<p>Free article in the Chronicle of Higher Education takes a look at Skidmores opportunity programs to discuss the often taboo subject of the academic performance gap of minority students and the efforts some colleges are making to close the gap.</p>
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Susan B. Layden, who oversees Skidmore's efforts to promote minority achievement as associate dean of student affairs, is among a growing group of educators and researchers who believe that colleges must do far more to help minority students earn high grades.</p>
<p>"This is not rocket science," she says. "We can do this across higher education, especially at the elites."
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Education researchers and other social scientists have offered a host of explanations for such performance gaps, including the residual effects of slavery and segregation, the stigmatization of high academic achievers by their minority peers, and the lack of minority role models among college administrators and professors.
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<p>Well at least its not the fault of the students themselves not working hard, or their talents, skills, and intelligence level!!!!</p>
<p>I am intrigued about what educational approaches make Skidmore and its Opportunity Programs so successful and exceptional compared to other efforts going on at Amherst, Brandeis, Oberlin, Pomona, St. Lawrence, and Swarthmore, among other IHEs.
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Skidmore — a small, private, liberal-arts college in a town known for its horse tracks — has committed itself to taking in academic long shots and turning them into winners....In finding ways to increase the share of its minority students who perform at high levels, Skidmore is itself exceptional. ... Skidmore, with a total enrollment of about 2,400, annually admits about 40 freshmen whose failure to make the cut seems related to their disadvantaged backgrounds. Once they matriculate, the college provides them with support services intended to help them succeed academically.
<p>Taboo subject? Are you joking? The achievement gap is arguably the most discussed dilemma in education. Various articles and studies are published about it frequently.</p>
<p>Lake Washington - the OP article addresses the "academic performance gap" - not the achievement gap. The linked article goes to great lengths to describe it all in terms of an ignored and extremely touchy subject that opens a virtual pandora's box of controversial and "taboo" issues. </p>
<p>In any case, I do think that an "A" has no color because, it makes perfect sense to me that once students are able to break the cycle of failure and do well academically then they will feel good about themselves. This notion seems to run counter to "The conventional wisdom in academe ...that students will perform better academically if they feel good about themselves socially and personally."</p>
<p>asteriskea, I've always been impressed by your posts, but I'm puzzled here by your response to LakeWashington. I read the CHE article, and my response is the same as LakeWashington's. The terms "performance gap" and "achievement gap" are used interchangeably. And from my experience here in central California, that topic is endlessly discussed (though here it's the white/Hispanic achievement gap that gets attention). D's HS is predominantly Hispanic, and these kids score (statistically) low on every academic measure the school throws at them. It's impossible to attend any sort of meeting at school without being bombarded by speeches about the "achievement gap." The last principal was fond of talking about her tireless efforts to "close the gap." My daughter (a high achiever and a blonde) liked to joke that meant she and her gringo friends ought to skip some classes and lower their grades to help out the principal's efforts.</p>
<p>If students break the cycle of failure and do well academically, they still may not feel good about themselves if the people around them stigmatize them for their academic achievement.</p>
<p>About 30 years ago, I went to a high school where about 100 of the 400 students in my class were black. In that class, there was only one black student who was a high academic achiever. One of the reasons for this girl's success was that she was immune to stigmatization because she was the sister of the school's universally admired star athlete, and it was unthinkable for anyone to mess with that guy's sister. So she had total freedom to be and do whatever she wanted -- and what she happened to want was academics. I wonder how many other black students there were in my class who had as much ability and interest in academics as this girl did but who were discouraged from pursuing academic success by social pressures.</p>
<p>I wish I could say that things are totally different today than they were thirtysomething years ago, but I don't think that's the case.</p>
<p>Edited to add: One good thing has happened during the past 30 years, though. We now have a substantial number of new African immigrants in the U.S., and they're doing very well academically -- so well, in fact, that it is now obvious that the theory that poorer academic performance among African American kids is due to racial differences in intelligence is nonsense.</p>
<p>This is an issue examined for early school years by Roland G. Fryer, Jr. and Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics) with some surprising results. For example:
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Black children actually score slightly better than Whites in reading in the fall of kindergarten. Like math, however, blacks lose substantial ground relative to other racial groups in the first four years of school.
<p>There have been successful programs that improve the performance of historically underprepared college students. Project SOAR at Xavier University (though now called something different, I believe) and the Personalized Curriculum Institute of Malcolm X College (which may also be called something different now). These programs focused at great deal on analytical reasoning and inquiry skills as well as improved writing and math, etc skills.</p>
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its not the fault of the students themselves not working hard, or their talents, skills, and intelligence level
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<p>Right, it's not. Too many findings that these factors could not explain. But thanks for pointing out why some people fear that raising the question leads to this assumption.</p>
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university (of Maryland BC) has compiled data showing that participants have much higher grade-point averages, and are much more likely to get admitted to graduate programs in science, engineering, and math than are students of the same minority groups who emerged from high school with similar academic profiles.
