One of the more interesting public schools in the country is Carpenter Elementary, in a fairly expensive neighborhood of the San Fernando Valley up against the Hollywood Hills, because every several years its small number of black students average higher on at least one standardized achievement test than its white majority.
For example, the current Great Schools page shows the 4% of students who are black slightly outscoring (on California’s English test) the 73% who are white, which is an extremely high percentage of whites for an inner-ring suburb public school on the West Coast in 2023.
(On math, whites currently slightly outscore blacks, but it’s still close.) The sample size of black students is so small that these results fluctuate from year to year, usually with whites in the lead, but I recall one time a half dozen years or so ago in which blacks outscored whites on average across all the subjects.
I’ve never seen any study of why this is so.
Carpenter Elementary is, by all accounts, a very good public school with fine teachers and impressive support from the parents.
Its reputation is so high that it sometimes has scandals in which students’ parents are discovered to have rented studio apartments in the district in order to get their child into Carpenter. (Scandals in which it’s discovered that the family doesn’t actually live in that little apartment near the school, instead Dad just uses it as his office to write his screenplays there, are the good kind of scandals for a school to have.)
The neighborhood is popular among the more family-oriented middle ranks of the entertainment industry. (Close by are two of the more culturally conservative TV networks, Hallmark and CBS.)
My guess would be that blacks in the mid-ranks of the entertainment industry (i.e., not stars you’ve heard of, but, say, voice-over actors or other skilled professionals respected in their specific fields but not world famous) are well above the black average in IQ, while whites in the entertainment industry are less above the white average in IQ than more typical members of the upper middle class like tech workers, lawyers, and accountants. (Only 10% of Carpenter’s students are Asian, which is extremely low for a high-achieving school in a safe neighborhood in California, but there aren’t that many jobs for Asians where Laurel Canyon Boulevard is a main commuting artery.)
Also, most black kids at the school live there due to their parents’ or at most distance grandparents’ prosperity, while some of the white students live there due to great-grandparents buying a house in the district in 1938 or whenever. (The developer of the neighborhood in the late 1920s was Mack Sennett of the Keystone Cops silent slapstick comedies):
The famous Proposition 13 in 1978 changed the property tax system so Californians wouldn’t be driven out of their homes by property taxes due to rising property values. So California neighborhoods, due to lower property taxes for long-time residents, probably have a wider dispersal of classes than in high property-tax states like Illinois and Texas, where lower-income people are driven out of expensive neighborhoods by massive property-tax bills.
(I haven’t seen this researched, but my impression from looking at a lot of real estate in Chicago’s super-suburbs like Lake Forest and Wilmette is that you move in when your kids are ready for school, and your kids get superb services like free summer camps in return for you exorbitant property taxes, and then you move out when they move out or when you retire and can no longer afford the giant property taxes.)
But Proposition 13 benefits California whites in that their ancestors got there first and built what are now a lot of nice neighborhoods and their descendants can afford to hold out in them even if they aren’t the highest earning people in California at present.
A more typical example is this from Berkeleyside:
Achievement gap in Berkeley schools has long been among the nation’s very worst
BUSD has spent decades striving to close the gap between Black and Latino students and their white and Asian peers but has yielded only limited success.
By Ally Markovich
Aug. 30, 2023, 2:30 p.m.A team of top education researchers at Stanford University analyzed nearly a decade’s worth of test score data, attempting to understand the gap that separated the results of white students from Asian, Black and Latino students nationwide.
Their study of scores from students in 3rd through 8th grade from 2009 to 2018 (at BUSD, just through 2016) found yawning gaps in reading and math scores at schools across the country.
But Berkeley Unified stood out more than nearly any other. Among the nation’s 5,000 largest districts, it had the second-largest gap in scores, behind only Washington, D.C.
It’s almost as if there were a correlation between % voted for Biden in 2020 and the racial gap in test scores. For example, Berkeley voted 93%-4% for Biden in 2020, second only to the barely still-existent East St. Louis. In the extremely still existent taxpayer-financed Washington, D.C., Biden won 92%-5%.
Five grade levels separated the reading and math scores of white and Black students in Berkeley. White students scored three grade levels above the national average in English and math, while Black students scored two grade levels below.
Obviously, the children of white Berkeley professors tend to be quite smart. On the other hand, Asians don’t like sending their kids to Berkeley public schools because the schools seem to be too Woke to help them get into UC Berkeley.
My impression is that Berkeley public schools take in not just blacks who can afford to live in Berkeley but some black students from adjacent slums like Oakland. This is a bad idea, not just for selection reasons, but also for treatment reasons: black parents at Berkeley schools have been known to complain that the schools are too progressive and woo-woo to give their kids the basics they need.
Early discourse around achievement gaps was rooted in racist pseudoscience
As efforts to address the achievement gap were underway, so was a fierce debate about the root cause of it.
Why, in a city that believes so staunchly in equality, is this problem so persistent?
The debate carried on with fervor in boardrooms, ivory towers and kitchen tables. Some in Berkeley blamed children’s families. Others blamed the school district. Meanwhile, academics laid out statistical arguments attributing poor academic outcomes to poverty and parent education.
