The Color of Mind: Why the Origins of the Achievement Gap Matter for Justice

by Derrick Darby, John L. Rury

Overview

"An indispensable text for understanding educational racial injustice and contributing to initiatives to mitigate it." —Educational Theory
American students vary in educational achievement, but white students in general typically have better test scores and grades than black students. Why is this the case, and what can school leaders do about it? In The Color of Mind, Derrick Darby and John L. Rury answer these pressing questions and show that we cannot make further progress in closing the achievement gap until we understand its racist origins.
Telling the story of what they call the Color of Mind—the idea that there are racial differences in intelligence, character, and behavior—they show how philosophers, such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant, and American statesman Thomas Jefferson, contributed to the construction of this pernicious idea, how it influenced the nature of schooling and student achievement, and how voices of dissent such as Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and W.E.B. Du Bois debunked the Color of Mind and worked to undo its adverse impacts.
Rejecting the view that racial differences in educational achievement are a product of innate or cultural differences, Darby and Rury uncover the historical interplay between ideas about race and American schooling, to show clearly that the racial achievement gap has been socially and institutionally constructed. School leaders striving to bring justice and dignity to American schools today must work to root out the systemic manifestations of these ideas within schools, while still doing what they can to mitigate the negative effects of poverty, segregation, inequality, and other external factors that adversely affect student achievement. While we can't expect schools alone to solve these vexing social problems, we must demand that they address the injustices associated with how we track, discipline, and deal with special education that reinforce long-standing racist ideas. That is the only way to expel the Color of Mind from schools, close the racial achievement gap, and afford all children the dignity they deserve.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226525495
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	12/22/2022
Series:	History and Philosophy of Education Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	870 KB

About the Author

Derrick Darby is professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Rights, Race, and Recognition, and coeditor, with Tommie Shelby, of Hip Hop and Philosophy: Rhyme 2 Reason. John L. Rury is professor of education and, by courtesy, history and African and African American Studies at the University of Kansas. His other books include Education and Social Change, The African American Struggle for Secondary Schooling with Shirley A. Hill, and Education and Women's Work.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Racial Achievement Gap

The nation's school report card, issued by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), documents trends in student achievement. It offers a snapshot of how different age cohorts perform on standardized reading and mathematics tests. Over time, NAEP indicates whether the racial achievement gap between black students and their white classmates is narrowing and, consequently, whether we are making good on the promise of equal educational opportunity. It also helps us to assess whether major education reforms, such as No Child Left Behind, have achieved their objectives. However, although NAEP and other quantitative reports are useful resources for marking progress on standardized tests, they delineate the achievement gap in largely statistical terms.

Framing the Achievement Gap

Social scientists define achievement gaps as stable and statistically significant differences in the average performance of students at the same grade level but from distinct demographic or economic groups on standardized tests. Such gaps, typically presented in figures like the ones below, are calculated with national, statewide, and local datasets, and extend over varying intervals of time. The figures below show black-white differences in NAEP for reading and mathematics between 1973 and 2004, for seventeen-year-olds across the country. Basically, they indicate that the racial achievement gap — the difference between black and white scores — shrank by about 40 percent in less than two decades and then stabilized. Today, the gap remains about what it was thirty-five years ago. Data regarding the racial achievement gap can be parsed by gender and socioeconomic status, but gaps between black and white students, while reduced, continue to be evident when gender and socioeconomic status are statistically controlled. Relatively affluent black males generally perform worse on standardized tests in math and reading than their white counterparts. In other words, contrary to the suggestion that social class or gender may matter more than race in terms of achievement differences, evidence of the black-white gap exists even when considering blacks and whites of comparable economic status, or males and females.

These and similar data inform reports about where the nation stands on the achievement gap. Although this gap is certainly not confined to major urban areas, it is particularly acute in places having large numbers of poor black and other minority students. And despite considerable convergence in the racial achievement gap during the 1970s and 1980s, progress has stalled in the interim. Moreover, disparities persist in school factors other than grades and test performance that affect academic achievement. A report released by the UCLA Civil Rights Project found that in 2012, black secondary students were more than three times more likely than whites to be suspended from school (23 percent of blacks and 7 percent of whites). Other studies have found that the dropout rate for black high school students has been nearly double that for whites. Such factors pose serious challenges to promoting black student achievement. More than sixty years after the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision, substantial racial differences in educational accomplishment remain pervasive.

