Checking NYC’s Facts

We take the essence of Eric Hanu­shek’s article (“Pseudo Science and a Sound Basic Education,” check the facts, Fall 2005) to be that existing means for appraising “adequate” school financing levels are, at best, inexact, and when in the hands of irresponsible advocates, often result simply in “junk science.”

Perhaps surprising to some readers, the principals of Management Analysis & Planning (MAP) concur with his thesis.

Indeed, in several articles published elsewhere, we have stated that in pursuing the doctrine of “adequacy,” the judicial system has far outstripped the capacity of social science to provide precise and verifiable answers.

How much does it take to enable a student from economically disadvantaged circumstances to achieve statespecified learning standards in mathematics, science, or language arts? What should high-school class sizes be? What are the characteristics of an effective teacher, one who achieves superior student outcomes?

Frankly, anyone who claims to know with certainty the answers to these crucial questions is usually an unabashed advocate for more money for schools and has little respect for policy analysis or research. We believe that qualified professionals who have demonstrated success providing instruction to diverse student populations can apply their knowledge to the discussion about what programs and processes are more likely to produce desired student outcomes. For that MAP offers no apologies. However, when professional judgment panel results are misused, that is indeed a problem, and it is in such circumstances Hanushek’s argument deserves attention.

MAP has never claimed, in any of its adequacy studies, to have determined the amount below which expenditures are inadequate. We always offer estimates for policymakers to consider given assumptions specified in the analytic and estimation exercises. We had no control over how New York referees would use the report and its findings. We share Professor Hanushek’s concern that the referees apparently relied on a bottom-line estimate without considering the assumptions and methodology underlying that estimate. Had they done so they would have discovered several assumptions and statistical procedures that served to inflate the estimate, but about which reasonable experts could disagree.

That said, Professor Hanushek’s thesis falls a bit shy, and here is why.

Professor Hanushek’s criticisms of the voodoo science of professional judgment and successful schools models of adequacy analysis, though justified when they are used to determine “the” number, lead then to reliance upon another analytic technique, cost-function analysis. But that, when applied by economists to the circumstances in New York, called for even more money than any of the professional judgment analyses specified.

In many ways, AIR/MAP (American Institutes for Research) figures were the median of all estimates if one includes those produced by William Duncombe and John Yinger of Syracuse. The latter use a cost-function analysis and claim to incorporate “efficiency” into their estimation models. Thus criticisms of the professional judgment studies without addressing cost-function estimates leave Hanushek’s arguments incomplete and open to even higher estimates by advocates relying upon econometric methods.

MAP acknowledges and, when provided with an opportunity, has always insisted that any infusion of additional school money should be accompanied by other systemic reforms, including stronger accountability for school failure with an emphasis on performance above all else, changes in antiquated systems (for example, single-salary schedules), and a stronger focus on evaluations to determine success and failure of programs and individuals. We realize that money by itself is not an answer to the nation’s education challenges.

Professor Hanushek does not declare how much money is the “right” amount for New York. That is good. He should not. No one knows the “right” amount. However, one can know the right process. The right process is to provide the political system with the best advice one can and then let the deliberative dynamics of representative government take hold.

James R. Smith
President
James W. Guthrie
Chairman, Management Analysis
and Planning, Inc.

Eric Hanushek replies: The MAP principals underscore a fundamental problem that runs throughout the use of costing-out studies, in New York and elsewhere. School finance policy is politics, in both the good and bad sense of the term. While science may provide guidance on some aspects of the problem, the costing-out studies are not scientific in the traditional sense. Even so, partisans in the dispute distort and misuse those studies under the banner of science. The authors, even with the best of intentions, unleash a process that they cannot control—and at least in this case, seem dismayed by.

As Smith and Guthrie point out, other methods have now found their way into the costing-out world, including the cost-function method. (Still another is the “state of the art” or evidence-based method.) Although they did not play a prominent role in the CFE judgment, such models have been introduced in a number of other state court cases and legislative deliberations. As Smith and Guthrie indicate, these alternatives are no better than the professional judgment or successful schools approaches—and may be worse in important dimensions.

It is clear, though, why costing-out studies are almost always commissioned by partisans in the school finance debates. Courts and legislatures are not going to make any nuanced use of them, but instead tend to extract a number, paint it as science, and use it for their purposes. Think alchemy, not science.

North Carolina Charters

Renowned pollster George Gallup once referred to data gathering this way: “Not everything that can be counted counts; and not everything that counts can be counted.” This comment is apropos to any discussion of charter school research, especially recent findings from Robert Bifulco and Helen Ladd (“Results from the Tar Heel State,” research, Fall 2005). Their study, sharply critical of North Carolina charter schools, is flawed and fails to “count” what matters most to parents and students.

