Acting White

November 22, 2010

Stuart Buck, the University of Arkansas graduate student and author of the well-reviewed book, Acting White, suggests that high academic achievement for African-American students is hindered by negative social pressure from peers.

Now Dan Willingham reviews a new study on the subject:

It used a sample of over 13,000 students, averaging about 15 years old. Social acceptance was measured with a simple 4 question interview that asked whether they felt socially accepted, and the frequency with which they felt lonely, felt disliked, or felt people were unfriendly to them.

The study took measures at two time points and examined the changein social acceptance across the year. The question of interest is whether students’ academic achievement (measured as grade point average) at Time 1 was related to the change in social acceptance over the course of the year.

For White, Latino, and Asian students, it was—positively. That is, the higher a student’s GPA was at Time 1, the more likely it was that his or her social acceptance would increase during the coming year. It was not a big effect, but it was present.

For African American and Native American students the opposite was true. A higher GPA predicted *lower* social acceptance during the following year. This effect was stronger than the positive effect for the other ethnic groups.

Thus, it seemed that the simpler version of the “acting white” hypothesis was supported.
But the story turned out to be a bit more complicated.

Further analyses showed that there was a social penalty for high achieving African Americans *only* at schools with a small percentage of black students. The cost was not present at high-achieving schools with mostly African-American students, or at any low-achieving schools.

At the same time, there was never a social benefit for academic achievement, as there was for White, Latino, and Asian students.

These more fine-grained analyses were not possible for the Native American students, because the sample was too small.

So what are we to make the of “acting white” phenomenon?

A single study is never definitive, but this study indicates that academic success is not universally taken by African American adolescents as a sign of rejecting African American culture. It is specific to particular contexts and is plausible a response to discrimination.

Sounds like this mostly supports Stuart’s argument but I’m curious to hear what he thinks.

1 Comment | civic values | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Why Should We Let People Vote?

July 14, 2009

Normally I’m a big fan of Dan Willingham’s ideas but he does have some blind spots.  In particular, Dan seems to miss the point on school choice.  His argument is that for school choice to work, parents have to be rational in making choices:

The logic of school choice seems obvious. If parents selected their children’s schools, they would not choose bad ones, so bad schools would not be able to survive. Schools would have to improve or close, just as a store that offers poor service will lose business to a store that offers better service.

Here’s my problem with that logic: I think it’s highly likely that many parents will choose bad schools.

People often make irrational decisions.

Dan is mistaken in that choice does not require perfect rationality on the part of parents.  All that it required is that parents, on average, will do better at picking schools for their children than the bureaucrats who design schools and compell children to attend those schools.

We all understand that human beings are imperfect and often make mistakes.  Even all of the research on systematic irrationality produces results that are familiar to most people.  The point is that the distant bureaucrat who assigns students to schools controlled by the bureaucrat also suffers from all of these same human foibles. 

Nor can we simply assume that the distant bureaucrat will be focused on academic quality more than parents are.  The distant bureaucrat, even more than parents, has interests that distract from the focus on academic quality.  For example, the bureaucrat might be more concerned about protecting the jobs and incomes of the adults working in schools because those people influence the bureaucrat’s own job status and income.  Just consider whether superintendents are free to do whatever works for kids regardless of the effect on adults working in the schools.

Some might counter that at least the bureaucrats are highly-trained and have access to a lot of information, while parents lack the expertise and information necessary to assess academic quality.  If we really believed this made the bureaucrats superior at making educational choices, we should ask ourselves:  why do we let people vote?

Rather than have individuals make choices about their leaders and policies, shouldn’t we let highly trained experts with superior access to information select our leaders for us?  Regular people may be prone to systematic irrationality when they vote.  In fact, there is a lot of research to support such a conclusion.  For example, people are more likely to vote for more attractive candidates.  Why should people be allowed to vote when: “it’s highly likely that many [voters] will choose bad [candidates]? ”

Of course, the reason why we have democracy despite our awareness of human irrationality is the same reason why we should have schools choice:  on average, people are better at making decisions that affect their own interests than are others.  Even poorly-educated people lacking information are likely to have more knowledge of their interests and how to pursue them than are others making decisions on their behalf.

14 Comments | vouchers | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Willingham Strikes Again

January 10, 2009

Psychologist Dan Willingham strikes again with another excellent video about educational psychology.  In this one he makes a strong case for the importance of teaching content for teaching reading.

2 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene