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9486 in the collection
The Therstroms' New Book: There's No Excuse for No Excuses
At a recent meeting, a friend came up to me with a book opened to certain pages. The book was No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning by Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom. The pages were 88 and 89 wherein, according to the Thernstroms, "Gerald W. Bracey argues that the Asian success story is entirely reducible to what he calls the 'mundane' facts of parental socioeconomic status" (p. 89).
Problem is, I had argued nothing of the sort. The Thernstroms citation on this piece is to an obscure note I penned in 1998 for an education consulting company initially formed by three disaffected IBM ex-employees called America Tomorrow. How the Thernstroms found it remains a mystery.
www.america-tomorrow.com/ati/gb80211.htm
Why they read it and nothing else is even more mysterious.
I began the piece with an anecdote from a Brooklyn principal who had joked to me that when he was a kid, everyone absolutely knew that there was a Jewish "smart gene." Now, he said, everyone in the same neighborhood absolutely knew there was an Asian "smart gene." I then cited, as evidence why one might believe this, an international study in which Asian American students outscored the top two nations, Taiwan and Korea.
So far, it looks like the Thernstroms are reporting accurately. But the second paragraph of my essay reads in its entirety as follows:
Now comes a report from Educational Testing Service that reveals some more mundane reasons [than a gene] for high Asian-American test scores: contrary to the stereotyped images, Asian families are not huddled in tiny apartments in various "Chinatown" slums. Asian students live in the suburbs with parents who are considerably more affluent and better educated than the nation as a whole. If we put them all into a single district, in terms of education and income, it would look a lot like Fairfax County, Grosse Pointe, or Cherry Creek.
The remaining seven paragraphs of my little essay described some salient statistics for various Asian groups. In fact, one conclusion to take from the essay is that one cannot speak of Asian students meaningfully because the various groups differ so much--the report provides separate statistics for Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Southeast Asian (Laotian, Vietnamese, Cambodian), and South Asian (Indian, Pakistani). At the time, Filipinos constituted the largest group in the country.
Indeed, that is the point of the ETS report by Heather Kim, Diversity Among Asian American High School Students. The Report, although not online, is still listed among the publications of ETS' Policy Information Center. Although I did not mention the report by name or author, it would have been easy enough for the Thernstroms to locate it either through ETS or me.
In fact, the America Tomorrow piece is a shortened version of something else readily accessible to the Thernstroms, my December, 1997 "Research" column in Phi Delta Kappan. So why did the Thernstroms start and stop with this essay that had been read by maybe five other people? And why did they attribute to me arguments I never made? The Thernstroms wish to argue that "culture matters" (p. 87). My essay only summarized a report dashing a common stereotype. In Kim's words:
The stereotype of Asian Americans is that of a highly successful minority who have made it in American society. Asian American students are portrayed as "whiz kids" the "best and the brightest", math and science majors, students who pass through our toughest universities with ease…Contrary to the stereotype, there are significant differences among Asian American seniors in terms of socioeconomic characteristics, parental expectations and involvement, educational values, academic achievement, and college aspirations.
The Thernstroms' chapter is titled "Asians." Perhaps for them to have acknowledged the variability described by Kim would undercut their generalizations.
Or maybe it's a combination of the Thernstroms' habitual subordination of fact to ideology with a bit of payback. Among the Rotten Apple Awards distributed in "The Ninth Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education," (Phi Delta Kappan, October, 1999) was the "We Don't Have to Check for Accuracy Because We All Know It's True Award" to…Stephan Thernstrom.
Professor Thernstrom earned his prize with an introduction to the fall, 1998 issue of The Concord Review. He first invoked the old we're-spending-more-and-more-money-but-test-scores-aren't-rising cliché, then offered this:
The performance of our very best students has been particularly depressing. In every subject, the scores required to make it into the top decile and the top 5 percent and lower than they were in the 1970's.
I wondered about the wisdom of putting these words in The Concord Review, which, after all consists of history essays written by some of those very best high school students. When I asked Thernstrom where he obtained his figures he referred me to NAEP 1996 Trends in Academic Progress.
That volume revealed that the Winthrop Professor of History at Harvard University had got it wrong. Science scores for the 90th and 95th percentile had risen about 5 points. Reading and math scores were mostly "lower" but how could anyone read a trend into the differences?
READING MATH SCIENCE
1971 1996 1978 1996 1977 1996
90TH 341.7 340.4 344.7 345.6 346.2 351.7
95TH 356.5 354.4 355.7 354.7 361.5 365.3
Thernstrom's text made it seem like NAEP scores were in some terrible downward spiral. As the figures above make clear, they were not.
Of course, the results above are misleading. Because of the changes in the ethnic mix in the nation, aggregate NAEP scores are affected by Simpson's Paradox: The aggregate scores paint one picture, the subgroup scores another. All ethnic groups are up. Simpson's paradox is explained at the archives of the Education Disinformation Detection and Reporting Agency, EDDRA:
www.america-tomorrow.com/bracey/EDDRA
The explanation appears in an article that begins with a discussion of vouchers in Chile. (Simpson's Paradox will also be explained in a forthcoming article in the February, 2004 American School Board Journal, using both SAT and NAEP trends.).
I have not read much of No Excuses, but the section falsely imputing arguments to me is followed by one labeling Larry Steinberg's Beyond the Classroom as part of "much scholarly research" (p. 89) that refutes me. Beyond the Classroom is to scholarly research as Enron is to fair and open markets.
I suggest the book be ignored.
— Gerald Bracey
2003-11-
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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