 I'm Susan Collins, the Joan and Sanford Wilde Dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy here at the University of Michigan. And on behalf of the Ford School and our Center for Public Policy in Diverse Societies, I am delighted to welcome all of you here today. Today is the Ford School's contribution to the Rackham Graduate School's Centennial Celebrations. And the Centennial Lecture Series was designed to showcase both the diversity and the extensive and really impressive quality of the intellectual legacy that the University of Michigan's graduates have had. There are over 60 graduate programs hosting a Centennial Lecture over this month, and again we're delighted that you are joining us here today for this one. We are particularly pleased and really proud to have with us and to be able to introduce our Rackham Centennial speaker and to welcome him back to campus, Angel Harris. We're delighted to have you here with us. The Ford School launched its very innovative joint PhD program in 2001, and Angel was just our second graduate with that new program. His dissertation earned him a Rackham Graduate School Distinguished Dissertation Award back in 2005, and he was the first of our PhD alums to come up for tenure, and he was the very first to get tenure. And I should mention that that tenure was offered at another university, a very fine Ivy League university. So in particular, Angel is Associate Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Princeton University, and again we are extremely proud of him. He is interested in how perceptions about the opportunity structure and the system of social mobility influence the extent to which people invest in schooling. His research focuses on the social psychological determinants of the racial achievement gap, and you'll hear a lot more about that today. His first book was entitled, Kids Don't Want to Fail, Oppositional Culture and the Black-White Achievement Gap, and it was published by Harvard University Press in 2011. We are very proud of his accomplishments, and we eagerly look forward to seeing his work as it continues to take shape and to inform and advance our understanding of educational sociology. I should note that in the program, we say that we will be collecting cards for the question and answer part of the session. In fact, we'll do it more informally, and after his formal remarks, Angel will invite questions from the floor and then we'll have a kind of informal discussion period. And following the remarks, we hope that in that session we hope that many of you will stay and join us for an informal reception as well, but I'll remind you of that later on. So please join me in welcoming Angel Harris. So I want to start off with a little narrative first to give you a sense of why I'm interested in what I'm interested in. So the problem that I study is the racial achievement gap, and so I'll begin with a story that will make it obvious as to why I studied this topic. So I'm from Brooklyn, New York. How many people from New York? Okay, so if you're from New York, you realize that you can live in a certain area of a borough in New York and really think that the world ends outside of that space. So I grew up in Brooklyn, downtown Brooklyn, and you have everything you need in downtown Brooklyn. You don't feel like you're missing anything. So that's where I grew up. And growing up, I was raised by my grandmother who had an eighth grade education and my grandfather who had a third grade education. So my mom passed away when I was five, and so she raised me and my sister. And growing up, college wasn't something that we talked about. That wasn't something that was part of the story for us. So for her, she just wanted us to finish high school. That was her main goal. So when I was growing up, I didn't really know about colleges and universities. And really, I never really ventured outside of Brooklyn. We didn't have a car, which is not uncommon in New York. It was the norm. We didn't have a car. We lived in the projects, in the low-income housing. For those of you who, I don't know if you've seen the projects in New York. It's like you've seen The Wire, The Show, The Wire, and HBO. That kind of scene. So that was the scene. And the first time I ventured outside of Brooklyn was when I went to high school. I went to a high school called Manhattan Center for Science and Math, where I proceeded to fail both science and math. And it's on the east side of New York, so it's 116th Street and FDR Drive. And so I would take the sixth train to 116th Street and walk to the FDR Drive. And I did not venture to the west side of Manhattan, so I didn't know what was there. I never went to the Bronx. I didn't know what was in Queens either. No one knows what was in Staten Island, so that's cool. So I just knew downtown Brooklyn. That was what I knew. That was my world, and then the sixth train. And when I graduated from high school in a class of 242 students, my class rank was 217. So that's the 10 percentile. So thinking back, I would say the guidance counselors in my high school were not concerned with the students, but now I realize, no, no, they probably weren't focused on the 10 percentile, the students down there. But that was my experience. And so I did not know about colleges and universities. I knew about Brooklyn College because we lived in Brooklyn. I knew about LIU, Long Island University, because they have a campus downtown Brooklyn. And I knew about NYU because Theo Huxtable went to NYU. But Columbia was a country. And I didn't know about Rutgers or Arizona State or University of Michigan. I would have found it strange that you're putting the name of a university and the name of a state together. I didn't know that. I wasn't a college sports fan, so I wouldn't have known that. So college just wasn't on the radar. And so instead, I was looking into trade school to be mortician. I wanted to be a mortician. Really, I wanted to be an embalmer. And so I would go to a funeral home, hang around in the back, and there was a funeral home that was nice enough to let me go and watch them embalm people, and that's what I wanted to do. I thought it was something respectable, and you tell people you're an embalmer, and people say, okay, you know, it doesn't matter what's happening with the economy, you know, you always have a steady stream of business. And so that was what I wanted to do. So I was looking into this. And I had a friend in high school who had twin aunts, Danette and Darlene, and they had completed the undergraduate work Cornell. And they said, you know, you should go to college, get the experience, try it out, see if you like it. So they gave me four applications to complete. One was Grambling State, Morgan State, Hampton, and Lincoln and Pennsylvania. So these are all historically black colleges and universities. Now I had no idea, you know, I didn't know about any colleges outside of Brooklyn, let alone HBCUs. I didn't know what they were. But I applied. I applied to these schools. And Grambling was the only school to accept me. And they accepted me on a conditional basis. The first semester was kind of, you know, probationary student type. Because my GPA when I graduated high school was something like 169. I mean, it was really, really bad. I mean, I was a 10 percentile. But I finished. And so I wasn't going to go to Grambling because, you know, it's in Louisiana. And remember, I never left New York. In fact, the furthest I'd been in a car was to Newark International Airport, which back then seemed like a long drive because you generate, you know, you generate some speed in the car where you're going past 55 miles an hour. You don't generate that kind of speed in Brooklyn unless you're on the BQE. So, and that's eight miles from Brooklyn. Anyway, so I wasn't going to go to Grambling. And the net, you know, called me two days before dorm was set to open. In August, this was August of 93. And she says, do you want to go to college or not? And I