“It’s been a really long time since I’ve heard anybody blame families.”—Dana Moran, Berkeley High ethnic studies teacher since 1993
The origins of discourse around racial achievement gaps date back to the 19th century, when pseudoscientists measured the size of human skulls and attributed the differences to genetic inferiority. Scientific racism was used to explain differences in everything from IQ to health outcomes. Debunked in the 20th century,
DEBUNKED I tell you. Of course, nobody remembers exactly who debunked it or how, but, trust me, it was DEBUNKED. You might think that the heroic debunker of The Bell Curve would still be remembered in Berkeley, but it just shows how systemically racist even Berkeley is that nobody can precisely remember who or what debunked The Bell Curve.
the arguments morphed into a social justification for the low test scores of nonwhite students and resurfaced with books like Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve.
People who still hold these ideas believe that inequality in test scores is fundamentally the result of deficits inherent to Black and brown people. That explanation shifted away from genetics to the cultural deficit argument that was popular in American discourse through Barack Obama’s presidency. Some in Berkeley put the responsibility of low test scores on “parents who don’t care.”
This view has increasingly fallen out of fashion in Berkeley. “It’s been a really long time since I’ve heard anybody blame their families, which is how it originally started,” said Dana Moran, an ethnic studies teacher at Berkeley High since 1993, though the case is still made in anonymous comments on Berkeleyside articles.
ANONYMOUS comments. Who would dare cite Occam’s Razor under his own name?
Data show that family wealth tracks closely to academic performance
As these arguments were unfolding, a growing body of research was developing that linked test scores with socioeconomic status, parents’ education and children’s achievement in school.
When it comes to economic inequality, Berkeley is particularly unequal. The median white household in Berkeley earns $128,000 per year, compared with $68,000 for Asian households, $67,000 for Latino households and $43,000 for the median Black household. About 80% of white and Asian adults in Berkeley have a bachelor’s degree, compared with half of Latino adults and 29% of Black adults.
It’s almost as if UC Berkeley’s 55 Nobel Laureates have tended to have smart children. It appears from their pictures as if 54 of Berkeley’s Nobelists have been white and one Chinese.
But to suggest that would be PSEUDOSCIENCE.
Together, these factors fundamentally shape children’s lives, from how much their parents read to them to how much chronic stress they experience on a daily basis. It means the difference between a parent who can pay for private tutoring for their struggling child and a parent who is struggling to put food on the table. Racism, separate from class, also leaves a mark on children’s ability to perform in school, research shows.
While Black Berkeley students score below grade-level on average, it’s the extremely high scores of white students that explain the city’s exceptional achievement gap.
In Berkeley, family income tracks neatly onto students’ academic performance. In 2000, students from the Zip codes with the wealthiest families had the highest GPAs, and the reverse was true, too. The wealthier the neighborhood, the better the students’ grades, with few exceptions.
Analyzing hundreds of millions of standardized test scores for American schools from 2009 to 2018, the Stanford researchers found the same trends were true at schools across the country. Their research found that parents’ income and educational level, as well as patterns of racial and ethnic segregation, were by far the most significant factors shaping achievement gaps.
A page in Unfinished Business shows that both household incomes and average GPAs were higher for ninth graders living in the Berkeley Hills than the Berkeley flats in 2000.
Most schools with large gaps in scores are not integrated like Berkeley. The Stanford researchers found school segregation to be the most important predictor of achievement gaps, but Berkeley—like districts in Evanston, Illinois, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Menlo Park—was an outlier in this trend.
It’s almost as if ultraliberal districts have
School districts with the smallest achievement gaps between students of different races tended to be places where all students performed poorly. The exceptions tended to be school districts serving wealthy students. The best test scores for Latino students in the country came from Briarhill Manor Union Free School in Westchester, where 4% of the student body is low-income.
Briarcliff Manor is in Westchester County, NY in between Pleasantville (which, indeed, is pleasant)
and Chappaqua, where the Clintons reside.
Of the largest 464 districts in California, there are none where Black students perform more than one grade level above the national average, but schools in wealthy enclaves like Orinda and Los Altos come the closest. Piedmont, an affluent city carved out of Oakland, is the only school district, among the state’s 772 largest, where Latino students score two grade levels above the national average.
In Berkeley, while Black students score below grade-level on average, it’s the extremely high scores of white students that explain Berkeley’s exceptional achievement gap. In Oakland, San Francisco and Los Angeles, Black students are slightly further behind than they are in Berkeley, but white students are not as far ahead as they are here.
It’s almost as blacks don’t thrive in extremely liberal places.
Similarly, the extremely liberal Shaker Heights suburb of Cleveland, home to progressive beau ideals like Paul Newman, has not managed over the last 70 years to close the white-black school achievement gap, as documented by Washington Post reporter and Shaker Heights grad Laura Meckler in her new book Dream Town. Meckler documents how the extremely liberal suburb of Cleveland, voting 88% for Biden in 2020, has repeatedly failed over the last 70 years at narrowing The Gap between white and black. In the Stanford database, Shaker Heights’ gap is a huge 4.3 grades.