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<p>So this is a difference not in what the kids to bring to college (ability, motivation), but what happens to them once the get there.</p>
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The discussion is further complicated by the effectiveness of many historically black and predominantly Hispanic colleges. Many of them produce large numbers of minority graduates with academic records strong enough to easily gain admission to most graduate programs and law and medical schools. Their relative success suggests that predominantly white colleges may place a distinct set of obstacles in the paths of minority students, an idea that can put campus administrators on the defensive.
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<p>It also frustrates those who want to claim that the black and Hispanic students are unprepared, not smart enough, or too lazy to succeed. If any of that were true, then why do they do well at the black and Hispanic colleges, and then in graduate or professional school? The informed faculty at majority colleges are also uncomfortable talking about it out of fear of worsening stereotype threat.</p>
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<p>"This is not rocket science," </p>
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<p>That's true -- it's much tougher than rocket science. Thousands of rockets have been successfully launched into space. If any institution in the country has solved the achievement gap in a racially diverse student population, then I haven't heard about it yet.</p>
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<p>Many of them produce large numbers of minority graduates with academic records strong enough to easily gain admission to most graduate programs and law and medical schools</p>
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<p>This is a wild overstatement, at least as it concerns law school. HBCUs do place a disproportionate number of black students in respected graduate programs. But the data show that the number of black college graduates with the "academic records" (i.e. pure numbers) to get into top-tier law schools without affirmative action is shockingly low, and that includes graduates of both HW and HBCUs. The pipeline just isn't there. That's why the population of black law students dwindled to virtually zero when the universities of California and Texas had to cease using affirmative action. Colleges of all kinds have a long, long way to go.</p>
<p>You're right. Very few who can match the performance of white students. Smaller numbers of under represented minorities (hence Urm), and overall lower grades and test scores for them. Thus fewer headed to grad school or professional school, and fewer still absent AA. </p>
<p>It would be more accurate to say "these colleges produce students with academic records strong enough for graduate programs and law and medical schools, out of proportion to the apparent academic promise of these students when they enrolled in college"</p>
<p>I know some black college counsellors who encourage their excellent black students to consider HBCU's due to their perception that the students will get better treatment while in college, and have better outcomes at the end. Some of these kids choose such places over the elite places usually discussed here on CC.</p>
<p>Realistically, the best approach to fixing the minority gap would be to take the GSP approach of some schools (ie. BU, NYU). Students accepted to these programs go through their first two years in college with more personal education approaches, learning with other students whose high school grades or SATs weren't high enough. However, if colleges had some sort of program like this, which was dominated by minorities, it would be called segregation. And, it would look like:
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"you are presuming there is something wrong with African-American kids, and now you are undertaking to fix them."
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<p>So, to be honest, I don't know. At least there's no special minority grading curve yet...</p>
<p>celloguy, first of all thank you and I have to say that I am equally impressed by your posts including this one. I re-read the article and I still find there is an indication - intended or unintended- of some kind of paradigm shift going on that attempts to draw a distinction between two concepts that are usually fuzzily lumped together in the same bag: achievement - to accomplish something successfully, and performance - how something is begun and carried through to completion; the latter specifically focusing on how a student gets through college defined by all those longer-term parameters of college success/achievement such as grade-point averages and retention rates. Frankly, if there is no real distinction between the two terms then the article doesn't make all that much sense to me precisely because, for most of us, the terms achievement and performance are interchangeable. Plenty of articles of late in the NYT and NPR as well as several threads deal with the laudable efforts at Amherst and other colleges to increase diversity and close the achievement gap so, I have to ask again, what is so unique about the Opportunity Programs at Skidmore? The OP article mentions that "dozens of colleges have joined efforts to study and discuss the efforts of the private LACs and small universities involved in the Consortium on High Achievement and Success academic performance gap, although most have yet to bear fruit." The emphasis here does seem to be on the "doing" and the need for colleges to design and carry out viable academic support programs (the boot camp etc.) to help students "perform well in difficult entry-level courses". In terms of college admissions, it certainly isn't anything new or unique for a college to overlook weak SAT scores in the name of diversity when a student has other strong indicators of academic achievement in their favor, such as high school GPA, that fit the profile of their respective applicant pools and therefore are judged to have a strong chance of academic success (there have been endless discussions about what are the best predictors of academic success in college - SAT standardized testing or GPA etc.) So, I really do not think the juxtaposition between achievement and performance is just mere word play but if it is then it is extremely interesting and significant word play. The distinction is significant because, as afan points out, "this is a difference not in what the kids bring to college (ability, motivation), but what happens to them once the get there." The emphasis on performance also, no doubt, has a great deal to do with this:</p>
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Mr. Bowen is gathering data on the performance gap as part of a study of 21 major public universities. The Council on Aid to Education's Collegiate Learning Assessment is seeking to measure how much undergraduates at various colleges are learning.