said, I don't know how I'm going to pay for it. Because I thought at the time that you had to pay all of the money up front. Because, you know, growing up, we never financed anything. We didn't own a car. We paid for everything, cash or food stamps, right? So there's no such thing as like the concept of borrowing or loans didn't exist for me. So I thought you had to pay all the money up front and then you attend. And they said, no, this financial aid, you know, that's not how it works. So I said, sure, you know, I'll go. And they said, we'll just pack your bags. We'll work it out. So I packed my bags and I tell my grandmother that I'm going to Grambling State University. Now this is the first time she ever heard Grambling State University. It was the day that I left the Grambling State University. So I told her I'm going to this place called Grambling State University. She says, where is it? And I said, this is Louisiana. And she asked me if it was in another country. I know it might as well be, but it's not. She had no idea where it was. The other thing is that, you know, she had never really left. I mean, her life was lived in this, you know, like this four block radius, you know, just there in Puerto Rico. And so all this was happening in Spanish. And so she says to me, so, you know, she had some major concerns. Her primary concerns were, one, how are you going to live? How are you going to make it? And so I knew I was leaving the, I was going off the grid so she could place me if I'm going down the street to a friend's house. She could imagine, she could picture where I'm going to be. But now I was leaving the New York area and she had no concept of where I was going. And her third primary concern was that I was 17 at the time. So in her mind, you know, you're a minor. What if something happens to you? I could be charged with neglect. So these were her primary concerns. So, you know, I'm telling her, no, it's, you know, it's going to be okay. They had this thing called financial aid. I'm trying to explain to her something that I just learned. And so she was certainly nervous. So Danette and Darlene show up in a 93 Crown Victoria. They had rented this car. So it was the two of them with two of their friends from law school. They show up in this car and I, you know, had my bags packed and I get in the car and they start driving. And I remember, you know, we stopped in Maryland for gas. And I remember thinking, man, this is a long way. And we were four hours into the trip. We had 20 hours left to go. I also remember thinking, wow, this is beautiful. And I was talking about I-95 because I had never been on an interstate before. There's no interstate in New York. I mean, 95 cuts across the Bronx, but it doesn't look like an interstate, right? And the BQE certainly doesn't look like an interstate. So it was the first time where I had, you know, been in a car and saw just hours of just nothing, but just what you see, you know, just trees and you see that in Prospect Park, but you know that there's a bound to that, right? So that was just, that was all new for me. And so we get to, 24 hours later, we get to Monroe, Louisiana. And, you know, we spent a night in the hotel. Danette and Darlene fund everything. They fund the entire trip. And we get there. And I remember thinking, okay, this is a different world. It's northern, rural Louisiana. The white folks were different from anything that I've seen before in New York. The black folks were different from anything I've seen in New York. There were no Asians. There were no Hispanics. It was a different world. And, you know, we spent a night. And then the next day we get up, go 30 miles, and we drive to Grambling. And we get to Grambling State. Danette takes me to my dorm room. She checks me in. Darlene comes back. You know, she disappears for some time. She comes back. She says, okay, you fill this out for your coursework. You fill this form out for your financial aid. You go stand in this building to register. And then they gave me like, they gave me $30. And after about 45 minutes, they got back in the car and drove to New York. And I was dropped off at Grambling State University in northern rural Louisiana. First time outside of, you know, the Brooklyn, East Manhattan. Okay? So it was a huge difference, right? And when I got there, I thought, I remember thinking, wow, I'm on a college campus. You know? And I had the image of, you know how you see the image of people walking out the building with the backpack on their back, talking to someone in this grass, and someone's reading, sitting against a tree, reading a book. And I say, this is a real college campus. I had that image. And so anyway, so, and I realized then that a shift that occurred in my life, right, that Danette and Darlene had done something that had really changed the trajectory of my life in a way that I could appreciate after that, particularly because now I look back and I realize they were young. They were kids. They were children. Excuse me. I'm sorry. Anyway, they changed the context of my life. And so at the time, they were adults. They were grown-ups to me. But now I look back and I realize they were young kids, you know? So I got the Grammling and I majored in psychology. And I majored in psychology because I thought you could read people's minds. And so that's why I wanted to major in psych. I've since realized that that's not the case. And I graduated Grammling with a 3.34, you know, a modest GPA. And one of the things that changed was a professor there, my first psychology class. He gave an example where he said, if a child is misbehaving, you can tell people, look, Johnny's misbehaving. Or you can say, in the past hour, Johnny has kicked three kids, slapped four, and punched five. And then you can let them determine whether or not that's misbehavior and how much misbehavior that is. So he essentially operationalized misbehavior for me. And after that, they changed the way I took in knowledge. It was like every time someone talked to me, I went to this bad stage where I would always say, you know, so-and-so is nice. What do you mean? What do you mean by nice? I wanted them to operationalize what nice meant. Right? Tell me what nice is. I want to be a definition so I can determine how much niceness there is. Right? And it changed my connection to information and how I filtered information. Completely changed it. So after that, I graduated with being psychology. I applied to graduate school. And Kansas State University was the only school to accept me. So I went to Kansas State University for masters in college student personnel work. The stigma of that was weighing on me. So I walked over to the social department before the semester started. And I transferred over to sociology. And I received a master's in sociology. And I applied to a PhD program in sociology. And Michigan was the only place to accept me. So I always tell people, you only need one school. That's all. So when I come visit, you know, the grad students are saying, what are those places are you considering? And people say, oh, I'm Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard. And for me, it was like, well, my mind's made up. I'm coming to Michigan, you know? And so I ended up coming to Michigan for a PhD in sociology. In 99. And then the policy program begins in 01, the joint degree program. And so I was the first cohort in that. And I finished that program in 2005. And when I finished that program, I ended up having a reversal of fortunes. I won the Distinguished Citation Award. I took a postdoc. And UT Austin recruited me out of the postdoc. And so I spent a year on a faculty at University of Texas at Austin. And in my first year there, I was recruited by Princeton at NYU. And I ended up going to Princeton. Four years later, I got tenure at Princeton. And so that brings us to today. So the moral of that story is that I was kid number 217 in my graduating class in high school. Right? And so, you know, I tell this, I