White, Black and Then There Was Brown:
Remembering the landmark court case, Brown vs. Board Of Education and working to uplift its original intention
by Tanisia Morris
Issue date: 2/1/06 Section: News
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Since 1995, Researchers like Dr. Claude Steele and Dr. Joshua Aronson have attributed black underperformance on standardized test to stereotyping. The experiments they conducted revealed that when black sophomores from Stanford University were told that the verbal test they were going to take measured their intellectual abilities, they scored less than their white classmates. The results were astonishing because Steele and Aronson had grouped both black and white students based on the fact that both groups were on the same intellectual level to begin with. In a more informative study, students were asked to complete words that were missing two letters. Steele and Aronson found that more blacks completed the fragments using words that could be used to undermine their intellectual abilities.
Steele and Aronson concluded that black students were pessimistically affected by stereotypes that undermined their intellectual abilities and by findings that revealed their inferiority when compared with other groups. Although this may be one cause as to why blacks often do poorer than other students in school, there may be other reasons. Perhaps it is a factor that many use as an excuse to explain the gap, rather than trying to uncover all the possible reasons, and seek a solution that is worth implementing.
Educators have tried to minimize the gap between blacks and whites by creating intensive programs and educational standards that focus on preparing students for the level of work required of them later on in their education. But the "five-year gap between the races, as the Education Trust observed - does not pose an optimistic prospect for admissions of black
students to our four-year colleges and universities during the years ahead," says Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage Inequalities. These strategies might be the causes for why blacks and whites are so far apart when it comes to education. According to Kozol, "they undermine the capability of children of minorities to thrive with confidence and satisfaction in the mainstream of American society".