The authors conclude that charter schools negatively affect performance, and that the public interest is not “well-served” by these schools. Consider, though, that only students who either entered a charter school after 4th grade, or exited a charter school before 8th grade, were included in their main analysis. This means that longer-term charter-school attendees (and, presumably, those students deriving the greatest benefit from these schools, since they stayed put) were excluded. In addition, the data used to assess performance came from state end-of-grade tests measuring knowledge of state curriculum—a seemingly obvious bias against innovative charter schools exercising their freedom to employ alternative curricula.

Bifulco and Ladd’s data also differ from recent Department of Public Instruction statistics. In 2004–05, 63 percent of regular North Carolina charter schools made adequate yearly progress under federal accountability guidelines, compared with just 58 percent of traditional public schools. Charter schools were also more likely to earn the label “school of excellence” than traditional public schools (33 percent compared to 24 percent).

And what about those intangibles that aren’t easily “counted”? Charter schools (and choice programs) empower parents—not school boards—with the freedom to select the best school for their child. In the final analysis, Bifulco and Ladd’s study demonstrates what parents have known all along: no one school can possibly meet the needs of all students, be it public, private, or charter. But charter schools do provide valuable and much-needed options, often to poor and disenfranchised families who cannot afford private school tuition. Doesn’t it make sense to let parents be the ultimate arbiters of whether their interests are “well-served” by charter schools?

Lindalyn Kakadelis
Director, North Carolina
Education Alliance

Bifulco and Ladd’s negative conclusion about North Carolina charters is much less certain than it appears. For instance, despite their finding that students in charters make less academic progress than students in regular public schools, enrollment in N.C. charter schools persists, and grows.

It’s also troubling that the negative effect of charters that they report depends upon charter age. My research shows that the apparent negative effect of charters in their third year, or older, was small—.01 to .03 standard deviations—and in some instances insignificant. I also find that the negative effect varied by grade level: larger for 3rd through 5th graders and statistically insignificant for 6th through 8th graders.

The authors also tout their method as addressing the problem of self-selection. It does, but at a cost. The method can mislead unless we understand why students enter charters and why students leave. Some students enter because they are having difficulty in the regular public schools, difficulty that continues to affect them, even worsen, while attending charters. As for students leaving charters, charters may simply not be a good fit for everybody. No doubt some students leave Ivy League colleges and do better elsewhere. Does that mean the Ivy League schools are teaching poorly?

Finally, the effect of charters on students who leave is likely a worst-case estimate; it should be complemented by one comparing the academic growth of students who stay in charters with the effect of students who stay in regular public schools. My research finds that math-score growth for North Carolina students who stay in charters is not significantly different from students who stay in regular public schools; reading-score growth is higher, significantly so, for students staying four or five consecutive years.

Craig Newmark
Associate Professor of Economics
North Carolina State University

Bifulco and Ladd reply: We agree with Ms. Kakadelis that test scores don’t count for everything. At the same time, they clearly matter, especially in a state such as North Carolina that has long had a statewide course of study and a set of state tests aligned with that curriculum. Given that state taxes are used to pay for charter schools, the public has a valid interest in the extent to which the students in those schools are meeting state achievement goals.

Like Kakadelis, we support the idea of more schooling options, especially for students in low-income families. We differ, however, in wanting those new options to be as effective in promoting student achievement, at least on average, as the traditional public schools. Our study indicates that North Carolina charter schools are not meeting that standard.

Newmark, whose own detailed study of North Carolina charter schools also finds negative achievement effects, suggests our results are misleading because students who choose charter schools may be on a downward achievement trajectory before they switch to a charter school. The full version of our paper reports an additional test to rule out this hypothesis.

Bloomberg’s revolution

Sol Stern’s “An Education Revolution That Never Was” (forum, Fall 2005) is neither forthright about education in New York City nor informed about education generally, as his use of sources and data makes evident.

He quotes a teacher alleging that she was punished for asking “uncomfortable questions” during training, for example. He neglects to mention the thousands of teachers who applaud our professional development. Nor does he mention that we have had more teacher applications than ever before.

On our alleged unwillingness to use phonics-centered reading programs, Stern quotes the developer of one such program whose $27 million contract with the city was discontinued. Stern notes that this reading program helped raise scores in the city’s lowest-performing schools in the 1990s. But he fails to mention that the program was part of an intensive effort to improve these schools that included a vast infusion of additional resources, including teachers for class-size reduction, capping of enrollment, coaches, administrators, and restructuring—elements of our reform for all schools. And Stern doesn’t take issue with improved test scores unless they are our scores—which represent the greatest gains in memory.

