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&2015 　京ICP备号-6　京公网安备30　Race and the Schooling of Black Americans - 92.04
As originally published in The Atlantic
April 1992
Race and the Schooling of Black Americans
More than half of black college students fail to complete their degree
work -- for reasons that have little to do with innate ability or
environmental conditioning. The problem, a social psychologist argues, is
that they are undervalued, in ways that are sometimes subtle and sometimes
by Claude M. Steele
MY former university offered minority students a faculty mentor to help
shepherd them into college life. As soon as I learned of the program, I
volunteered to be a mentor, but by then the school year was nearly over.
Undaunted, the program's eager staff matched me with a student on their
waiting list -- an appealing nineteen-year-old black woman from Detroit, the
same age as my daughter. We met finally in a campus lunch spot just about
two weeks before the close of her freshman year. I realized quickly that I
was too late. I have heard that the best way to diagnose someone's
depression is to note how depressed you feel when you leave the person.
When our lunch was over, I felt as gray as the snowbanks that often lined
the path back to my office. My lunchtime companion was a statistic brought
to life, a living example of one of the most disturbing facts of racial
life in America today: the failure of so many black Americans to thrive in
school. Before I could lift a hand to help this student, she had decided
to do what 70 percent of all black Americans at four-year colleges do at
some point in their academic careers -- drop out.
I sense a certain caving-in of hope in America that problems of race can
be solved. Since the sixties, when race relations held promise for the
dawning of a new era, the issue has become one whose persistence causes
"problem fatigue" -- resignation to an unwanted condition of life.
This fatigue, I suspect, deadens us to the deepening crisis in the
education of black Americans. One can enter any desegregated school in
America, from grammar school to high school to graduate or professional
school, and meet a persistent reality: blacks and whites in largely
separate worlds. And if one asks a few questions or looks at a few
records, another reality emerges: these worlds are not equal, either in
the education taking place there or in the achievement of the students who
occupy them.
As a social scientist, I know that the crisis has enough possible causes
to give anyone problem fatigue. But at a personal level, perhaps because
of my experience as a black in American schools, or perhaps just as the
hunch of a myopic psychologist, I have long suspected a particular
culprit -- a culprit that can undermine black achievement as effectively as
a lock on a schoolhouse door. The culprit I see is stigma, the endemic
devaluation many blacks face in our society and schools. This status is
its own condition of life, different from class, money, culture. It is
capable, in the words of the late sociologist Erving Goffman, of "breaking
the claim" that one's human attributes have on people. I believe that its
connection to school achievement among black Americans has been vastly
underappreciated.
This is a troublesome argument, touching as it does on a still unhealed
part of American race relations. But it leads us to a heartening
principle: if blacks are made less racially vulnerable in school, they can
overcome even substantial obstacles. Before the good news, though, I must
at least sketch in the bad: the worsening crisis in the education of black
Americans.
Despite their socioeconomic disadvantages as a group, blacks begin school
with test scores that are fairly close to the test scores of whites their
age. The longer they stay in school, however, the m
for example, by the sixth grade blacks in many school districts are two
full grade levels behind whites in achievement. This pattern holds true in
the middle class nearly as much as in the lower class. The record does not
improve in high school. In 1980, for example, 25,500 minority students,
largely black and Hispanic, entered high school in Chicago. Four years
later only 9,500 graduated, and of those only 2,000 could read at grade
level. The situation in other cities is comparable.
Even for blacks who make it to college, the problem doesn't go away. As I
noted, 70 percent of all black students who enroll in four-year colleges
drop out at some point, as compared with 45 percent of whites. At any
given time nearly as many black males are incarcerated as are in college
in this country. And the grades of black college students average half a
letter below those of their white classmates. At one prestigious
university I recently studied, only 18 percent of the graduating black
students had grade averages of B or above, as compared with 64 percent of
the whites. This pattern is the rule, not the exception, in even the most
elite American colleges. Tragically, low grades can render a degree
essentially "terminal" in the sense that they preclude further schooling.