share this narrative, particularly with teachers, because I want them to know that the kid you're looking at, you never know what's possible. Right? And they'll be able to distinguish probability from possibility. So with that, I'll sort of go into what I study. I study the racial achievement gap. At one time, I was contributing to that gap on a negative end. Right? I was pulling the mean down for members of my group. And so what does the gap look like? So I'm just going to present some background information on the achievement gap. So here I'm showing you the different, the achievement in reading, math, U.S. history and geography. This is based on data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the NAPE. So this is nationally representative data. And all these bars correspond to 12th graders. And so what you're seeing is that white 12th graders are closer to being proficient than black and Hispanic 12th graders. And all the tests are scaled so that 300 is considered proficient. So what you're seeing is that it's a pretty substantial gap. Right? So these are whites, these are blacks, these are Hispanics. Now, I'm going to put up a dashed line. The red dashed line corresponds to white 8th graders. So what you'll notice there is that on average, this is four years worth of growth, right? But what you'll notice is that on average, black and Hispanic 12th graders are graduating high school with the same skill sets that whites had in the 8th grade. So it's a four-year gap. Another way to show you this gap is this way. This is the percent of students at or above basic proficiency level. Again, NAEP data, so it's naturally representative. And I'm going to highlight the black bar. So what you see is that slightly more than half of blacks are proficient in reading, 12th graders, less than a third are proficient in math, science, and U.S. history. Hispanics aren't doing too much better. So the gap is big. It's a four-year gap. It's pervasive. It spans across a wide range of subjects. Any solution, you have to think of a solution that's going to cut across a number of subjects. How is it changing over time? Here I'm showing you the gap over time from 1965 to 2006. But this is based on a study from Hedges and Newell in 1999. And what they did was they calculated the rate of decline in the gap from 65 to 1992. And so they're using large national data that were collected by the U.S. government in each of these decades. So you have the Equal Educational Opportunity of 1965. You have the National Longitudinal Survey of 1972. You have High School and Beyond of 80 in 1982. And then you have the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1992. And so all of these are different samples. They're different exams, so they're different sets of people across time. So because of that, the tests have been scaled. So we're able to compare how the gap is changing over time among 12th graders in the U.S., black-white gap. They calculate that the rate of decline is 0.12 standard deviations per decade. So all you have to know is how many times will it take you to subtract this from this number to reach zero, and that's how many decades it would take to reach gap convergence in reading. So roughly five to six decades to accomplish gap convergence in reading, given the rate of decline from 65 to 92. Here's the same information in math. 0.08 standard deviations. So essentially it's going to take roughly 10 decades for the gap to close in math. Given the rate of decline from 65 to 92, 10 decades, a little more than a century for the gap to close in math. Given the rate of decline, again absent any major intervention. But these projections stop early 90s. What has happened since the early to mid 90s? Here I'm showing you the gap on perhaps the most consequential of all exams. This is the gap on the SAT. This is reading. And the scores are not important. What's important are the trends. Here you have whites, Asian-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and blacks. The lines are parallel. Essentially there's no convergence. So whatever convergence I showed you in the previous graphs, we haven't begun to cut into those because the convergence is stalled. So this is reading and this is math. The good news is that the No Child Left Behind Act tells us that the gap is going to close by 2014. So right around here these lines are going to converge. They just haven't unfolded the plan yet, but it's coming because that's the goal of the act. But what that shows you is that perhaps there's a large disconnect between the goals that politicians may set and the data. Given these data, there's no way you could expect the gap to close by 2014. Absent any major intervention. And so this is a problem that I think is one that we don't respect enough. This is, as I showed you from the trends, you can see that it's going to take six decades to get the gap to close in reading and roughly 10 in math. Even if you don't believe that, even if you cut that in half, the point is that it's ridiculous to think that it's going to close within the next four years of anybody's political term. We would never walk into an oncologist's office where you've been working on cancer for all these years, millions of dollars in research, give us the cure by next week. We would never do that because we respect that problem. This is a problem similar to that one in the sense of how long it's going to take for convergence to be achieved. The gap also extends beyond testing. So this is the gap in terms of GPA. So this is GPA for Whites in 2001 and 2011. Again, national data set. This is SAT test takers. This is for Asians. That's the gap. I'm sorry. That's the achievement. That's the GPA in 2001 and 2011. For Hispanics and blacks, so this is the average GPA right here. The line represents the average GPA for all kids. So what you see is that the gap is there in terms of grades as well. Why is this important? I'm showing you the percent of the white U.S. population and the percent non-white. This was in 2000. 70% of the population was white. 2010, 64%. And these are projected. And what you see is that by roughly 2040, half your population are going to be comprised of non-whites. Even if in this 49%, you have some Asian-Americans. Let's give them 10%. You can have nearly half the population of 40% of the population walking around with eighth grade skill set on average. There's no way that doesn't affect everyone. Who are they going to sell their homes to? So what are some explanations put forward for this gap? Well, some people have suggested that the gap is genetic, that essentially blacks and Hispanics have a different stock of genes that don't allow them to learn. So this was put forward by Arthur Jensen. And it was also resurfaced with the bell-shaped curve. It was a famous book in sociology of education. But, you know, at one point I used to say that this is no longer taken seriously. However, there are a group of researchers who I think are headed in this direction. There's a group of people out of UNC Chapel Hill. Apparently, we found a way to have genes and data sets. And so for people who are social scientists, quantitative researchers, there's some data sets that now have genetic biomarkers in them where they code people's gene, whatever, 0, 1, or 2, and they have a thousand genes, particularly in ad health. They have a thousand genes. And so now what happens is that you have some social scientists playing geneticists and now they're trying to use this to predict certain social behaviors. And, you know, it's only a matter of time before they get to the part where they say, oh, there it is. We found the gene to explain intelligence. We could talk about that more in the Q&A, though. Also, another explanation is that the gap is due to differences in resources, whether it's socioeconomic resources of the family, whether it's school funding, whether it's difference in family structure, anything related to resources. This explanation doesn't fully