Explaining the Gap

In 1966, Congress authorized a study to assess equality of opportunity in schools. Led by sociologist James Coleman, it marked the beginning of systematic research on educational achievement by social scientists. Coleman investigated the effect of school resources on educational outcomes and determined that it was relatively modest. He found that family background was a stronger predictor of variation in student achievement (test scores) than levels of school funding, teacher characteristics, or other facets of institutions. Subsequent research corroborated these findings. Although more recent studies have found that Coleman underestimated the contributions of schooling to achievement differences, his report still gives credence to arguments against additional resources for institutions serving poor and minority students. On the other hand, Coleman did help to focus new attention on families, and by extension the alleged "failures" and "deficiencies" of black kids, their parents, and their communities. The extensive tradition of social-scientific research flowing from this perspective has profoundly influenced studies of the racial achievement gap. Researchers utilize a wide variety of data sources, yet the range of explanations for variation in achievement remains narrow. And in the public mind, traditionally racist perspectives persist. In what follows, we sort prevailing explanations of the achievement gap into three broad categories, representing factors said to influence racial differences in academic performance. We also associate them with contemporary political viewpoints.

1. Is It Innate?

A requisite starting point is an explanation dating at least to the eighteenth century. Are black students coming up short in school when measured against white children because they are innately less intelligent? This is a controversial question today, but it has not always been so. Indeed, the view that black people are innately less intelligent than white people, and generally inferior to them, was once a widely shared belief.

Southern writers defended slavery by arguing that Africans were inherently unequal, or, as one put it, "an inferior species, or at least variety of human race." Even in the North, prominent anti-slavery minister William Ellery Channing could describe blacks in 1835 as naturally "affectionate, imitative and docile," a more affirmative yet still demeaning portrayal. Such ideas were very slow to change. Nearly seven decades later, philanthropist Robert C. Ogden complained about the "childish characteristics" of African Americans, and declared that "a school of domestic training" was appropriate for their education in New York.

Regardless of their views about involuntary servitude, most whites nonetheless believed that blacks were naturally mentally inferior to whites, and many thought the point beyond dispute. Indeed, near the end of the century in 1890, just six years before the US Supreme Court would uphold racial segregation as a principle of law in Plessy v. Ferguson, former Confederate soldier and US senator from Alabama John T. Morgan made the point this way: "The inferiority of the negro [sic] race, as compared with the white race, is so essentially true, and so obvious, that to assume it in argument, cannot be justly attributed to prejudice." Such beliefs survived well into the twentieth century, and historically were associated with conservatives, or the Right.

It is tempting to think that such beliefs about black intellectual capacity are no longer influential. Yet occasionally, they still surface in public discourse. Moreover, research continues to uncover evidence of their persistence. According to survey data, from 1977 to 1996 the percentage of whites believing blacks to be innately less intelligent and capable of learning than whites dropped from 27 to 10. Interestingly, when the same survey did not attribute learning differences to genetic factors, the percentage doubting-black intelligence increased dramatically to 53. Clearly, many whites still harbor doubts about black intellectual ability, even though far fewer accept genetic explanations for it. Thus, it is reasonable to agree with the study's conclusion: "There is little prospect that 'rumors of inferiority' will cease or that racial differences in estimates of students' potential will disappear."

A variation of the inferiority argument has been to attribute black underachievement not to innate racial differences in intelligence but to laziness or "shiftlessness," a lack of effort, motivation, or focus. The claim is that black kids generally don't do as well as whites on measures of academic achievement because they fail to work as hard. Researchers who study racial stereotypes have observed correlations in public attitudes about race between traits such as "hardworking" or "lazy" and "intelligent" and "unintelligent." And they find that whites are more likely to view blacks as less intelligent or indolent. When assessed in 1990, nearly 65 percent of whites viewed blacks as less hardworking, while a little below 60 percent deemed them less intelligent. In one sense, the appeal to laziness in explaining black underachievement may seem to be an advance over genetic explanations; it appears to be a less pessimistic racial stereotype, portraying underachievement as something that can be remedied. But appearances often are deceiving.