Blacks in graduate and professional schools face a similarly worsening or
stagnating fate. For example, from 1977 to 1990, though the number of
Ph.D.s awarded to other minorities increased and the number awarded to
whites stayed roughly the same, the number awarded to American blacks
dropped from 1,116 to 828. And blacks needed more time to get those
Standing ready is a familiar set of explanations. First is societal
disadvantage. Black Americans have had, and continue to have, more than
their share: a history of slavery, segregation,
continued lack of
and the related
problems of broken families, drug-infested communities, and social
isolation. Any of these factors -- alone, in combination, or through
accumulated effects -- can undermine school achievement. Some analysts point
also to black American culture, suggesting that, hampered by disadvantage,
it doesn't sustain the values and expectations critical to education, or
that it fosters learning orientations ill suited to school achievement, or
that it even "opposes" mainstream achievement. These are the chestnuts,
and I had always thought them adequate. Then several facts emerged that
just didn't seem to fit.
For one thing, the achievement deficits occur even when black students
suffer no major financial disadvantage -- among middle-class students on
wealthy college campuses and in graduate school among black students
receiving substantial financial aid. For another thing, survey after
survey shows that even poor black Americans value education highly, often
more than whites. Also, as I will demonstrate, several programs have
improved black school achievement without addressing culturally specific
learning orientations or doing anything to remedy socioeconomic
disadvantage.
Neither is the problem fully explained, as one might assume, by deficits
in skill or preparation which blacks might suffer because of background
disadvantages. I first doubted that such a connection existed when I saw
flunk-out rates for black and white students at a large, prestigious
university. Two observations surprised me. First, for both blacks and
whites the level of preparation, as measured by Scholastic Aptitude Test
scores, didn't make much differenc low scorers (with
combined verbal and quantitative SATs of 800) were no more likely to flunk
out than high scorers (with combined SATs of 1,200 to 1,500). The second
observation was racial: whereas only two percent to 11 percent of the
whites flunked out, 18 percent to 33 percent of the blacks flunked out,
even at the highest levels of preparation (combined SATs of 1,400). Dinesh
D'Souza has argued recently that college affirmative-action programs cause
failure and high dropout rates among black students by recruiting them to
levels of college work for which they are inadequately prepared. That was
clearly not the black students flunked out in large
numbers even with preparation well above average.
And, sadly, this proved the rule, not the exception. From elementary
school to graduate school, something depresses black achievement at every
level of preparation, even the highest. Generally, of course, the better
prepared achieve better than the less prepared, and this is about as true
for blacks as for whites. But given any level of school preparation (as
measured by tests and earlier grades), blacks somehow achieve less in
subsequent schooling than whites (that is, have poorer grades, have lower
graduation rates, and take longer to graduate), no matter how strong that
preparation is. Put differently, the same achievement level requires
better preparation for blacks than for whites -- far better: among students
with a C+ average at the university I just described, the mean American
College Testing Program (ACT) score for blacks was at the 98th percentile,
while for whites it was at only the 34th percentile. This pattern has been
documented so broadly across so many regions of the country, and by so
many investigations (literally hundreds), that it is virtually a social
law in this society -- as well as a racial tragedy.
C something is missing from our understanding of black
underachievement. Disadvantage contributes, yet blacks underachieve even
when they have ample resources, strongly value education, and are prepared
better than adequately in terms of knowledge and skills. Something else
has to be involved. That something else could be of just modest
importance -- a barrier that simply adds its effect to that of other
disadvantages -- or it could be pivotal, such that were it corrected, other
disadvantages would lose their effect.
That something else, I believe, has to do with the process of identifying
with school. I offer a personal example:
I remember conducting experiments with my research adviser early in
graduate school and awaiting the results with only modest interest. I
struggled to meet deadlines. The research enterprise -- the core of what one
does as a social psychologist -- just wasn't ME yet. I was in school for
other reasons -- I wanted an advanced degree, I was vaguely ambitious for
intellectual work, and being in graduate school made my parents proud of
me. But as time passed, I began to like the work. I also began to grasp
the value system that gave it meaning, and the faculty treated me as if
they thought I might even be able to do it. Gradually I began to think of
myself as a social psychologist. With this change in self-concept came a
my self-esteem was affected now by what I did as a
social psychologist, something that hadn't been true before. This added a
new m self-respect, not just parental respect, was on
the line. I noticed changes in myself. I worked without deadlines. I bored
friends with applications of arcane theory to their daily lives. I went to
conventions. I lived and died over how experiments came out.
Before this transition one might have said that I was handicapped by my
black working-class background and lack of motivation. After the
transition the same observer might say that even though my background was
working-class, I had special advantages: achievement-oriented parents, a
small and attentive college. But these facts alone would miss the
importance of the identification process I had experienced: the change in
self-definition and in the activities on which I based my self-esteem.