account for the gap because you go into Princeton or Shaker Heights or Prince George's County. These are fluent school districts and you still have a gap. And so the gap still exists in places where you have a fluence and wealthy school districts and wealthy families. So there's still a gap. This explains roughly a third of the gap. This is a substantial proportion of the gap, but there's still two-thirds of the gap left. Then there's bias and testing. This is one that... This is a tricky one. Bias and testing. A lot of people... Most people think that they understand what this is. So I want to ask someone a question here. Could anyone just tell me what they think bias and testing means? How do you understand this explanation? Yes. Right. And usually because... That's right. That's right. There are some cultural tools that they're familiar with that black people are not and so... Okay. That's what most people think about bias and testing. So I'm going to give you an example and I want you to see if this... I don't know, changes how you think of it. So here's a question that I want everyone to read. So the actors bearing on stage seem blank. Her movements were natural and her technique blank. The answer is C. The actors bearing on stage seem unstudied. Her movements were natural and her technique uncontrived. That's the correct answer. Is that question racially bias? You know the answer is yes. Is bias against whites and not blacks? The question is bias against whites. Every year the ETS, they make the SAT. I think they make the GRE, the MCAT, LSAT. There are a roster of questions that are on the exam, right? There's a roster that they draw from to put on the exam. Anytime there's an exam, there's never a completely new set of questions. That's too risky, right? Because we believe that we have the questions that are adequately measuring what we believe is supposed to be measuring, right? So when we're going to introduce new questions, they have to introduce one new item, right? And then how do you measure how that item performs? You have to see how it performs relative to the other items that we know are measuring what we think they're measuring, right? Okay. Each individual SAT question ETS chooses is required to parallel the outcomes of the test overall. So if high-scoring test takers who are more likely to be white tend to answer the question correctly in pre-testing, it's a worthy SAT question. If not, it's thrown out. Race and ethnicity are not considered explicitly, but racially desperate scores drive question selection, which in turn reproduces racially desperate test results in an internally reinforcing cycle. This looks like a typical SAT verbal question, yet this question differs from others in one important respect. According to ETS, 8% more African Americans than whites answered this question correctly. I call this the black preference question. I don't know why blacks did better here, but nearly all SAT questions capture something about race that can't be determined onto pre-testing. Because of favorite blacks who score lower on the test overall, this actor's bearing question, which was pre-tested by ETS in 1998, did not favor high scores and therefore was rejected for use on the SAT. If we come up with an exam, and if we come up with an exam, and everyone in here takes the exam, and we identify all the questions for which females scored higher than males, for which a greater percentage of females got the question correct than males, then we only selected those questions. You're going to have a gender gap, and over time it will look like this. And this makes sense to me. It makes total sense after you understand the notion of a new question has to be highly correlated with the rest of the exam. That's the racial bias. So it's not necessarily that the question has some cultural question that blacks aren't exposed to, but it's that there are some math questions that for whatever reason black people get correct at a higher rate than white people. Hispanics get correct, and because it doesn't correlate with the rest of the exam, it's thrown away. So this changes how we think about meritocracy. The test scores are right, and affirmative action, get the high test score. If the questions that make it are the ones that my group sees, then I like the system. I want to keep that. Okay, so should make you think, huh? Then another explanation is cultural deficiency. The fact that the gap has been around for so long just makes people think that, well, it must be that blacks don't want to learn, right? That blacks themselves are resistant to educational goals, and so that's what I study. That's what my area of research is. So in the past decade, this theory has moved from the academy into the mainstream press. So for example, you have Thomas Sowell who wrote that the most painful of new developments has been a growth of an attitude in ghetto schools across the country that are trying to learn is acting white. Then you have Brent Staples of the New York Times who wrote, some education experts demean the gifted programs as elitist and unfair, even rival students get into the act harassing the achievers for acting white. You have Bob Herbert of the New York Times who wrote, some African-Americans unable to extricate themselves from the quicksand of self-defeat have adopted the incredibly stupid tactic of harassing fellow blacks who have the temerity to take their study seriously according to the poisonous logic of harassers, the attempt at acquiring knowledge as a form of acting white. And then you have President Obama who said, go into any inner city and neighborhood and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach our kids to learn. They know that parents have to teach, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate this land that says black youth with a book is acting white. They know those things. So this is a really, really popular narrative that exists that black students and Latinos resist educational goals. And that's what I work on. And so I'm not going to go into the X's and O's football term. I'm not going to go into the nuts and bolts of the research and the findings. And I'll cover some of that on the talk on Monday. But today I just want to sort of just introduce the topic and also give you a sense of what I find. And so the theory basically says that the reason why you have this achievement gap is you have to understand how groups are incorporated into a society. And so you have a dominant group, but then you also have groups that are involuntary minorities. These are groups who will come to the host country and search for better opportunities. So because of that, they see education as a way of getting ahead. And any obstacles they experience, they say, oh, this is because of the language we're different, we'll overcome these obstacles. But then you have involuntary minorities. These are groups who are incorporated via colonization, conquering a slavery. And so because of this, they have a long-term history of the dominant group. They don't receive the same rewards as a dominant group for their educational credentials. Just think blacks' pre-civil rights movement. So as a result, why invest in a system that's not going to reward you to the same degree as a dominant group? So if you do, in fact, you're acting like the dominant group, i.e. you're acting white. And so instead, what Ogbu suggests is, who wrote this framework and came up with this framework within the literature of education, what he suggests is that blacks invest, they instead invest their efforts in things like learning, such as physical or verbal dueling. I think he means sports and hip-hop. But that's, I don't know. So this is the achievement gap here. So I'm showing you how I visually represent this. This is the achievement gap. So the groups differ on achievement. And the groups meaning voluntary and involuntary. Or you can have Asian-Americans, whites, blacks. The groups differ on achievement. And the reason