Stern’s fixed idea about the teaching of phonics obscures the central point in our curriculum reforms: phonics is essential to reading instruction, but it is not the only essential skill. Anyone who has taught children knows this at least intuitively. As even a brief visit to our web site indicates, the New York public schools offer a rich and diverse menu of reading programs and interventions for its students. We tailor offerings to a student’s needs: not all children need a fortified diet of phonics, but those who do, get it.

Stern also fails to mention how some of our early critics are now our supporters—experts who criticized our phonics component in 2003 (his sole point of reference) have been partners and advisors in the intervention strategies we have designed with help from special-education consultant Dr. Eileen Marzola.

We value the experience and the different strengths of our teachers. We understand the potential and the strengths of our students. That is why we have a curriculum and interventions that allow for nuance, creativity, critical thinking, and academic rigor. The results show it.

Carmen Farina
Deputy Chancellor for
Teaching and Learning
New York City Department of Education

Sol Stern replies: Ms. Farina writes that “thousands of teachers applaud our professional development.” How does she know? The DOE has never asked the teachers for their opinion. She claims that the Success for All phonics program was only “part” of the reason for academic improvement in the lowest scoring schools. Again, how does she know? Her department didn’t study SFA’s relative contribution before it recklessly ditched the program. She says some “early critics” have become supporters, but only cites someone who’s on the DOE payroll. All of which highlights one of the main points of my article: namely, that we need an independent research agency to evaluate DOE operations and claims of success. Otherwise, all we have is spin from a mayoral agency dedicated to getting the boss reelected.

 

Private Schools for the Poor

James Tooley (“Private Schools for the Poor,” features, Fall 2005) reports widespread existence of private schools in five poor countries—India, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and (to a lesser extent) China—and addresses two common “myths” about such schooling: that “private education for the poor does not exist” and that “private education for the poor is low quality.”

Evidence for debunking the first myth already existed nearly a decade ago. Several studies found that even the poorest households in India and Pakistan use private schools extensively. Tooley’s contribution is to extend the South Asian evidence to countries in Africa and to test it in communist China.

His findings also add to the evidence base on the second myth: namely, that, in several developing countries, private school students outperform their public-school counterparts after controlling for schools’ student-intakes. Thus the article helps to build a fuller picture of private and public schools for the poor in developing countries and adds to existing knowledge.

However, I believe that Tooley’s concern that public intervention crowds out private initiative in education is not well placed. First, the evidence adduced for such a trade-off is weak. Second, surely one should not lament parents’ abandonment of private for public schools when fees are abolished in the latter. It is a welfare-maximizing choice parents make in light of information about their circumstances, which is far more information than that available to the analyst.

While agreeing with Tooley that private schools tend to provide better-quality education (as I also found in a 1996 study I conducted), I would be more cautious and nuanced about the policy implications. Tooley advocates reform programs that support private initiative with government support, such as voucher schemes and charter schools. From colonial times, India has used a charter-like system of publicly funded, privately produced education; such private-public partnerships are called “aided” schools. However, evidence from Uttar Pradesh, India, suggests that such schools are just as ineffective and poorly resourced as public schools.

Thus private ownership per se may not be the key. Other attendant factors are also crucial: whether there are performance criteria or incentives built in to the formula for government aid (there are none in India); how much central oversight the government provides (a great deal in India); and to what extent the government is able to resist demands from aided-school teachers to be granted the same employment and other arrangements as those existing for public school teachers.

In Uttar Pradesh, militantly organized aided-school teachers’ unions have demanded and successfully obtained treatment comparable to that received by public school teachers. Over time, aided schools have become very similar to public schools in terms of level of teachers’ salaries, school resources, centralized administration,  salary disbursement, teacher appointment procedures, and student achievement outcomes. Aided-school teachers are no longer locally accountable. This example encourages caution in assuming that private delivery of publicly funded education is a panacea. A good deal of thought may be necessary about the design of incentives in the grant to such schools and on how to keep “private”truly private by resisting demands from vested interests to make such schools more like public schools.

Geeta Kingdon
Research Officer, Centre for
the Study of African Economies
University of Oxford

“Go into any inner-city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can’t teach kids to learn.They know that parents have to parent, that children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.”
—Barack Obama, Keynote Address, Democratic National Convention, 2004

Acting white was once a label used by scholars, writing in obscure journals, to characterize academically inclined, but allegedly snobbish, minority students who were shunned by their peers.

Now that it has entered the national consciousness—perhaps even its conscience—the term has become a slippery, contentious phrase that is used to refer to a variety of unsavory social practices and attitudes and whose meaning is open to many interpretations, especially as to who is the perpetrator, who the victim.