They would also miss a simple condition necessary for me to make this
identification: treatment as a valued person with good prospects.
I believe that the "something else" at the root of black achievement
problems is the failure of American schooling to meet this simple
condition for many of its black students. Doing well in school requires a
belief that school achievement can be a promising basis of self-esteem,
and that belief needs constant reaffirmation even for advantaged students.
Tragically, I believe, the lives of black Americans are still haunted by a
specter that threatens this belief and the identification that derives
from it at every level of schooling.
The Specter of Stigma and Racial Vulnerability
I HAVE a good friend, the mother of three, who spends considerable time in
the public school classrooms of Seattle, where she lives. In her son's
third-grade room, managed by a teacher of unimpeachable good will and
competence, she noticed over many visits that the extraordinary art work
of a small black boy named Jerome was ignored -- or, more accurately
perhaps, its significance was ignored. As genuine art talent has a way of
doing -- even in the third grade -- his stood out. Yet the teacher seemed
hardly to notice. Moreover, Jerome's reputation, as it was passed along
from one grade to the
next, included only the slightest mention of his talent. Now, of course,
being ignored like this could happen to anyone -- such is the overload in
our public schools. But my friend couldn't help wondering how the school
would have responded to this talent had the artist been one of
her own, middle-class white children.
Terms like "prejudice" and "racism" often miss the full scope of racial
devaluation in our society, implying as they do that racial devaluation
comes primarily from the strongly prejudiced, not from "good people" like
Jerome's teacher. But the prevalence of racists -- deplorable though racism
is -- misses the full extent of Jerome's burden, perhaps even the most
profound part.
He faces a devaluation that grows out of our images of society and the way
those images catalogue people. The catalogue need never be taught. It is
implied by all we see around us: the kinds of people revered in
advertising (consider the unrelenting racial advocacy of Ralph Lauren ads)
and movies (black women are rarely seen as romantic partners, for
example); media discussions of whether a black can be P
invitation lists to junior high sch
literary and musical canons. These details create an image of society in
which black Americans simply do not fare well. When I was a kid, we
captured it with the saying "If you're white you're right, if you're
yellow you're mellow, if you're brown stick around, but if you're black
get back."
In ways that require no fueling from strong prejudice or stereotypes,
these images expand the devaluation of black Americans. They act as mental
standards against which information about blacks is evaluated: that which
fits th that which contradicts them we suspect. Had
Jerome had a reading problem, which fits these images, it might have been
accepted as characteristic more readily than his extraordinary art work,
which contradicts them.
These images do something else as well, something especially pernicious in
the classroom. They set up a jeopardy of double devaluation for blacks, a
jeopardy that does not apply to whites. Like anyone, blacks risk
devaluation for a particular incompetence, such as a failed test or a
flubbed pronunciation. But they further risk that such performances will
confirm the broader, racial inferiority they are suspected of. Thus, from
the first grade through graduate school, blacks have the extra fear that
in the eyes of those around them their full humanity could fall with a
poor answer or a mistaken stroke of the pen.
Moreover, because these images are conditioned in all of us, collectively
held, they can spawn racial devaluation in all of us, not just in the
strongly prejudiced. They can do this even in blacks themselves: a
majority of black children recently tested said they like and prefer to
play with white rather than black dolls -- almost fifty years after Kenneth
and Mamie Clark, conducting similar experiments, documented identical
findings and so paved the way for Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. Thus
Jerome's devaluation can come from a circle of people in his world far
greater than the expressly prejudiced -- a circle that apparently includes
his teacher.
In ways often too subtle to be conscious but sometimes overt, I believe,
blacks remain devalued in American schools, where, for example, a recent
national survey shows that through high school they are still more than
twice as likely as white children to receive corporal punishment, be
suspended from school, or be labeled mentally retarded.
Tragically, such devaluation can seem inescapable. Sooner or later it
forces on its victims two painful realizations. The first is that society
is preconditioned to see the worst in them. Black students quickly learn
that acceptance, if it is to be won at all, will be hard-won. The second
is that even if a black student achieves exoneration in one setting -- with
the teacher and fellow students in one classroom, or at one level of
schooling, for example -- this approval will have to be rewon in the next
classroom, at the next level of schooling. Of course, individual
characteristics that enhance one's value in society -- skills, class status,
appearance, and success -- can diminish the racial devaluation one faces.