why they differ on achievement is because they have different academic orientation. Academic orientation meaning anything, your attitude, your disposition toward education, your approach, your behavior toward education. And so because some groups have worse academic orientation than others, they have lower achievement. And now why do groups differ on academic orientation? Well, the reason why they differ is because they have different experiences with the opportunity structure. So young blacks are not bewitched by the rhetoric of equal opportunity. They hear another side of the story at the dinner table. And so as such, because you hear your parents and friends talk about their experiences in the opportunity structure, that has implications for how youth themselves perceive opportunities, which in turn has implications for their investment in academics. So this is the framework. And so in the book that I, in my first book, Kids Don't Want to Fail, this was the model that I was testing throughout the book. And so this is not intended to be a path diagram. Instead it's a theoretical framework and each path, each chapter tested a path. So each path was a chapter, essentially. So the book goes path by path, testing each link to see where the theory breaks down. And I find that the theory does break down. And so again, I'm skipping a lot of the technical stuff, but in one study I compared blacks and whites on a series of measures. And by the wording of the measure, you can predict whether or not black should be higher or lower. So black should have lower educational aspirations. Black should have high school less. They should seek help on having trouble in class less. They should do these things more. And what I found is everything in blue goes against the framework. And everything in red goes in the direction of the framework. So if this is your theory, only two out of 24 outcomes go in the direction your theory predicts, you have to be incredibly unlucky for the findings to come out this way. And so I'm moving ahead here. What some proponents of the theory say is that you can't believe what blacks say on surveys and what an ideology is. They're going to say, oh yeah, we love education. Education is good. So it reflects wishful thinking. They don't match their aspirations with effort. If they really believed education was important, they would try harder and have higher grades. And so this was turned the attitude of achievement paradox that blacks consistently express greater reverence to education in whites. But the issue is not straightforward because despite the fact that blacks have this antagonistic view towards getting ahead, it's those who have succeeded academically. Those are the ones that have the worst views about what education can do. Those are the ones who are hitting their head against a glass ceiling, but they've already invested. And so one of the things I did in another study was I examined racial differences on the value kids attribute to schooling. And I found that blacks attribute more value to schooling than whites. But then they also attribute more barriers that schooling can't overcome than whites as well. And when I looked at how these attitudes are predictive of achievement, I found that the attitudes about the value of schooling matter for grades, but perception of barriers was inconsequential, whether the findings were run separately for blacks and whites. So in other words, perception of barriers did not have an impact on kids' investment or decisions to invest in schooling. So I'm skipping here. So what I found over time is that the theory I could not find support for the framework. And in the book I used six data sets. The data sets were from the United Kingdom because I thought maybe I'm on a different, I'm on the wrong continent, so let me see if I can find support for it in another country. And six data sets over 160 measures and I could not find support for the framework. I tested it by race, by class, by gender, and it never panned out. And so this perhaps is the reason why it didn't pan out. The question is not whether or not blacks have an opposition to culture. The question is whether the achievement gap is attributed to an opposition of culture among blacks. It's a different question. So what I noticed is that the theory usually looks at kids during adolescence. It's the fifth, sixth, seventh graders where you say, oh, we start to see the opposition of culture. Look, you start to see the attitudes. It's around fifth, sixth grade. But the thing is that you have skill sets that the kids come into that stage with and that's related to race. It has implications for the academic orientation and it has implications for the achievement gap and it predicts achievement. So basically what I'm saying is that learning is a longitudinal thing. You can't jump to high school or adolescence and say, oh, look, opposition to culture, there it is. That's why they're failing. There's something that happens before that stage in life. Tyson indicates that achievement is central in the development of academic behaviors early in the schooling process to the extent that oppositional behaviors are influenced by prior academic skills. The achievement to account for prior skills leads to the effects of behaviors to be overestimated. And so opposition to culture cannot adequately explain racial differences in achievement if it's not adapted to account for how learning is intertwined with development. And so this is the last thing I'll show you here. This is the achievement gap, national representative data. So this is the achievement gap for blacks and Asians relative to whites. So what I'm showing you is that the average for whites is 20 and for Asians is 22, I'm showing you the plus two. Okay, so that's the plus two and this is the minus eight. And this is after accounting for background factors. That's the gap. What does the gap look like in 12th grade? What would the gap look like if the kids behaved similarly during high school? Like that. 13% of the gap. So schooling behaviors explained 13% of the black-white gap. What would the gap look like if they came into high school with the same skill set? 70% of the gap. So if you asked me, would you prefer for blacks to behave the same way as whites during high school or to come into high school with the same skill set? I would offer the same skill set. Fall of kindergarten. This is whites. So again, whites aren't, they don't average a zero. Let's say they average a 20. I'm just showing you the plus and the minus. So this is white achievement. Asian-Americans, blacks. Fall of kindergarten. Reading. What happens when you control for social class? This is based on research from Fryer and Levitt. So it's not something that I conducted. I just created a graph of their findings. When they control for social class, this is the gap in the fall of kindergarten. Asians, blacks, whites. What this means is that when you compare children who are similarly situated with regards to social class, there's a gap with whites being toward the bottom. Now, when we maintain that comparison group where social class is the same for all groups and we move across time, here's what happens. Spring of kindergarten, spring of first grade, spring of third grade. That's reading, and that's math. CDS, Child Development Supplement to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. This is the Woodcock-Johnson exam. This is not panel, this is not panel data, but what you see is that blacks, not different from whites in reading. This is first grade, second grade, third, fourth, fifth, it steadies out. Same thing in math. So here's my last slide. So here you have two kids at birth. First six years of life, you see growth. This is reflecting the x-axis is time. This, the y-axis is growth, development. Here's a school. They're entering the school system. This is what happens. They're most similar when they enter. They start to diverge after they've entered the school system. This