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EDUCATION

Living With the Tests

Why do certain black students succeed?

By ELLIS COSE

STANDARDIZED TESTS AREN ‘T Satan's tools, but they make unending racial mischief. They fuel theories of race based intellectual inferiority, and block admission of upwardly mobile blacks and Latinos to top universities.

Affirmative action has helped to mitigate the effects. But as support for affirmative action withers, reliance on such tests will only increase. Blacks and Hispanics (who, on average, test less well than whites and Asians) will suffer-unless a way is found to close the test-performance gap.

A new and as-yet-unpublished study sponsored by the Mellon Foundation offers insights into how that gap may eventually be closed. The study, by Mellon program officer and counsel Stephanie Bell-Rose in collaboration with the Urban Institute, analyzed College Board questionnaire data from the roughly 100,000 blacks who took

the SAT in 1996. By focusing on the fewer than 5 percent who earned a combined score of 1200 or above, Bell-Rose and her colleagues hoped to isolate the factors responsible for their success. (A separate Mellon study to be released this week examines the long-term impact of affirmative action.) The researchers uncovered no magic formula, but they did confirm that blacks who do best on tests have experiences in common that may be replicable, and that they are both similar to and different from whites who score in the same range.

While high-scoring blacks tend to be better off economically than their lower- scoring black peers, they are disadvantaged (in terms of income and other relevant measures) when compared with high-scoring whites. As expected, black students from private and Catholic schools fare better than those from public schools. Still, three fourths of high achievers were from public schools. And much of the advantage of a Catholic education washed out when compared with those of public school students with similar extracurricular activities and courses.

The biggest difference between the high and low scorers was not the type of school they attended, but the specific courses and extracurricular activities they undertook. Unlike most of those who did poorly, the overwhelming majority of the high scorers had taken calculus and honors English. They were also much more likely to take on intellectually challenging extracurricular activities such as

journalism, public speaking and debate.

Many also seem to have been blessed with parents who stressed education, and with inner faith as unyielding as steel. Nicole Sherwood, a 19-year-old now at Harvard, credits two things for her academic success: a supportive family and her good fortune to attend schools - such as Fieldston, a private academy in the Bronx, N.Y. -where achievement was nurtured.

Carolanda Bremond, of Sugar Land, Texas, credits her own self-confidence and college-educated parents for the academic persistence that got her to Wellesley College. She confronted low expectations in her hometown, where some residents were shocked, despite her stellar grades and test scores, that she had any serious aspirations. "People came up and asked what junior college I was going to," Bremond recalls.

The Mellon-Urban Institute study was not designed to measure the impact of such negative preconceptions, but experts don't doubt that they exist. Claude Steele, a Stanford psychologist, believes such stereotypes impose substantial pressures on blacks that thwart academic performance. James Comer, professor of child psychiatry at Yale and author of "Waiting for a Miracle," thinks blacks often undermine their

own development. When he was a student half a century ago, recalls Comer, the black community "supported and expected high achievement." He would like to see that spirit re-created. The National Urban League and others are trying. It has declared September "achievement month" and is sponsoring activities promoting academic excellence.

Steele worries that in pursuit of higher scores, Americans may lose sight of the larger picture. The SAT, he estimates, measures only 18 percent of those things that influence freshman college grades, and even less of what makes for a successful life. He believes Americans should focus on the whole array of negative influences including poverty and prejudice) that depress black achievement. He concedes, however, that as long as standardized tests play such a crucial role it is essential to improve black performance on them.

The Mellon study gives some sense of what it might take to do that. It also makes what may be an even more important point: that even for most academically motivated blacks, the educational White environment is significantly inferior to that enjoyed by most whites. That such numbers still manage to do well says volumes about what could happen if America really got serious about educational equity.

Closing the Performance Gap

Public-high-school students who earn 1200 or better on the SAT

have a lot more in common than high scores, regardless of race.

African-American White

| |ALL |OVER 1200 | |ALL |OVER 1200 |

|XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX |XXXXXX |XXXXX |X |XXXXX |XXXXX |

|Percent taking calculus |11% |59% | |23% |58% |

|Percent taking honors English |28% |76% | |40% |74% |

|Percent of neighbors with B.A.s |18% |26% | |25% |30% |

|Median income of neighborhood |$34.8 |$41.6 | |$43.5 |$47.3 |

SOURCE: MELLON FOUNDATION/URBAN INSTITUTE

SEPTEMBER 14, 1998 NEWSWEEK p. 65

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