And sometimes the effort to prove oneself fuels achievement. But few from
any group could hope to sustain so daunting and everlasting a struggle.
Thus, I am afraid, too many black students are left hopeless and deeply
vulnerable in America's classrooms.
"Disidentifying" With School
I BELIEVE that in significant part the crisis in black Americans'
education stems from the power of this vulnerability to undercut
identification with schooling, either before it happens or after it has
Jerome is an example of the first kind. At precisely the time when he
would need to see school as a viable source of self-esteem, his teachers
fail to appreciate his best work. The devalued status of his race devalues
him and his work in the classroom. Unable to entrust his sense of himself
to this place, he resists measuring himself against its values and goals.
He languishes there, held by the law, perhaps even by his parents, but not
allowing achievement to affect his view of himself. This psychic
alienation -- the act of not caring -- makes him less vulnerable to the
specter of devaluation that haunts him. Bruce Hare, an educational
researcher, has documented this process among fifth-grade boys in several
schools in Champaign, Illinois. He found that although the black boys had
considerably lower achievement-test scores than their white classmates,
their overall self-esteem was just as high. This stunning imperviousness
to poor academic performance was accomplished, he found, by their
de-emphasizing school achievement as a basis of self-esteem and giving
preference to peer-group relations -- a domain in which their esteem
prospects were better. They went where they had to go to feel good about
themselves.
But recall the young student whose mentor I was. She had already
identified with school, and wanted to be a doctor. How can racial
vulnerability break so developed an achievement identity? To see, let us
follow her steps onto campus: Her recruitment and admission stress her
minority status perhaps more strongly than it has been stressed at any
other time in her life. She is offered academic and social support
services, further implying that she is "at risk" (even though, contrary to
common belief, the vast majority of black college students are admitted
with qualifications well above the threshold for whites). Once on campus,
she enters a socially circumscribed world in which blacks -- still largely
separate from whites -- this is reinforced by a
sidelining of minority material and interests in the curriculum and in
university life. And she can sense that everywhere in this new world her
skin color places her under suspicion of intellectual inferiority. All of
this gives her the double vulnerability I spoke of: she risks confirming a
particular incompetence, at chemistry or a foreign language,
but she also risks confirming the racial inferiority she is suspected
of -- a judgment that can feel as close at hand as a mispronounced word or
an ungrammatical sentence. In reaction, usually to some modest setbacks
she withdraws, hiding her troubles from instructors, counselors, even
other students. Quickly, I believe, a psychic defense takes over. She
disidentif she changes her self-conception, her
outlook and values, so that achievement is no longer so important to her
self-esteem. She may continue to feel pressure to stay in school -- from her
parents, even from the potential advantages of a college degree. But now
she is psychologically insulated from her academic life, like a
disinterested visitor. Cool, unperturbed. But, like a painkilling drug,
disidentification undoes her future as it relieves her vulnerability.
The prevalence of this syndrome among black college students has been
documented extensively, especially on predominantly white campuses.
Summarizing this work, Jacqueline Fleming, a psychologist, writes, "The
fact that black students must matriculate in an atmosphere that feels
hostile arouses defensive reactions that interfere with intellectual
performance....They display academic demotivation and think less of their
abilities. They profess losses of energy." Among a sample of blacks on one
predominantly white campus, Richard Nisbett and Andrew Reaves, both
psychologists, and I found that attitudes related to disidentification
were more strongly predictive of grades than even academic preparation
(that is, SATs and high school grades).
To make matters worse, once disidentification occurs in a school, it can
spread like the common cold. Blacks who identify and try to achieve
embarrass the strategy by valuing the very thing the strategy denies the
value of. Thus pressure to make it a group norm can evolve quickly and
become fierce. Defectors are called "oreos" or "incognegroes." One's
identity as an authentic black is held hostage, made incompatible with
school identification. For black students, then, pressure to disidentify
with school can come from the already demoralized as well as from racial
vulnerability in the setting.
Stigmatization of the sort suffered by black Americans is probably also a
barrier to the school achievement of other groups in our society, such as
lower-class whites, Hispanics, and women in male-dominated fields. For
example, at a large midwestern university I studied, women match men's
achievement in the liberal arts, where they suffer no marked stigma, but
underachieve compared with men (get lower grades than men with the same
ACT scores) in engineering and premedical programs, where they, like
blacks across the board, are more vulnerable to suspicions of inferiority.