I cannot, in the research presented here, disentangle all the elements in the dispute, but I can sort out some of its thicker threads. I can also be precise about what I mean by acting white: a set of social interactions in which minority adolescents who get good grades in school enjoy less social popularity than white students who do well academically.

My analysis confirms that acting white is a vexing reality within a subset of American schools. It does not allow me to say whose fault this is, the studious youngster or others in his peer group. But I do find that the way schools are structured affects the incidence of the acting-white phenomenon. The evidence indicates that the social disease, whatever its cause, is most prevalent in racially integrated public schools. It’s less of a problem in the private sector and in predominantly black public schools.

With findings as potentially controversial as these, one wants to be sure that they rest on a solid base. In this regard, I am fortunate that the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Adhealth) provides information on the friendship patterns of a nationally representative sample of more than 90,000 students, from 175 schools in 80 communities, who entered grades 7 through 12 in the 1994 school year. With this database, it is possible to move beyond both the more narrowly focused ethnographic studies and the potentially misleading national studies based on self-reported indicators of popularity that have so far guided the discussion of acting white.

The Meaning of the Phrase

Though not all scholars define acting white in precisely the same way, most definitions include a reference to situations where some minority adolescents ridicule their minority peers for engaging in behaviors perceived to be characteristic of whites. For example, when psychologist Angela Neal-Barnett in 1999 asked some focus-group students to identify acting-white behavior, they listed actions that ranged from speaking standard English and enrolling in an Advanced Placement or honors class to wearing clothes from the Gap or Abercrombie & Fitch (instead of Tommy Hilfiger or FUBU) and wearing shorts in winter!

Only some of these behaviors have a direct connection to academic engagement. However, as the remarks of Barack Obama, who would later win a seat in the United States Senate, suggest, it is the fact that reading a book or getting good grades might be perceived as acting white that makes the topic a matter of national concern. Indeed, negative peer-group pressure has emerged as a common explanation for the black-white achievement gap, a gap that cannot be explained away by differences in demographic characteristics alone. If minority students today deliberately underachieve in order to avoid social sanctions, that by itself could explain why the aca­demic performance of 17-year-old African Americans, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), has deteriorated since the late 1980s, even while that of nine-year-olds has been improving. It may also help us understand the shortage of minority students in most elite colleges and universities.

Ethnography vs. Statistics

But is this well-publicized aspect of African American peer-culture reality or urban legend? Most ethnographers who examine school life in specific locations present acting white as a pervasive fact of high-school life for black adolescents. But the only two quantitative studies that analyze data from nationally representative samples of high-school students dismiss it altogether as cultural lore. My findings confirm the existence of acting white among blacks as well as among Hispanics, but offer important qualifications about its pervasiveness.

Although they did not coin the term (its origins are obscure), it was an ethnographic study by anthropologists Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu, published in the Urban Journal in 1986, that did the most to bring it to the attention of their fellow academics. Their “Capitol High,” a pseudonym for a predominantly black high school in a low-income area of Washington, D.C., had what the researchers said was an “oppositional culture” in which black youth dismissed academically oriented behavior as “white.”

In the late 1990s, Harvard University economist, Ron Ferguson, found much the same thing in quite another setting, an upper-class suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, called Shaker Heights. Although that city had been integrated for generations, large racial disparities in achievement persisted. When Ferguson detected an anti-intellectual culture among blacks in the local high school, Shaker Heights became virtually synonymous with the problem of acting white.

Fordham and Ogbu traced the roots of the “oppositional culture” to institutionalized racism within American society, which they contend led blacks to define academic achievement as the prerogative of whites and to invest themselves instead in alternative pursuits. Other observers, however, place the blame for acting white squarely on the shoulders of blacks. The Manhattan Institute’s John McWhorter, for example, contrasts African American youth culture with that of immigrants (including blacks from the Caribbean and Africa) who “haven’t sabotaged themselves through victimology.” These two theories, the former blaming acting white on a racist society, the latter on self-imposed cultural sabotage, have emerged as the predominant explanations for acting white among American blacks.

In fact, however, shunning the academic is hardly the exclusive prerogative of contemporary African American culture. James Coleman’s classic work The Adolescent Society, published in 1955, identified members of the sports teams and cheerleaders, not those on the honor role, as the most popular students in public schools. (See an excerpt from Coleman’s original Harvard Education Review article.) The former bring honor to the entire school, reasoned the University of Chicago sociologist; the latter, only to themselves. Since Coleman, ethnographers have found similar tensions between self-advancement and community integration. Indeed, variants on acting white have been spotted by ethnographers among the Buraku outcasts of Japan, Italian immigrants in Boston’s West End, the Maori of New Zealand, and the British working class, among others.

