Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap.

Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap, by Richard Rothstein (Economic Policy Institute).

Nobody who followed Richard Rothstein's columns in the New York Times or his earlier work on education will be surprised that his new book ascribes most of the black-white achievement gap to social class and economics. In effect, he devotes this book to affirming James Coleman's 1966 finding that school differences have far less impact on achievement differences than do family characteristics, the mightiest of which, Rothstein says, is socioeconomic status.

Rothstein insists that contemporary school reforms cannot overcome that influence and therefore urges (if the country is serious about the gap closing) that we focus on equalizing income, housing, health care, and such. Indeed, Rothstein states, "If the nation can't close the gaps in income, health, and housing, there is little prospect of equalizing achievement." He also tries to debunk some well-known examples of schools and educators that succeed with disadvantaged minority youngsters. He deprecates claims made by, among others, the Heritage Foundation, the Education Trust, KIPP Academies, Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, and Jaime Escalante's biographers, insisting that the achievements don't amount to much or couldn't be replicated or that the schools engage in cream skimming. The book, therefore, seeks to throw ice water on just about every popular form of contemporary school-centered reform.

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And he does not hesitate to gore left as well as right, warning, for example, that today's spate of "adequacy lawsuits" (which seek to reshape school finance by having judges force states to spend "adequate" amounts of money on schooling) runs a risk of overpromising.

Is he right? Do we quit trying to fix the schools we've got while we wait for radical social changes to be made? Is this not a counsel of despair that plays right into the tendency of some educators to say, "We're doing all that should be expected of us, given the kids we're being sent from the homes they're being sent from, so stop demanding more from us?"

Readers may also wish to read an important new essay by sociologist George Farkas, "The Black-White Test Score Gap" (Contexts, Spring 2004), which says that the racial rift is caused, more than any other thing, by divergent child-rearing practices (and preschool opportunities). Farkas doesn't exactly contradict Rothstein, but he offers a more hopeful and actionable scenario instead of, in effect, suggesting that we sit on our hands until the Promised Land arrives.