"Wise" Schooling
"WHEN they approach me they see...everything and anything except
me....[this] invisibility...occurs because of a peculiar disposition of
the eyes...."
-- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Erving Goffman, borrowing from Gays of the 1950s, used the term "wise" to
describe people who don't themselves bear the stigma of a given group but
who are accepted by the group. These are people in whose eyes the full
humanity of the stigmatized is visible, people in whose eyes they feel
less vulnerable. If racial vulnerability undermines black school
achievement, as I have argued, then this achievement should improve
significantly if schooling is made "wise" -- that is, made to see value and
promise in black students and to act accordingly.
And yet, although racial vulnerability at school may undermine black
achievement, so many other factors seem to contribute -- from the
debilitations of poverty to the alleged dysfunctions of black American
culture -- that one might expect "wiseness" in the classroom to be of little
help. Fortunately, we have considerable evidence to the contrary. Wise
schooling may indeed be the missing key to the schoolhouse door.
In the mid-seventies black students in Philip Uri Treisman's early
calculus courses at the University of California at Berkeley consistently
fell to the bottom of every class. To help, Treisman developed the
Mathematics Workshop Program, which, in a surprisingly short time,
reversed their fortunes, causing them to outperform their white and Asian
counterparts. And although it is only a freshman program, black students
who take it graduate at a rate comparable to the Berkeley average. Its
central technique is group study of calculus concepts. But it is also
it does things that allay the racial vulnerabilities of these
students. Stressing their potential to learn, it recruits them to a
challenging "honors" workshop tied to their first calculus course.
Building on their skills, the workshop gives difficult work, often beyond
course content, to students with even modest preparation (some of their
math SATs dip to the 300s). Working together, students soon understand
that everyone knows something and nobody knows everything, and learning is
speeded through shared understanding. The wisdom of these tactics is their
subtext message: "You are valued in this program because of your academic
potential -- regardless of your current skill level. You have no more to
fear than the next person, and since the work is difficult, success is a
credit to your ability, and a setback is a reflection only of the
challenge." The black students' double vulnerability around failure -- the
fear that they lack ability, and the dread that they will be devalued -- is
thus reduced. They can relax and achieve. The movie Stand and Deliver
depicts Jaime Escalante using the same techniques of assurance and
challenge to inspire advanced calculus performance in East Los Angeles
Chicano high schoolers. And, explaining Xavier University's extraordinary
success in producing black medical students, a spokesman said recently,
"What doesn't work is saying, 'You need remedial work.' What does work is
saying, 'You may be somewhat behind at this time but you're a talented
person. We're going to help you advance at an accelerated rate.'"
The work of James Comer, a child psychiatrist at Yale, suggests that
wiseness can minimize even the barriers of poverty. Over a fifteen-year
period he transformed the two worst elementary schools in New Haven,
Connecticut, into the third and fifth best in the city's
thirty-three-school system without any change in the type of
students -- largely poor and black. His guiding belief is that learning
requires a strongly accepting relationship between teacher and student.
"After all," he notes, "what is the difference between scribble and a
letter of the alphabet to a child? The only reason the letter is
meaningful, and worth learning and remembering, is because a MEANINGFUL
other wants him or her to learn and remember it." To build these
relationships Comer focuses on the overall school climate, shaping it not
so much to transmit specific skills, or to achieve order per se, or even
to improve achievement, as to establish a valuing and optimistic
atmosphere in which a child can -- to use his term -- "identify" with
learning. Responsibility for this lies with a team of ten to fifteen
members, headed by the principal and made up of teachers, parents, school
staff, and child-development experts (for example, psychologists or
special-education teachers). The team develops a plan of specifics:
teacher training, parent workshops, coordination of information about
students. But at base I believe it tries to ensure that the
students -- vulnerable on so many counts -- get treated essentially like
middle-class students, with conviction about their value and promise. As
this happens, their vulnerability diminishes, and with it the companion
defenses of disidentification and misconduct. They achieve, and apparently
identify, as their achievement gains persist into high school. Comer's
genius, I believe, is to have recognized the importance of these
vulnerabilities as barriers to INTELLECTUAL development, and the corollary
that schools hoping to educate such students must learn first how to make
them feel valued.