Even so, the question remains whether the tension that Coleman identified is more severe in some cultural contexts than others. On this topic, two sets of scholars weighed in with quantitative studies based on nationally representative surveys. Writing in 1998 in the American Sociological Review, James Ainsworth-Darnell of Georgia State University and Douglas Downey of Ohio State University reported that anti-intellectualism is no more severe a problem among black or Hispanic adolescents than it is among whites. Meanwhile, in a 1997 study, economists Phillip Cook of Duke and Jens Ludwig of Georgetown found that high-achieving black students are, if anything, even more popular relative to low-achieving peers than are high-achieving whites.

Of course, it is possible that the social rewards for achievement do not vary among ethnic groups in the United States. But both studies, each of which is based on data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS), have a common shortcoming in that they depend solely on a self-reported measure of personal popularity. The NELS contains a question that asks if the student “thinks others see him/her as popular.” The answer choices are: very, somewhat, or not at all. Unfortunately, when students are asked to judge their own popularity, they can be expected to provide a rosier scenario than is warranted.

New Data and Methods

Fortunately, the Adhealth data I used in this study allow me to measure popularity in a more subtle way. All the students surveyed were asked to list their closest male and female friends, up to five of each sex. I first counted how often each student’s name appeared on peers’ lists. I then adjusted these raw counts to reflect the fact that some friends count more than others. The more frequently a peer is listed by others, the more weight I assign to showing up on his or her list.

The advantage of this research strategy is that one never has to ask a student about his or her own popularity. Students’ natural tendency to brag, in this case by listing popular students as their friends, only gives us a more accurate picture of the school’s most desirable friends. Students listed as a friend by many peers who are themselves popular, rise to the top of the social hierarchy. Those who are listed by only a few peers, who in turn have few admitted friends, stand out as the marginal members of the community.

Armed with an objective measure of social status, I could examine more systematically whether or not the ethnographers were correct in identifying a distinctive acting-white phenomenon within African American communities. Do high-achieving minority students have fewer, less-popular friends than lower-achieving peers? How does this compare with the experience of white students?

I first report my findings using a measure of each student’s popularity within his or her own ethnic group, as that is the most direct test of the acting-white hypothesis. But as I explain below, I obtain the same set of results when I analyze the data without regard to the friends’ ethnicity.

I measure student achievement with a composite of grade-point average (GPA) based on student self-reports of their most recent grades in English, math, history/social studies, and science. When comparing the popularity of high- and low-achieving students, I compare students only with students who attend the same school, ensuring that the results are not skewed by unmeasured characteristics of specific schools. Even then, I take into account a number of factors, measured by the survey, that could affect popularity differently for students from different ethnic backgrounds. These factors include parental education and occupation and participation in various school activities, such as varsity sports, student government, and cheerleading.

Finally, to subject my findings to the strongest possible test, I adjust students’ popularity to reflect variation in self-reported effort in school. Recall that some types of acting-white theory say that students are penalized only for trying hard, not for achievement per se. The bright kid who can’t help but get good grades is not subjected to scorn. It’s the plodding rate busters with books constantly in their faces who are annoying. By adjusting for the effort students are putting into their studies, I do my best to separate the social consequences of achievement from those of effort to achieve.

New Evidence of Acting White

Even after taking into account many factors that affect student popularity, evidence remains strong that acting white is a genuine issue and worthy of Senator Obama’s attention. Figure 1, which plots the underlying relationship between popularity and achievement, shows large differences among whites, blacks, and Hispanics. At low GPAs, there is little difference among ethnic groups in the relationship between grades and popularity, and high-achieving blacks are actually more popular within their ethnic group than high-achieving whites are within theirs.  But when a student achieves a 2.5 GPA (an even mix of Bs and Cs), clear differences start to emerge.

As grades improve beyond this level, Hispanic students lose popularity at an alarming rate. Although African Americans with GPAs as high as 3.5 continue to have more friends than those with lower grades, the rate of increase is no longer as great as among white students.

The experience of black and white students diverges as GPAs climb above 3.5. As the GPAs of black students increase beyond this level, they tend to have fewer and fewer friends. A black student with a 4.0 has, on average, 1.5 fewer friends of the same ethnicity than a white student with the same GPA. Put differently, a black student with straight As is no more popular than a black student with a 2.9 GPA, but high-achieving whites are at the top of the popularity pyramid.

My findings with respect to Hispanics are even more discouraging. A Hispanic student with a 4.0 GPA is the least popular of all Hispanic students, and Hispanic-white differences among high achievers are the most extreme.