is what should happen. So a lot of this is summarized in the book. And the book kids don't want to fail. But the main message here is that if I were to walk into a high school with John Ogbu, he would say, look, oppositional culture, there it is. We go to Detroit. We're a school you can find. He would say, there it is, oppositional culture. And he would see a lot of oppositional culture. And I would say, I see the same thing you see. He would say, see, the kids are avoiding high-level courses. They don't want to take calculus. And I would say, yeah, they can't take calculus because they didn't learn algebra. You're asking them to go through a ninth grade curriculum and they have fifth grade skillset. That's what you're seeing. Unless you believe that in the first grade, kids are turning to each other saying, hey, man, let's fail because we're not going to get rewarded to the same extent as whites. Let's screw this whole system. Unless you believe they're saying that in the first grade, oppositional culture cannot be the reason for the achievement gap. And that is the message that I've been trying to say. But people are blinded by what they see. I see oppositional culture. Look, the pants hanging down. Look at that. I'm not saying the kids don't have this culture that's counterproductive because they're not doing well. I'm not saying that that's not the case. I'm saying that that's not the reason for the gap. It can't be. The gap was there before. So with that, I'll stop and take questions. So the question, so what are some of the reasons for the gap? What are some of the things that my research point out? So at this point, I think that the problem is really complicated. And so I have not even begun to go into why, what are the causes of the gap? I spent the last five, six years saying, look, this is a distraction. It's not this. So this is related to this cultural deficiency narrative that exists. And so this is my first book. My second book is on parental involvement. And the reason why we have a gap, here's the narrative. No child left behind suggests that in order to close the gap, we have to get more parents involved. That's one of the six major features of that act is to involve parents. So let's carry that through. Do you have a gap? Black kids are at the bottom. One of the ways to close it is to involve parents. That means that the parents of these kids are going to be involved in a way that bring up their achievement or that the reason why you have this gap is because they're not involved. So that's getting at this narrative. The title of the book is The Broken Compass. Is social policy on parental involvement misguided? The answer is yes. The answer is yes. In essence, what I find in that book is that I have, I use four data sets from K-12 and over 60 measures of parental involvement. Some examples are help your kid with homework, read to the child, have a rule about GPA, have a rule about homework, talk to the child about high school. Those are things you can do at home. Have a set of measures about school. Are you a PTO member? How often do you talk to the teacher? You know, parent-teacher conference, a bunch of measures. So if you put these 63 measures, if you line them up, and let's pretend that there are policy buttons that you can push, right? The parental involvement movement will say, push all of them, right? Just be involved in your kid's lives. Just be involved, push all of them. What the findings show is that if you push of 60, maybe about six are related to increases in achievement, maybe about 15 are related to declines in achievement, and the rest are not related to achievement at all. And these findings are run separately for each racial group. So I run them just for white kids, then just for blacks, then just for Mexican-Americans, then just for non-Hispanic Mexicans, I'm sorry, non-Mexican-Hispanics, then for two groups of Asian-Americans, model minority Asians, you know, the Chinese, Japanese, and then the Southeast Asians, the sort of more disadvantaged group. Run it separately for each group, and you find a different set matter for each group. You know, for whites, it might be this one, this one, and that one, and for blacks, it might be this one, that one, and this one. There is no one-size-fits-all set of things that just do this and it's going to work for all kids. Why do we think that? That's insane. Well, to me, it looks to sound the same. But there's no one-size-fits-all. And so essentially what I've been doing is I've been taking on these kind of large narratives that exist about culture's efficiency and saying, is there something to this? What does the data say with regard to this? And so I'm spending a lot of my time taking the big distractions off the table and saying, let's move this aside and let's have a real fruitful discussion. So I haven't gotten to that part yet. Long answer, but it's coming. Yeah. So for those of us who don't study education policy, what can you tell us about, I guess, what could be termed the expectation gap? So I would assume that folks receive different sorts of teaching and training based on what a teacher expects of them. So there's an expectation that a black student would perform at a level that's different than a white student and so they would get a different sort of teaching based on these distractions that are on the table. What do we know about that? Yeah. I think that that's getting toward what the problem is. It's getting toward that. So if I hear your question correctly about the expectations gap that teachers may hold for kids, so I actually knew you were going to ask that question. So here's for you. You did study psychology. I read your mind. Now, numerous studies show that teachers' perceptions of academic success is not independent of cultural considerations. So disadvantaged minority groups perceive as outsiders to the academic setting. So many studies show this, particularly qualitative studies. So there's some studies that show that teachers favor whites in Asian cultural ethos versus other groups. And so teacher expectations favor white and Asian students over black and Latino students with comparable academic records. This comes from world psychology. There are also studies that show that elementary school teachers rate students' motivation and achievement who behaviorally manifest a European or mainstream cultural ethos as greater relative to those with the afro-cultural ethos. This one is perhaps my favorite. So for this study, let's take... So I'm going to just describe the study. So you have a white kid and a black kid and you tell them, hey, today y'all are going to be white for the day. And we're going to video record you. Being white for the day. Y'all know what that means, right? You know, I mean, come on. You know what I'm saying? Like walking, hey, Bob, you know. Being white for the day. You know what I'm talking about? Come on now, y'all seen Chris Rock and you know the routines, you know. They were white for the day, you know, walking around straight, you know, right, you know. And they were white for the day and they were video recorded. And then the next day they said, y'all are going to be black for the day. What does that mean? They had swagger. You know, they were cool. You know, they were chill. You know, they were comfortable. They were comfortable. And that film was shown to teachers. And the teachers were asked to rate the kids on problem behaviors, the needs for special education, and for achievement. The black for a day were worst on all three. Just based on the video. These are capturing, these are studies that capture the unconscious biases that teachers bring into the classroom with them. Right? And so now take this down to first and second graders. And these teachers coming into the classroom with this, they're not, I'm not saying they're racist. It's racist, but you can have racism without racism. This is a book by Eduardo Bonilla Silva. And so they're coming into the classroom with this. And that could be driving some of this, right? That could be driving some of this. And so I think that that's in the direction of what the problem could be. Yep. I was curious to find out how much legitimacy you put behind theories that say parental education and household income are the best predictors of success. So how much weight do I give to theories that suggest that parents' background, parental education is the best predictor of success? Right? Yeah. And whether SES is a predictor of success. It is a predictor of success. It is. And it does. I think that that's, if parental involvement works, it's because of those factors and not because I'm talking to the teacher. I'm sitting down reading to you. I'm doing this with you. It's not because of all these little things that parents do. That's not what's really driving it. So here's the idea. If you spend 10 seconds walking through the home of someone who is in the worst area you could find, just the hood, go to the hood and walk to someone's home and where they have lack of resources. 