These are not isolated successes. Comparable results were observed, for
example, in a Comer-type program in Maryland's Prince Georges County, in
the Stanford economist Henry Levin's accelerated-schools program, and in
Harlem's Central Park East Elementary School, under the principalship of
Deborah Meier. And research involving hundreds of programs and schools
points to the same conclusion: black achievement is consistently linked to
conditions of schooling that reduce racial vulnerability. These include
relatively harmonious race rela a commitment by
teachers and schools to seeing minority-g the
instructional goal that students at all levels of
desegregation at the classroom as well and a
de-emphasis on ability tracking.
That erasing stigma improves black achievement is perhaps the strongest
evidence that stigma is what depresses it in the first place. This is no
happy realization. But it lets in a ray of hope: whatever other factors
also depress black achievement -- poverty, social isolation, poor
preparation -- they may be substantially overcome in a schooling atmosphere
that reduces racial and other vulnerabilities, not through unrelenting
niceness or ferocious regimentation but by wiseness, by seeing value and
acting on it.
What Makes Schooling Unwise
BUT is wise schooling is so attainable, why is racial vulnerability the
rule, not the exception, in American schooling?
One factor is the basic assimilationist offer that schools make to blacks:
You can be valued and rewarded in school (and society), the schools say to
these students, but you must first master the culture and ways of the
American mainstream, and since that mainstream (as it is represented) is
essentially white, this means you must give up many particulars of being
black -- styles of speech and appearance, value priorities, preferences -- at
least in mainstream settings. This is asking a lot. But it has been the
"color-blind" offer to every immigrant and minority group in our nation's
history, the core of the melting-pot ideal, and so I think it strikes most
of us as fair. Yet non-immigrant minorities like blacks and Native
Americans have always been here, and thus are entitled, more than new
immigrants, to participate in the defining images of the society projected
in school. More important, their exclusion from these images denies their
contributive history and presence in society. Thus, whereas immigrants can
tilt toward assimilation in pursuit of the opportunities for which they
came, American blacks may find it harder to assimilate. For them, the
offer of acceptance in return for assimilation carries a primal insult: it
asks them to join in something that has made them invisible.
Now, I must be clear. This is not a criticism of Western civilization. My
concern is an omission of image-work. In his incisive essay "What America
Would Be Like Without Blacks," Ralph Ellison showed black influence on
American speech and language, the themes of our finest literature, and our
most defining ideals of personal freedom and democracy. In The World They
Made Together, Mechal Sobel described how African and European influences
shaped the early American South in everything from housing design and land
use to religious expression. The fact is that blacks are not outside the
American mainstream but, in Ellison's words, have always been "one of its
major tributaries." Yet if one relied on what is taught in America's
schools, one would never know this. There blacks have fallen victim to a
collective self-deception, a society's allowing itself to assimilate like
mad from its constituent groups while representing itself to itself as if
the assimilation had never happened, as if progress and good were almost
exclusively Western and white. A prime influence of American society on
world culture is the music of black Americans, shaping art forms from
rock-and-roll to modern dance. Yet in American schools, from kindergarten
through graduate school, these essentially black influences have barely
peripheral status, are largely outside the canon. Thus it is not what is
taught but what is not taught, what teachers and professors have never
learned the value of, that reinforces a fundamental unwiseness in American
schooling, and keeps black disidentification on full boil.
Deep in the psyche of American educators is a presumption that black
students need academic remediation, or extra time with elemental curricula
to overcome background deficits. This orientation guides many efforts to
close the achievement gap -- from grammar school tutoring to college
academic-support programs -- but I fear it can be unwise. Bruno Bettelheim
and Karen Zelan's article "Why Children Don't Like to Read" comes to mind:
apparently to satisfy the changing sensibilities of local school boards
over this century, many books that children like were dropped from school
when children's reading scores also dropped, the approved
texts were repla and when reading scores dropped
again, these were replaced by even simpler books, until eventually the
children could hardly read at all, not because the material was too
difficult but because they were bored stiff. So it goes, I suspect, with a
great many of these remediation efforts. Moreover, because so many such
programs target blacks primarily, they virtually equate black identity
with substandard intellectual status, amplifying racial vulnerability.
They can even undermine students' ability to gain confidence from their
achievement, by sharing credit for their successes while implying that
their failures stem from inadequacies beyond the reach of remediation.