The shift from innate stupidity to laziness in explaining black underachievement is hardly an advance. Both views perpetuate the presumption of black inferiority, no matter the ultimate explanation, and both are generally associated with social conservatives politically. Indeed, the observed correlations between these traits in historically recent studies of racial attitudes suggest that they represent the same pernicious construct. Whether it is genes or lack of character, both explanations of black-white achievement differences imply that it is something endogenous to black kids that best explains why they do not perform better on tests.

2. Is It Due to Family Background?

As noted above, an important legacy of the Coleman Report has been a focus on family background as an explanation of the black-white achievement gap. This is a common factor cited in social scientific discussions of the gap, focusing on a child's home life and key family characteristics such as the number of parents, along with their income, wealth, and education. It also includes parental behavior, such as how much they read to their kids and how discipline is handled at home, with some researchers noting racial differences in such activities. Political scientist Robert Putnam offers telling accounts about how family background, especially parental socioeconomic status, remains a strong correlate of success in school and social mobility. And although gender and race continue to pose special challenges, the interplay of financial resources, family structure, and parenting loom large in determining life prospects in this account. It is a valuable insight, but it is almost certainly not the whole story.

Putnam highlights kids from families of modest means, from single-parent households, or from broken homes in working-class and even ghetto neighborhoods. He argues that during the 1950s, poor white and black kids had much better prospects of achieving success than their counterparts today. But race was definitely a major factor. As one African American respondent, Jesse of Port Clinton, Ohio, recalled, "The hardest part [of growing up] was not being accepted as a human being." Despite this, Putnam suggests that black children's "humble class origins did not prevent them from using their talents and work ethic to achieve great upward mobility, any more than comparably modest family backgrounds prevented [white children] from gaining success in life." This speaks against the stereotype of indolent blacks, but success was not always due to talent and diligence. For kids rising up from humble beginnings, it was also about being rooted in circumstances that did not pose nearly insurmountable obstacles. Even if Jesse was fortunate in this regard, many other blacks certainly were not.

Putnam also describes the more recent case of a black youth who lived, off and on, with his mother in Atlanta and a grandfather in New Orleans. Verbal and physical abuse, alcoholism, and general neglect were norms in these households. Peers proved to be negative influences, and his neighborhoods were sites of everyday mayhem, factors that can raise stress levels and inhibit learning. Even though he struggled in school, receiving bad grades and an expulsion for skipping class, he managed to graduate. His story shows how neighborhood poverty and vice can pose major obstacles to achievement. Success in this case was also far from simply being about inherent talent, work ethic, or willpower. Kids similarly endowed in these respects today, but placed in dramatically different neighborhood environments, are bound to have quite dissimilar routes to achievement.

While these insights highlight the significance of the family as a social institution, they also point to its limitations as an arbiter of success. Furthermore, this explanation of the achievement gap speaks to both conservative and liberal political viewpoints, with one emphasizing the importance of family responsibility, the other the power of the family's immediate social context. Many black communities have been ravaged by segregation, unemployment, mass incarceration, extreme poverty, and political neglect, although, as we argue in chapter 6, these are structural problems school leaders cannot fix. As sociologist William Julius Wilson and other scholars have demonstrated, countless families crumbled in the face of these developments, and their children suffered the consequences. Whether this was due to irresponsibility, changing social and economic conditions, or the war on drugs, it has nonetheless contributed to the racial achievement gap.

3. Is It the Legacy of Discrimination?

Many people are skeptical about explanations of the achievement gap that focus on either black kids or their families. They suggest, rather, that the problem is the vast overrepresentation of black children among the most disadvantaged Americans. Liberals tend to hold this view. One cannot consider the achievement gap, they argue, without reflecting on the country's long legacy of racial discrimination. And this requires attention to broader issues such as segregation, societal prejudice, and political contributions to racial differences in educational achievement and attainment. These are particularly daunting issues that direct attention far beyond the schoolyard. Moreover, their resolution will undoubtedly entail a radical redistribution of resources, which will require sweeping political change not likely to occur in the immediate future. While social justice school leaders will also complain about these things, some will also rightly point out that these problems are beyond their power and authority. School leaders are responsible for what goes on inside the building, not outside it. Of course, they hope that a positive school experience which encourages achievement in a supportive climate will ameliorate the impact of adverse experiences students encounter at home, in their neighborhoods, and elsewhere outside school.

