriorate and their engagement can deteriorate, and the teachers
are more likely to think that the kids just don’t want to
learn. If the class is less than 25 percent white or Asian and the
students rate the teacher as offering both low help and low perfectionism,
kids can treat each other pretty poorly. All you need is about a
quarter of the kids in the class who don’t think their questions
are welcome to get a pretty uncollegial classroom environment. The
challenge to the teacher is being able to signal, “I love
to help you” and “We’re never fully satisfied
until we can do it correctly.” When working with kids who
come from difficult backgrounds, and who don’t bring a whole
lot for you to scaffold on some of the time, you’ve really
got to understand these kids. You’ve got to understand what
they don’t understand and what their misunderstandings are,
and you’ve got to have the confidence to say, “If these
children tell me what they are thinking, I can clear up any confusions
that they have, and at the end of the day they’re going to
understand what I am trying to teach them.”
Over 80 percent of kids in any classroom say they
plan to do their best all year long, if you ask them in the fall.
The only ones that are still near that level in the spring—if
the vast majority are nonwhite and non-Asian—are kids in high
help/high perfectionism classrooms. We need to give teachers the
learning experiences that help them reach and teach some of the
kids who they are struggling to understand if we want kids to persist
and do their best work all year.
For Further Information
J.B. Diamond. “Are We Barking Up the
Wrong Tree? Rethinking Oppositional Culture Explanations for the
Black/White Achievement Gap.” Available online at http://agi.harvard.edu/events/download.php?id=79
W.T. Dickens and J.R. Flynn. “Black
Americans Reduce the Racial IQ Gap: Evidence from Standardization
Samples.” Available online at http://agi.harvard.edu/events/download.php?id=66
R. Ferguson. What Doesn’t Meet
the Eye: Understanding and Addressing Racial Disparities in High-Achieving
Suburban Schools. Oakbrook, IL: North Central Regional Educational
Laboratory, 2002. Available online at http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/tripodproject/about.html#whatis
R.G. Fryer Jr. and S.D. Levitt. “Testing
for Racial Differences in the Mental Ability of Young Children.”
Available online at http://agi.harvard.edu/events/download.php?id=93
The Tripod Project. www.ksg.harvard.edu/tripodproject/
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