The psychologist Lisa Brown and I recently uncovered evidence of just how
damaging this orientation may be. At a large, prestigious university we
found that whereas the grades of black graduates of the 1950s improved
during the students' college years until they virtually matched the school
average, those of blacks who graduated in the 1980s (we chose only those
with above-average entry credentials, to correct for more-liberal
admissions policies in that decade) worsened, ending up considerably below
the school average. The 1950s graduates faced outward discrimination in
everything from housing to the classroom, whereas the 1980s graduates were
supported by a phalanx of help programs. Many things may contribute to
this pattern. The Jackie Robinson, "pioneer" spirit of the 1950s blacks
surely helped them endure. And in a pre-affirmative-action era, they may
have been seen as intellectually more deserving. But one cannot ignore the
distinctive fate of 1980s blacks: a remedial orientation put their
abilities under suspicion, deflected their ambitions, distanced them from
their successes, and painted them with their failures. Black students on
today's campuses may experience far less overt prejudice than their 1950s
counterparts but, ironically, may be more racially vulnerable.
The Elements of Wiseness
FOR too many black students school is simply the place where, more
concertedly, persistently, and authoritatively than anywhere else in
society, they learn how little valued they are.
Clearly, no simple recipe can fix this, but I believe we now understand
the basics of a corrective approach. Schooling must focus more on reducing
the vulnerabilities that block identification with achievement. I believe
that four conditions, like the legs of a stool, are fundamental.
* If what is meaningful and important to a teacher is to become meaningful
and important to a student, the student must feel valued by the teacher
for his or her potential and as a person. Among the more fortunate in
society, this relationship is often taken for granted. But it is precisely
the relationship that race can still undermine in American society. As
Comer, Escalante, and Treisman have shown, when one's students bear race
and class vulnerabilities, building this relationship is the first order
of business -- at all levels of schooling. No tactic of instruction, no
matter how ingenious, can succeed without it.
* The challenge and the promise of personal fulfillment, not remediation
(under whatever guise), should guide the education of these students.
Their present skills should be taken into account, and they should be
moved along at a pace that is demanding but doesn't defeat them. Their
ambitions should never be scaled down but should instead be guided to
inspiring goals even when extraordinary dedication is called for.
Frustration will be less crippling than alienation. Here psychology is
everything: remediation defeats, challenge strengthens -- affirming their
potential, crediting them with their achievements, inspiring them.
But the first condition, I believe, cannot work without the second, and
vice versa. A valuing teacher-student relationship goes nowhere without
challenge, and challenge will always be resisted outside a valuing
relationship. (Again, I must be careful about something: in criticizing
remediation I am not opposing affirmative-action recruitment in the
schools. The success of this policy, like that of school integration
before it, depends, I believe, on the tactics of implementation. Where
students are valued and challenged, they generally succeed.)
* Racial integration is a generally useful element in this design, if not
a necessity. Segregation, whatever its purpose, draws out group
differences and makes people feel more vulnerable when they inevitably
cross group lines to compete in the larger society. This vulnerability, I
fear, can override confidence gained in segregated schooling unless that
confidence is based on strongly competitive skills and
knowledge -- something that segregated schooling, plagued by shortages of
resources and access, has difficulty producing.
* The particulars of black life and culture -- art, literature, political
and social perspective, music -- must be presented in the mainstream
curriculum of American schooling, not consigned to special days, weeks, or
even months of the year, or to special-topic courses and programs aimed
essentially at blacks. Such channeling carries the disturbing message that
the material is not of general value. And this does two terrible things:
it wastes the power of this material to alter our images of the American
mainstream -- continuing to frustrate black identification with it -- and it
excuses in whites and others a huge ignorance of their own society. The
true test of democracy, Ralph Ellison has said, "is...the inclusion -- not
assimilation -- of the black man."
Finally, if I might be allowed a word specifically to black parents, one
issue is even more immediate: our children may drop out of school before
the first committee meets to accelerate the curriculum. Thus, although we,
along with all Americans, must strive constantly for wise schooling, I
believe we cannot wait for it. We cannot yet forget our essentially heroic
challenge: to foster in our children a sense of hope and entitlement to
mainstream American life and schooling, even when it devalues them.
Copyright & 1992 by Claude M. Steele.
All rights
reserved. The Atlantic M April 1992; Race and the Schooling of
Black A Volume 269, No. 4; pages 67-78.