Educational researcher Gloria Ladson-Billings has called for a shift from discussing the racial achievement gap to considering an "educational debt" that stems from a long intervening national history of inferior schooling for African Americans. Since parental education is such a critical factor in the achievement of successive generations of children, the unequal provision of schooling in the past still affects the success of black students today. Linda Darling-Hammond elaborates on this idea by calling for more attention to the "opportunity gap," or contemporary inequalities in access to educational resources. The endemic poverty of many predominantly African American communities, linked to a lack of jobs and residential segregation, often means that local schools are inadequately funded. Darling-Hammond points out that fiscal resources, good leadership, and thoughtful, committed teachers can have a significant impact on the lives of young people in such circumstances. Along with Ladson-Billings, she takes issue with the basic argument of the Coleman Report, which directed attention away from schools as educative agencies and money as an indispensable resource. These scholars certainly recognize the importance of family and community factors in achievement, but place structural and institutional factors in the spotlight.

The educational debt and the opportunity gap are products of history. Shortchanging the educational experiences of one generation affects those that follow. Parental attainment is widely seen as the single most important determinant of kids' school success by social scientists. Denying education over successive generations prevented the development of this vital resource in black communities. This is yet another dimension of Ladson-Billings's point about historically rooted disadvantage. We offer a more detailed account of the relevant history in subsequent chapters. This matters today for understanding racial differences in academic achievement, and for explaining how existing school practices that sustain the Color of Mind are profoundly unjust.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Introduction: What School Leaders Need to Know

One     The Racial Achievement Gap
Two     The Color of Mind: Constructing Racial Differences in Intellect, Character, and Conduct
Three   The Color of Schooling: Constructing the Racial Achievement Gap
Four     Voices of Dissent: Dispelling an Inglorious Fallacy
Five     “A Tangle of Pathology”: The Color of Mind Takes a Cultural Turn
Six       What Schools Cannot Fix: Poverty, Inequality, and Segregation
Seven  Old Poison in New Bottles: How the Color of Mind Thrives in Schools and Affects Achievement
Eight   Why We Sort Kids in School
Nine    Unjust Schools: Why the Origins of the Achievement Gap Matter

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

‘A mind is a terrible thing to waste’—but if the minds in question are black, then from the perspective of white racist educational policies, there’s really nothing much to lose to begin with. In this powerful indictment of the long history of discriminatory practices in U.S. schools, Derrick Darby and John L. Rury demonstrate how traditional racist assumptions about the ‘color of mind’ have systematically denied black students equal dignity and respect, and created the longstanding racial achievement gap in education. They demand corrective educational justice—a demand every decent American should support.

Charles W. Mills

"The Color of Mind belongs to a series, History and Philosophy of Education, that aims to bring a humanities perspective to issues of education generally dominated by the social sciences. The book entirely vindicates the value of this approach. It brings an unaccustomed and quite valuable historical sweep to three issues: the development of the color of mind ideology, intellectual criticisms of that ideology, and the history of educational practices with respect to black Americans, including black-led educational institutions during the segregation era. Additionally, it brings a rich normative philosophical perspective to an area often hobbled by the value neutrality of the social sciences. . . . Darby and Rury’s sweep of intellectual history here will be familiar to contemporary philosophers of race, but it is particularly illuminating in the context of education, showing that contemporary views of black students are deeply embedded in American history. . . . The Color of Mind will be an indispensable text for understanding educational racial injustice and contributing to initiatives to mitigate it."

Educational Theory

‘Achievement gap’—the phrase seems as normal or natural as anything we know about education. However, The Color of Mind meticulously documents the historical, social, political, and cultural context in which disparity was manufactured and is currently maintained. Everyone who cares about educational inequality should read this book.

Gloria J. Ladson-Billings

"There is, of course, no dearth of American scholarship on these themes, and the reader may be forgiven for thinking she will encounter little that isn’t already known. Fortunately, however, the tack the authors take deviates in several important ways from most scholarship. . . . Given the book's title and theme, it is reasonable to assume that most readers will be those already convinced of its premises . . . . But it would be a shame if this book were read only by those already ‘in the know’. It would equally be a shame if the book's genealogical approach were to suggest to non-American readers that the Color of Mind is a uniquely American phenomenon. . . . though it was not the authors’ intention to shed light on institutionally racist thinking outside of the United States, for those with eyes to see, this book also issues an invitation to begin moving in that direction. It is long overdue."

