Bill Evers responds to the Stanford study
I thought that Bill Evers did a great job responding to the Stanford study on the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE) in this blog post.
I wonder about several things:
- In theory, the stereotype threat should not be lowering scores for Asians.
- It should not be lowering scores for boys in the lowest quartile almost as much as for girls.
- Why is the stereotype threat working only on the lowest-quartile students? In theory, it should be lowering scores for blacks and girls in all quartiles on this high-stakes test.
- There would seem to be many difficulties for stereotype threat as the explanation for the results.
(The authors anticipate these objections and attempt, not very persuasively, to respond to them in their paper.)
Without getting into my skepticism about some aspects of the stereotype-threat effect, let’s assume that it’s true or can sometimes be true. The need then is to accustom blacks and women to competition and challenges, and the potential would seem to be there for greater success when people have instead high, demanding expectations about blacks and women.
The solution cannot be to cushion blacks and women from all challenges (like passing the not-very-tough high school exit exam). [This is a point that has been made about the stereotype threat by John McWhorter both in interviews and in his book Losing the Race.] Life is full of challenges.
Getting rid of the high school exit exam cannot be the solution. The solution has to be preparing low-performing students to pass the exam and telling them that their teachers, parents, ministers, and other community leaders expect them to succeed and will accept no excuses.
Right on Bill. His point is similar to my stand on the impacts of outside factors on the achievement of poor and minority students. Even if all of these things are 100% responsible for the achievement gap, that doesn’t mean educators should stop trying to improve student achievement of these students. Instead they need to look to schools that are being successful in closing achievement gaps and implement their strategies. Similarly, even if this “stereotype-threat effect” is 100% true, ending the exit exam is not the answer. Instead, schools need to find new strategies for helping students overcome this effect and pass the CAHSEE. Lowering the standards is never the answer for improving achievement.
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