The social costs of a high GPA are most pronounced for adolescent males. Popularity begins to decrease at lower GPAs for young black men than young black women (3.25 GPA compared with a 3.5), and the rate at which males lose friends after this point is far greater. As a result, black male high achievers have notably fewer friends than do female ones. I observe a similar pattern among Hispanics, with males beginning to lose friends at lower GPAs and at a faster clip, though the male-female differences are not statistically significant.

Potential Objections

Could high-achieving minority students be more socially isolated simply because there are so few of them? The number of high-achieving minority students in the average school is fewer than the number of high-achieving white students. To see whether this disparity could explain my findings, I adjusted the data to eliminate the effect of differences in the number of students at each school with similar GPAs. This adjustment, however, did little to temper the effect of acting white.

It might also be hypothesized that high-achieving minority students are able to cultivate friendships with students of other ethnic groups. If so, I should obtain quite different results when I examine popularity among students of all ethnic groups. While one finds some evidence that high-achieving students are more popular among students of other ethnicities, the increment is not enough to offset the decline in popularity within their own ethnic group—a predictable finding, given that black and white students have only, on average, one friend of another ethnicity, and Hispanics just one and a half.

Indeed, when minority students reach the very highest levels of academic performance, even the number of cross-ethnic friendships declines. Black and Hispanic students with a GPA above 3.5 actually have fewer cross-ethnic friendships than those with lower grades, a finding that seems particularly troubling.

Finally, I examined whether high-achieving blacks and Hispanics can shield themselves from the costs of acting white by taking up extracurricular activities. There are many opportunities in schools for students to self-select into activities, including organized sports, cheerleading, student government, band, and the National Honor Society, that should put them in contact with students with similar interests.

Unfortunately, when I look separately at minority students who participate in each of these activities, I find only one within which ethnic differences are eliminated: the National Honor Society. Among students involved in every other activity, new friends made outside the classroom do not make up for the social penalties imposed for acting white.

 

 

A Private-School Edge

The patterns described thus far essentially characterize social dynamics of public-school students, who constitute 94 percent of the students in the Adhealth sample. For the small percentage of black and Hispanic students who attend private school, however, I find no evidence of a trade-off between popularity and achievement (see Figure 2). Surprisingly, white private-school students with the highest grades are not as popular as their lower-achieving peers. The most-popular white students in private schools have a GPA of roughly 2.0, a C average.

These data may help to explain one of the more puzzling findings in the research on the relative advantages of public and private schools. Most studies of academic achievement find little or no benefit of attending a private school for white students, but quite large benefits for African Americans. It may be that blacks attending private schools have quite a different peer group.

The Segregated School: Is It an Advantage?

I also find that acting white is unique to those schools where black students comprise less than 80 percent of the student population. In predominantly black schools, I find no evidence at all that getting good grades adversely affects students’ popularity.

But perhaps this changes when school desegregation leads to cross-ethnic friendships within the school. To see how the degree of internal integration within a school affects acting-white patterns, I calculated the difference from what I would expect in the total number of cross-ethnic friends in a school based on the ethnic make-up of the student body. Schools with a greater percentage of cross-ethnic friendships than expected are considered to be internally integrated. I divide schools into two groups of equal size: those with higher and lower degrees of internal integration.

Unfortunately, internal integration only aggravates the problem. Blacks in less-integrated schools (places with fewer than expected cross-ethnic friendships) encounter less of a trade-off between popularity and achievement. In fact, the effect of acting white on popularity appears to be twice as large in the more-integrated (racially mixed) schools as in the less-integrated ones. Among the highest achievers (3.5 GPA or higher), the differences are even more stark, with the effect of acting white almost five times as great in settings with more cross-ethnic friendships than expected. Black males in such schools fare the worst, penalized seven times as harshly as my estimate of the average effect of acting white on all black students!

This finding, along with the fact that I find no evidence of acting white in predominantly black schools, adds to the evidence of a “Shaker Heights” syndrome, in which racially integrated settings only reinforce pressures to toe the ethnic line.

In Search of an Answer

That acting white is more prevalent in schools with more interethnic contact hardly passes the test of political correctness. It nonetheless provides a clue to what is going on. Anthropologists have long observed that social groups seek to preserve their identity, an activity that accelerates when threats to internal cohesion intensify. Within a group, the more successful individuals can be expected to enhance the power and cohesion of the group as long as their loyalty is not in question. But if the group risks losing its most successful members to outsiders, then the group will seek to prevent the outflow. Cohesive yet threatened groups—the Amish, for example—are known for limiting their children’s education for fear that too much contact with the outside world risks the community’s survival.