Theory and Research in Education

The Color of Mind is timely intervention into debates and discourses about the relationship between race, justice, and American education. From philosophy it offers a useful genealogy of the ethics of white supremacy and its impact on mutual racial respect; from history it offers a lean and direct account of the development of not only education policy but also the background conditions that preempted certain policies while making others possible. The authors have done a remarkable thing - they have made the hard work of pairing conceptual and historical work on an issue and topic that has been at the center of American debates for more than a century look easy and effortless to read.

Christopher J. Lebron

"The Color of Mind insists that no educational reform can succeed without teachers and school leaders knowing that black children were never supposed to learn or achieve by the same standards of their white counterparts. This pernicious idea and practice is at the root of today’s black-white achievement gap. Knowing this history is the first and most consequential step towards ensuring that every school respects the dignity of black lives and black minds. Then comes the obvious, as this brilliant work shows: dismantling every policy of racially disparate tracking, disciplining or special education if real justice is ever to be achieved."

Khalil Gibran Muhammad

"The Color of Mind insists that no educational reform can succeed without teachers and school leaders knowing that black children were never supposed to learn or achieve by the same standards of their white counterparts. This pernicious idea and practice is at the root of today's black-white achievement gap. Knowing this history is the first and most consequential step towards ensuring that every school respects the dignity of black lives and black minds. Then comes the obvious, as this brilliant work shows: dismantling every policy of racially disparate tracking, disciplining or special education if real justice is ever to be achieved."--Khalil Gibran Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America

"The Color of Mind is timely intervention into debates and discourses about the relationship between race, justice, and American education. From philosophy it offers a useful genealogy of the ethics of white supremacy and its impact on mutual racial respect; from history it offers a lean and direct account of the development of not only education policy but also the background conditions that preempted certain policies while making others possible. The authors have done a remarkable thing - they have made the hard work of pairing conceptual and historical work on an issue and topic that has been at the center of American debates for more than a century look easy and effortless to read."--Christopher J. Lebron, Johns Hopkins University

"'A mind is a terrible thing to waste'--but if the minds in question are black, then from the perspective of white racist educational policies, there's really nothing much to lose to begin with. In this powerful indictment of the long history of discriminatory practices in U.S. schools, Derrick Darby and John L. Rury demonstrate how traditional racist assumptions about the 'color of mind' have systematically denied black students equal dignity and respect, and created the longstanding racial achievement gap in education. They demand corrective educational justice--a demand every decent American should support."--Charles W. Mills, Graduate Center, City University of New York

"'Achievement gap'--the phrase seems as normal or natural as anything we know about education. However, The Color of Mind meticulously documents the historical, social, political, and cultural context in which disparity was manufactured and is currently maintained. Everyone who cares about educational inequality should read this book."--Gloria J. Ladson-Billings, University of Wisconsin

"The Color of Mind belongs to a series, History and Philosophy of Education, that aims to bring a humanities perspective to issues of education generally dominated by the social sciences. The book entirely vindicates the value of this approach. It brings an unaccustomed and quite valuable historical sweep to three issues: the development of the color of mind ideology, intellectual criticisms of that ideology, and the history of educational practices with respect to black Americans, including black-led educational institutions during the segregation era. Additionally, it brings a rich normative philosophical perspective to an area often hobbled by the value neutrality of the social sciences. . . . Darby and Rury's sweep of intellectual history here will be familiar to contemporary philosophers of race, but it is particularly illuminating in the context of education, showing that contemporary views of black students are deeply embedded in American history. . . . The Color of Mind will be an indispensable text for understanding educational racial injustice and contributing to initiatives to mitigate it."-- "Educational Theory"

"There is, of course, no dearth of American scholarship on these themes, and the reader may be forgiven for thinking she will encounter little that isn't already known. Fortunately, however, the tack the authors take deviates in several important ways from most scholarship. . . . Given the book's title and theme, it is reasonable to assume that most readers will be those already convinced of its premises . . . . But it would be a shame if this book were read only by those already 'in the know'. It would equally be a shame if the book's genealogical approach were to suggest to non-American readers that the Color of Mind is a uniquely American phenomenon. . . . though it was not the authors' intention to shed light on institutionally racist thinking outside of the United States, for those with eyes to see, this book also issues an invitation to begin moving in that direction. It is long overdue."-- "Theory and Research in Education"

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