10 seconds. And then you walk through the home of an affluent, you know, business person or dean of a college. 10 seconds. You say, okay, if we're going to serve two kids in both of these spaces without the parents even saying a word to the kid, in which space do you think learning is more conducive? Right? So you walk home, you pass the home office, you get in the car, NPR is playing, the average level of education of your parents' friends are above the national mean. You hear them verbally jousting. On what basis? What do you mean? You're not even in the room. You pick osmosis. You're picking it up through osmosis somewhere. You're getting it somewhere. And so that parent will say, oh, my kid is doing well and they can take credit for being involved, right? But they're living a lifestyle whether they had a kid or not, they'd be living that lifestyle and that lifestyle is conducive to education. So this is why children of preachers know the word more than other children of non-preachers. Children of academics do better academically. It ain't because academics are more involved, right? They're getting credit for something. They're accessing something that's class-related that they're getting credit for. And they're attributing it to, oh, it's my superior involvement. And my argument is that that's not really what's driving it because if it were, it would show up empirically. The fact that it's not showing up empirically but you do see this relationship between education, parents' education, and child's achievement suggests that the mechanism is not these measures of parental involvement. And thinking about Pre-K, how would you weight parental involvement throughout a child's life? Do you think that at certain times it's more necessary or matters more than at other times? Does parental involvement matter earlier in life or at different stages of a kid's development? And... It has to be data. Yes, the findings from the book is not out yet. It's coming out fall of next year, Harvard Press. But in that book, the findings do show that the whatever benefits of parental involvement that are there, they're stronger earlier on, right? However, they're not very strong. They're just stronger relative to later on, later on. Yeah. Yes? I'm curious in your thoughts on the comparison, you showed the trajectory for a white student and a black student in school entry and what happens to the divergence over time. And so the role there, the inference there of playing as a considerable role in the widening gap compared that to the income achievement gap where it's fairly wide at entry to school and only gets slightly wider. There's been some research that suggests schools are not really playing a role in that because children come to school with lower SES and higher SES students with that gap fairly significantly large at kindergarten or first grade already. So what are schools doing differentially whether or not exacerbating the income achievement gap but they are greatly exacerbating the racial achievement gap even though we know that racial achievement gap has been decreasing slightly over the past 40 years whereas the income achievement gap has been increasing over the same period of time? Okay, so now I'm going to speculate. So remember when I showed you the SAT question, right? Where for whatever reason there's something that there's something that certain groups the way they navigate the world this question resonates more, whatever it is. The best thing I can think of is there's a movie called Shallow Hal and the movie Shallow Hal, this was a movie with Jack Black and someone put a spell on Jack Black because his character was very shallow and so he was into women because of the way they looked and so a spell was placed on him and so now for the rest of the movie when he would interact with someone he would see how they were on the inside so if it was a beautiful person on the inside the camera would show him singing like Beyonce, right? But everyone else might see, you know, what the person really looked like, right? So that's the whole movie was like that, right? And then there were some people that looked horrible they would have a person trying to look bad but externally everyone else saw them as beautiful but he saw the inside of them so he fell in love with a character played by Gwyneth Paltrow and Gwyneth Paltrow put on a fat suit kind of like Eddie Murphy does with the clumps but her fat suit looked real it wasn't like Eddie Murphy's, you know, it looked real like a real person so that's how she really looked everyone saw her that way but he saw Gwyneth Paltrow so during the making of that movie Gwyneth was interviewed and she had mentioned that it takes hours to put on this suit and hours to take it down so because of that when she has it on they try to do as many takes as they can and so in between takes she would walk around through the lobby of the hotel or whatever and she mentioned, you know, for the first time in life, she realized the look she was getting, people were staring at her and she was like, I realized what it's like to live life in a body like this and when she said that I thought an obese person would say, yeah, that's my life you get it now, right? So at living life that way for those few days or whatever the world was looking different to her she was picking up new things about the world that were invisible to her previously but that an obese person would see and vice versa so keep that in mind so what I'm saying is that schools are kind of pitched at a certain way of looking at the world and you have folks who grow up in certain areas, under certain conditions they're picking up different things and so when they come into the school the things that the school is teaching toward in terms of what they assume you're coming in with and what you're picking up is incompatible with what these people are bringing in right? and the SAT question is kind of getting at that right? so I think that's what's happening I don't know how you fix that right? I don't have a solution but this is what we should be talking about not oppositional culture as the cause of it that's kind of like my major point is, yeah so I'm an instructor on campus and my students coming to me just talking about how discriminated they're against as a white person in these cases and I'm wondering why the hell you aren't from the Supreme Court so if you weren't from the Supreme Court what would you be telling them? yeah, well I understand why people say that I understand why people say that and somehow I knew you were going to ask that so the reason why people say that is because we have drastically different views about race in the U.S. right? so for example, how big a problem is racism in our society today this is based on an ABC News poll in 2009 how big a problem is racism in our society today these are whites, these are blacks they say it's a problem whites, blacks, a big problem whites, blacks, half