In an achievement-based society where two groups, for historical reasons, achieve at noticeably different levels, the group with lower achievement levels is at risk of losing its most successful members, especially in situations where successful individuals have opportunities to establish contacts with outsiders. Over the long run, the group faces the danger that its most successful members will no longer identify with its interests, and group identity will itself erode. To forestall such erosion, groups may try to reinforce their identity by penalizing members for differentiating themselves from the group. The penalties are likely to increase whenever the threats to group cohesion intensify.

Applying this model of behavior to minority and white students yields two important predictions: A positive relationship between academic achievement and peer-group acceptance (popularity) will erode and turn negative, whenever the group as a whole has lower levels of achievement. And that erosion will be exacerbated in contexts that foster more interethnic contact. This, of course, is exactly what I found with regard to acting white.

Understanding acting white in this way places the concept within a broader conceptual framework that transcends specific cultural contexts and lifts the topic beyond pointless ideological exchanges. There is necessarily a trade-off between doing well and rejection by your peers when you come from a traditionally low-achieving group, especially when that group comes into contact with more outsiders.

Alternative Explanations

Such a conceptualization is preferable to both of the two theories that have so far dominated discussions of acting white: the notion of oppositional culture and the allegation of cultural self-sabotage.

The oppositional culture theory, developed by Fordham and Ogbu in the wake of their experiences at “Capitol High,” accounts for the observed differences between blacks and whites as follows: (1) white people provide blacks with inferior schooling and treat them differently in school; (2) by imposing a job ceiling, white people fail to reward blacks adequately for their academic achievement in adult life; and (3) black Americans develop coping devices which, in turn, further limit their striving for academic success. Fordham and Ogbu suggest the problem arose partly because white Americans traditionally refused to acknowledge that black Americans were capable of intellectual achievement and partly because black Americans subsequently began to doubt their own intellectual ability, began to define academic success as white people’s prerogative, and began to discourage their peers, perhaps unconsciously, from emulating white people in striving for academic success.

However plausible it sounds, the oppositional culture theory cannot explain why the acting-white problem is greatest in integrated settings. If Fordham and Ogbu were correct, the social sanctions for acting white should be most severe in places like the segregated school, where opportunities are most limited. The results of my studies, of course, point in precisely the opposite direction.

The notion that acting white is simply attributable to self-sabotage is even less persuasive. According to its proponents, black and Hispanic cultures are dysfunctional, punishing successful members of their group rather than rewarding their success. That theory is more a judgment than an explanation. A universal, it cannot explain the kinds of variations from one school setting to another that are so apparent in the data I have explored.

The Need for New Identities

How important are these social pressures? Although that story has yet to be fully told, in my view, the prevalence of acting white in schools with racially mixed student bodies suggests that social pressures could go a long way toward explaining the large racial and ethnic gaps in SAT scores, the underperformance of minorities in suburban schools, and the lack of adequate representation of blacks and Hispanics in elite colleges and universities.

Minority communities in the United States have yet to generate a large cadre of high achievers, a situation as discouraging as the high incarceration rates among minorities who never finish high school. In fact, the two patterns may be linked. As long as distressed communities provide minorities with their identities, the social costs of breaking free will remain high. To increase the likelihood that more can do so, society must find ways for these high achievers to thrive in settings where adverse social pressures are less intense. The integrated school, by itself, apparently cannot achieve that end.

Roland G. Fryer is assistant professor of economics, Harvard University and a faculty research fellow, the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Like the television revolution, which brought electronic boxes into schools in the 1960s and was supposed to turn classroom teaching on its head, computers were rolled into schools in the 1990s and connected to the worldwide web with the expectation that education would never be the same. TVs never really caught on as chalkboard replacements. Although they are still around, they seem to be used primarily as “educational film” filler by substitute teachers. The wired computer invasion has been very different. We never saw classrooms filled with rows of children sitting in front of televisions. And there was no national Marshall Plan to close the “television gap.” The Internet, in fact, was something of an answer to the “vast wasteland” of TV; and it came with such promise for education that a new national anxiety, the “digital divide,” was born and with it a rush of educators and philanthropists wanting to make sure that the poor would not be shut out of the worldwide promised land.

The best evidence of the concern over the digital divide was the speed with which the federal government interceded to help close it. A program offering generous subsidies to schools and libraries for the purchase of Internet technology was made part of the massive overhaul of the Telecommunications Act in 1996. (In Internet time, this was almost prehistory: Amazon and eBay didn’t open their online doors until 1995, and Google was still two years from birth.) The subsidies were apportioned on a sliding scale, with poorer schools receiving more. Known as the E-Rate (education rate) program, the schools and libraries subsidy was funded by a tax on long-distance telephone service. It quickly became the most ambitious federal school technology program in history.

