On one hand I really want to spend a lot of time answering this question. On the other hand I'm in the process of moving out and don't have the time or mental energy it deserves. At some point I think I want to do an entire thread on this issue - this was literally the topic of my M.A. in Education.
I just want to quickly rapid-fire all the reasons that are obvious off the top of my head. I want posters to understand that I consider these to be very simple, superficial answers - there are a lot of complexities and deeper explanations that should be included for each of them but I don't have the time. Someday I'll dig up my files and give this shyt the attention it deserves.
1. Class differences. Obviously kids from well-off homes tend to do better in testing than kids from poorer homes, and far more white families are well-off while more black families are poorer-off.
Solution: Obviously we need more economic inequality. Some critics will then say, "But even better-off Black kids are doing worse than average!" That's in part because they measure class by income, and thus completely miss my point #2 that....
2. Black families tend to have far less accumulated wealth than White families. The average Black family making $60,000/year and the average White family making $60,000 a year are NOT at the exact same class level, because due to historic inequality that White family probably has a couple hundred grand in accumulated wealth and is paying off a house while that Black family is still renting and paying off their debts. In fact, one study found that Black households with an income of $100,000 tended on average to live in similar neighborhoods as White families with an average income of $35,000.
Solution: Obviously the wealth gap needs to be addressed and some form of reparations is really the central point of that. Until we measure class by wealth as opposed to just by income, we're going to keep fukking up class comparisons across racial lines.
3. Due to a huge spectrum of different factors (poverty, crime, disparate police actions, broken families, societal racism, etc.) the average Black student tends to be under far more stress than the average White student. Some studies show that anywhere from 25-45% of kids in inner-city neighborhoods show signs of PTSD. High stress levels have a dramatic effect on academic performance and are likely depressing test scores severely.
Solution: There are a lot of factors behind those high stress levels so there ain't just one explanation, though economic, judicial, and policing equality are part of it as well as trying our best to preserve and heal our own families. But honestly, I think part of the answer is that we need to get our kids out of those neighborhoods completely. Living in a crowded dense urban setting is just inherently more stressful on average than living in a less crowded, less urban situation. Our kids need more time with peace and quiet where they can actually hear themselves think. Our kids need more time in nature. Our kids need to get out of those high-pollution city centers. Our kids need the chance to not have 90% of the people they see every day be strangers and not have becoming a victim of crime be so likely. Dense urban life is simply harder, especially when you're poor or working class.
4. Black parents tend to spend far less time actively engaged in conversation with their kids, and the amount of verbal input a child is exposed to at a young age tends to have a very high impact on their language and problem-solving ability later in life. There are multiple theories for why this gap exists, including different conceptions of parenting or different ideas about how kids should spend their time (with adults as opposed to with other kids), but obviously a large factor is that Black children are disproportionately more likely to grow up in single-parent households, and thus simply have less exposure to the adult in the home, since there's only one of them and they're quite likely to be extremely busy trying to take care of the entire household.
Solution: I think we need really active efforts to get parents spending more deliberate time with their kids, talking to them more, and reading with them more. I don't say "parenting classes" exactly cause I don't have any experience with them so I don't know if they help, but whether through mentoring or friends or community pressure, we need to keep emphasizing to Black fathers and mothers that they need to talk to their kids, a lot, and spend real time doing shyt with them every single fukking day. And it goes without saying that this will be easier to the degree that both the mother and the father are in the kid's life. In situations where the father or mother are not in their life, we need to do a better job as a community in being surrogate aunties and uncles and mentors and just doing everything we can to help shepherd those kids along from the very beginning.
5. "Only children" and 1st-born children tend to have higher educational outcomes than later-born children, especially when children are both less than 3 years apart. If you have a lot of kids and some of those kids are only spaced 1 or 1.5 years apart, the later-born kids tend to have lower outcomes. And white families nowadays tend to have far fewer children and more spacing between their children than black families.
Solution: It's probably be a good idea to share more broadly that we need to space our kids out by 3 years or more.
