Are rich, white kids smarter? A rant.

It's pretty obvious if one looks at grades, test scores, attendance records, college acceptance...  Pretty much any standard of measurement out there, that upper-middle class, white children are more successful than students of other socio-economic classes.  One of the primary purposes of 2001's No Child Left Behind Act was to close this "Achievement Gap" in the United States.

But are rich, white kids smarter?  Do children really inherit a social or genetic predisposition to academic success?

Sugata Mitra, an educator in India began to wonder why it was that all of the children of wealthy people he knew were "gifted."  He wondered what would happen if you gave poor kids access to the same enrichment materials that their wealthier counterparts had.  He found that, given access to materials and left completely to their own devices, students who had never seen a computer, who didn't even know how to read, acquired knowledge at a rate as great or greater than those studying in traditional classrooms.  His "Hole in the Wall" project has sparked an international movement promoting project-based learning, peer teaching, and cloud schools.

Mitra and his Hole in the Wall computers.

So how do poor kids in India compare to those in the United States?  Why do poor kids in the United States who are given access to public education perform at consistently lower levels than their wealthier counterparts?

It isn't just a matter of access to enrichment materials.  It is also how students interact with the materials that are provided to them.

Middle- and upper-class students are setup to succeed with standardized tests, which is the most common method of sorting through college applicants, tracking into enrichment programs, and determining student, even teacher, success.  Not only do children from higher socio-economic statuses experience, on average, more enriching and healthy environments in utero onward but most of the contextual questions on standardized tests, worksheets, and in textbooks are geared toward the suburbanite and leave the urban and rural dwelling kids at a loss. 

An elementary teacher who spent nine years teaching in Gambell, Alaska told me that her students, on a state-mandated standardized test, were given pictures of a whale, a cat and a cow and told to circle the one that they eat.  The students in Gambell DO eat one of the three on a regular basis but it AIN’T the cow or the cat. 

Successful spring whale hunt in Gambell

So even if they've changed the names on the tests in the last decade and now Jamaal and Constancia are part of the story, what do Billy George and Anna-May McCoy know from breaking ten dollar bills at the mall after getting off a 15 mile train ride?  Details like that make a huge difference, especially to younger kids who are, possibly, left to wonder why a splitting maul needs so much money.

In a class I attended during my Master's program we were led in a debate over a hypothetical “case study.”  Students from a poor, urban environment were being bussed into an affluent, suburban school in order to raise their test scores.  The principal of that school did not integrate the students into the rest of the student body, however.  He kept them together in isolated classes in an isolated wing in order to, he said, give them time to adjust and to bring their scores up to par before mixing them with the rest of the population.

Controversy over busing has occurred since its inception.

A teacher from the kids’ previous school had transferred with them and the question of the case study was “What obligation, if any, did she have to those students and to her new principal?”

I was struck at how my class worked and weaseled to try to figure out how Ms. Blah-blah could get those kids a fair shot in the school when my thought was WHY are we trying to integrate those hard-working, blue-collar kids into a population of snotty, entitled, shallow, sheltered, materialistic brats?  Why on earth do we believe that their middle and upper class, white culture is desirable?  What is it about that culture that raises those kids’ test scores?  The nice classrooms?  The new jeans?  The grassy playing field?  Isn't this program just another form of the BIA's relocation program?

What makes the difference is that those little suburbanites have probably never had to worry about where their next meal is coming from, if they’re going to make it home safely after school and they've had books and iPads in their pudgy, white fingers from the time they could eat their Gerber Strawberry-Apple Puffs.  Plus the entire curriculum of this nation and every test that those suburbanite white kids will ever take has been written glorifying the lifestyle that they lead.

It is interesting to me that we would rather focus on changing our methods of education and evaluation than try to address the very real issues that are ACTUALLY causing the problems!  Those problems being that lots of little kids don’t have decent health care, food to eat or education!  I absolutely agree that all students would benefit from project-based, student-driven learning and SIGNIFICANTLY less time spent preparing for standardized tests.  But shouldn't we also be addressing the issues that create disparities between the classes as well?