by James A. Bacon
And the debate goes on…Yesterday, in “Yes, Virginia, Culture Does Matter in School Performance,” I argued based on the statewide pass rate for the Standards of Learning that disadvantaged Hispanic school children who had proficiency in English actually out-performed disadvantaged white school children (and black as well). I hypothesized that the difference could be attributed to culture, perhaps the work ethic of poor immigrant families.
The blogger Life On the Fall Line countered by suggesting that the superior statewide performance of disadvantaged, English-proficient Hispanics could be attributed to the fact that nearly three-fifths of Virginia’s Hispanic population resides in Northern Virginia, which spends more money per pupil on schools, while most whites and blacks live downstate. “So,” he concluded, “yes, Virginia, schools with superior financial resources matter.”
That sounded like a potentially valid point, so I decided to drill deeper into the Virginia Department of Education “Virginia SOL Assessment Build-A-Table,” to see if that was the case. The chart below compares disadvantaged, English-proficient whites and Hispanics in Fairfax County, Northern Virginia’s largest school division. And for yucks, I threw in disadvantaged, English-proficient Asians and blacks.
It turns out that Life on the Fall Line had a point. While poor, English-proficient Hispanics still out-performed their white counterparts, it was by such a narrow margin — less than one percentage point — that it could well fall into the margin of error.
But another stark finding jumps out from this table. Poor Asian kids kicked every other group’s academic ass by a wide margin. These are poor kids, mind you, not the sons and daughters of Indian software engineers and PhDs, whom you’d expect to excel. And, sadly, poor blacks under-performed by an equally large margin.
The response of the structuralists (those who believe that institutional structures discriminate against blacks) will be to say, “Drill down deeper! Look at the allocation of resources school by school.” That would be a worthwhile exercise for anyone who has the energy to do it. I welcome any contributions. But if differences in performance are mainly structural, not cultural, someone needs to explain the exceptional performance of Asian students. Do poor Asian kids attend the best schools with greater resources? If so, how do they pull it off? If they’re disadvantaged, they have no greater resources than their poor white, Hispanic or black peers to move into the top school districts.
While we’re at it, if school resources were the decisive factor, how do we explain that poor Hispanics outperform poor blacks? Do Hispanics not face as much discrimination and institutional racism as blacks?
From my reading of the data, it looks like once Hispanic students master English, they pass the SOLs at the same rate as white students. As I said before, that’s great news. It suggests that Hispanics are rapidly assimilating into mainstream Virginia culture. However, that still leaves the matter of Asians and blacks. How do we explain the persistent superior performance of one group and the under-performance of the other, if not in part by culture?
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