6. The Flynn effect is the observation that IQ scores appeared to steadily rise in developed societies over the course of the 20th century, by as much as 2 points a decade, though in the 21st century it appears to be beginning to level out. The reasons for the Flynn effect are heavily debated and split into A. effects that actually show increased intellectual ability (better nutrition, less exposure to disease) and B. effects that have more to do with improved conditioning to take standardized tests well (increased exposure to technological society, increased exposure to abstract thinking, greater familiarity with testing). Likely it's a mix of both, but no matter whether you use A or B to explain the increase, it's obvious that Black families have been deprived of both to some degree. This is also the reason, by the way, that people across the world from non-technological societies tend to perform very low on IQ and other standardized tests, though you see very rapid improvement within a generation or two when they enter a technological society.
Solution: The positive aspect of the Flynn effect is that it suggests that Black performance can be expected to continue to improve over time (as it already has) due to increased Black exposure to the same societal benefits that White folk have had for generations. And since White performance on these tests shows some signs of plateauing now, the performance gap should continue to decrease. So for the most part we can expect this aspect will improve on its own. However, it's obvious that good nutrition, good preventative health care, exposure to fun problem-solving and complexity and such at a young age, and early exposure to abstractions can only help.
7. Due to White flight, historical inequality in infrastructure and educational levels, and ongoing structural issues, even poor White kids on average tend to go to better schools than poor Black kids. It's definitely true that there are some shytty public schools in White neighborhoods. But in general most college grads are still White and comparatively few college graduates are Black. Most of those white grads end up wanting to teach in White schools, not Black schools. It's way easier to recruit a competent administrator to administrate in a suburban school district than an urban one, it's way easier to recruit qualified teachers to teach in white schools than in black ones. That doesn't mean there aren't still massive problems in the white schools too, but on average they aren't as poorly staffed as the Black schools are.
Solution: We need massive education reform in this country, but waiting for politicians to make real reform is a slow process. In the meantime I think we need to support Black schools in every way possible, whether that means working to improve your local public school or starting a well-run charter school or a low-cost private school. And it's worth mentioning that studies show by far the most significant factors in improved schooling are 1: better teachers and 2: better teaching techniques. Meaning that rather than focus on spending money on school buildings, technology, administrators, etc., 90% of our focus should be on getting the best teachers into the classroom and empowering them to use the best teaching techniques, and everything else will follow.
8. Even when Black kids and White kids go to the same schools, Black kids rarely enjoy the same learning experience - they're far more likely to be placed in a lower-tracked program, kept out of AP courses, etc. Of course this is a chicken-and-egg question, but I doubt anyone here believes that predominantly-white schools are free of racial bias and have zero discriminatory effect on their students' education.
Solution: The evidence increasingly shows that tracking kids results in more negative outcomes at the lower end while doing little for kids at the upper end, and increases racial and class-based disparities. It's past time to end tracking and start mainstreaming kids into the same classroom and learning environment together. That won't end racism in schools, but it will at least reduce its negative effects. We also need to get a lot more Black men and women into the classroom and the principal's office.
9. "Stereotype threat" has been shown to have a negative effect of Black test performance. Basically, when Black kids take a test many of them worry that they will be judged more negatively by a poor performance because they are Black, or believe that they will be a bad example of their race if they perform poorly, or simply will believe that Black kids don't test well. Black students who are reminded about their race directly before a test tend to perform more poorly than Black students who are not so reminded. This is the sort of thing that most White kids aren't even thinking about when they take a test, cause they don't have to think about their race the way Black kids do. That additional anxiety that most Black students carry with them into the testing situation has a depressing effect on scores.
Solution: It's difficult to address this one directly because directly addressing the situation will likely increase the anxiety rather than alleviating it. Part of the answer goes to #3, just decreasing the amount of stress our kids are under as a whole. Another part is better scaffolding their educational experience so that they build confidence, so that school becomes a place of gains and successes rather than simply a place of failures and low expectations. And another part is ending high-stakes testing as a whole - no student should ever feel that their value or their race is about to be judged by a single standardized test. There are nations with incredible education systems (Finland is always my go-to example) that don't engage in high-stakes standardized testing at all. They do randomized testing across the country to periodically ensure that educational outcomes are still strong across the board and that no one is being left behind, cause they value universal success far more than "survival of the fittest" bullshyt that our system emphasizes. But in any one school perhaps only 1/3 of the students will be testing, so most students don't even have to take the tests and the ones that do aren't evaluated by their test scores. That's likely a big part of the reason that Finland does so well in the international standardized test rankings - their students simply don't have any test anxiety because tests are no big deal to them.
I'm sure I'm forgetting really important factors but those 9 are good enough for now.