as many whites say it's a big problem as blacks do you think blacks have or will soon achieve racial equality? yes, blacks will never, not in my lifetime achieve racial equality, whites blacks, personally ever felt discriminated against because of race, whites blacks do you think blacks who live in your community have as good a chance as whites to get housing they can afford? whites, blacks get a job for which they're qualified whites, blacks receive equal treatment as whites when they visit local businesses blacks, from the police whites, blacks experience discrimination whites are fully aware that the rate of interracial marriage is going up that the rate of discrimination the labor market is going down that the rate of discrimination you can't use the N word anymore they know these patterns are happening which contributes to this blacks are perceiving the world differently you know racism is like a snake that gets loose in your home if someone puts a snake in your home and says you have to live there for a month with a snake loose in your home when you hear a sound was that the snake? was the window open? was that the snake? was it not the snake? and so black people perpetually live in the state of something happened was that because of race or not and that's the day to day thing and so you have these different experiences and so it makes sense that white students say I'm being discriminated against because of racism because blacks are no longer they no barriers anymore we don't need this anymore what are they talking about? they're delusional when you black you're like why is it that every time I show up to the building late at night canvas police is hovering around what is that about? you see what I'm saying so I think what's happening is that in this country this is there are encounters with prejudice authorities are often disbelieved because many listeners particularly whites are aware that the proportion of people who hold prejudicial beliefs is declining this triggers the cycle of many blacks doubting the integrity and commitment to justice of their white disbelievers and of many white doubting white doubting the integrity and even sanity of individuals with descriptions of events invokes racism or discrimination this is an asymmetry of experience which erects a difficult to scale wall of misunderstanding between communities and so in this country we are not really talking about race in a serious way and so this is the last thing I'll show you so here in the segregated black school there's an internal dialogue blacks are talking about race when you go into any black household people are going to be talking about race the black folks in the new room know what they're saying in the segregated white school there's a dialogue too but it's like this because he's not a part of it hey they're talking about him so what you end up having is you end up having two dialogues so what's in this circle white people you can't trust them oh they wear shorts in the winter oh they don't see their privilege oh they stereotype us they're racist in denial these are things that black folks say y'all know this right I mean y'all know this whites wear shorts in the winter I know isn't it I don't know what's in there I don't know what goes on there um but there's very little that's shared in common such that we're not having a real dialogue about race in this country and so because of that it makes sense to me that some people in this group feel discriminated against it makes sense to me that some people in this group feel angry and saying why don't y'all see this because there are completely different realities that are happening and the data is real from both sides the data to them is real but there's no serious interaction where a white person is allowed to say why do black people always do this that and the other and they should be allowed to say that and people should say okay this is how you feel this is based on the data you've collected from your lived experience let's interrogate this doesn't mean you're racist let's interrogate this because the minute they sense that you're going to call them racist they shut down that's it they disengage nothing happens the ball doesn't move forward I think that those discussions have to be had in order to understand why affirmative action is still necessary why it's similar to the GI bill why it's similar to bills like that in the past that were thought of as nation building right and so affirmative action is in a sense nation building it's just benefiting a different group and so we have to have these discussions I think that's part of the reason why we're not having a real discussion about race in this country okay last question I'll pay attention to your presentation you didn't say that the racial dependency gap determined academic success later in life so what steps can be done to ensure that one who is behind in high school can still achieve in college and in a professional career yeah and how would you say that going to attending Grammys later ACC may or may not have benefited you as opposed to attending a PWC for instance the University of Michigan go under that yeah that's a tough question that's a tough question I think for me I could so so one way I hear that is how is it that I was able to go from a bad student to being a principal professor I could give you an answer but in all likelihood that probably wasn't the thing that did it I honestly don't know what did it the stars lined up the ball bounced right and you know what in every group with everything in life there's a distribution with height most people are average height you have people who are really really short and people who are really really tall but there's a distribution with most people around the average someone has to be at the top of that distribution and so I live in the projects there are people who will make it out of there I happen to be one of those people who made it out of there but that's in some sense that's random noise in the data because the the pattern suggests that that's not the norm right and so when it's not the norm there's always a story there right and those stories it's hard to implement them in a systematic way because the stars lined up so to speak so I don't know what happened I don't know I'm riding away but I don't know what happened you know what I'm saying right I think that for me to attribute it to something that did it for me intellectually academically it was the example that the psychology professor gave about empiricism it introduced me to the concept of empiricism and it completely changed how I took in it changed the lens through which I viewed the world I took in everything differently I filtered things differently I don't know what that thing is for each person right so that's the first thing how did Grambling State that's another tough question because again with everything this is distribution I mean Grambling State you know I love Grambling State and it's great but at the end of the day they do have a 36% graduation rate as do many commuter schools regional colleges the US average is very low the US average is something in the 40s in terms of percent college graduation rate the Michigan and the UCLA's and Berkeley's 80% that's not real that's not the norm in reality the real world out there it's somewhere in the 40s and so it's a 36% graduation rate institution and again there's a distribution and within that distribution there's going to be a valedictorian and that valedictorian is going to be a pretty good student regardless of where they go and so I was toward the top of that distribution so again I don't know in other words I don't know how to make certain things systematic it's a complicated issue it's like cancer all I can do now is try to take on narratives one by one and say okay is it this is it not this is it this is it not this where should we be talking about where should we be having the fruitful discussion and so that's all I can do thanks