“Because of the E-Rate,” gushed Vice President Al Gore in May of 1997, “our children will not be stranded in the high-rent districts of cyberspace. We now can go from a world where most teachers don’t even have phones to a world where all teachers can help their students talk to the world. Our nation has taken a great step forward in closing the gap between the information haves and the information have-nots.”

The first E-Rate subsidies were distributed in 1998, in time to reach schools for the 1998–99 academic year. As applications increased, funding grew from $1.7 billion in 1998–99 to $2.1 billion in 2000–01, very near the maximum allowed by statute, which was (and remains) $2.25 billion per year. The program’s size was staggering, especially considering that total public-school spending on computers in 1999 (including hardware, software, training, networking) was only $3.3 billion.

Many of the supporters of the E-Rate program, including former Secretary of Education Richard Riley, expected the program to do more than simply wire schools. To be successful, Riley said, E-Rate “must show that it really makes a difference in the classroom, and that means helping students learn the basics and other core subjects.”

Billions of dollars in subsidies later, we can make some tentative conclusions about the effectiveness of the E-Rate program: whether it has, as Al Gore predicted, closed the gap between the “information haves and information have-nots,” and whether it fulfilled its promise, as Richard Riley demanded, to make “a difference in the classroom.” The conclusions are a mixed bag.

California Here We Come

To find out what happened to the E-Rate program, we turned our attention to California. With fully 13 percent of the public-school enrollment in the United States, California provides a large enough sample to allow for informative conclusions about the program. Better yet, it is also the only state that kept comprehensive records of school computer and Internet access before the enactment of the E-Rate initiative. We thus have a very valuable point of comparison to gauge E-Rate’s impact on Internet access and student test performance. We analyzed data beginning with the 1996–97 school year, before E-Rate, and ending with the 2000–01 year, when the program’s onset and initial growth make it easiest to measure its impact.

Before the implementation of E-Rate, the digital divide cut sharply through California’s public-school system. Our data indicate that schools with the most affluent student bodies, where less than 1 percent of students were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, already had Internet access in roughly one-half of their classrooms during 1996–97. In contrast, schools with 75 percent or more of their students eligible for the lunch program had a mere 8 percent of classrooms wired (see Figure 1).

The good news about the E-Rate program is that it clearly helped to narrow the digital divide among schools (see Figure 2). Offered Internet technology for lower prices, public schools responded by purchasing more. Because the E-Rate subsidies were more generous for schools likely to lag behind in technology adoption, gaps in access to Internet technology narrowed.

The bad news, though, is that the additional investments in technology generated by E-Rate had no immediate impact on measured student outcomes.

The Right Spending Spurs

Outcomes aside, the E-Rate program seems to be a model for how to induce school “reform” through a scaled incentive system. It did not provide preselected technology to schools or cover 100 percent of the price when schools made their own purchases. Instead, E-Rate subsidized schools’ purchases of approved technology. Requiring schools to foot part of the bill, it was believed, would encourage them to make only those purchases that they saw as having some value to them.

During the period covered in our study, the subsidy rate under E-Rate ranged from 20 to 90 percent, depending on the share of students who qualify for the national school-lunch program and whether the school is classified as rural. For example, an urban or suburban school with between 35 percent and 49 percent of its students eligible for the national school-lunch program would receive a 60 percent subsidy; an investment of $1,000 in approved technologies would cost the school only $400. The same $1,000 investment for an urban school with more than 75 percent of its students eligible for school lunches would cost just $100. The subsidies for rural schools were slightly higher to reflect their higher costs of getting connected.

Schools were able to draw on E-Rate funding to support purchases of any commercially available services and equipment that had the primary purpose of delivering telecommunication and Internet access to classrooms or other places of instruction. This included basic telephone service, Internet access, a high-speed T1 line, telecommunications wiring, routers, and switches. Schools could not, however, receive subsidies for things like software or computers that were not connected to the Internet.

Schools could apply for the program individually or as part of a district-wide application. The subsidy rate for districts was based on the average share of students eligible for school lunches across all schools included in the application. The rules required that local administrators “strive to ensure that each school receives full benefit of discount to which entitled.”

Between the 1998 and 2000 school years, California received almost $937 million in E-Rate subsidies, or more than 20 percent of the entire national subsidy to public schools in that period. California E-Rate funding increased sharply in 2000–01, rising from $254 million to $475 million, due entirely to the $230 million in E-Rate funding that the Los Angeles Unified School District received that year.

A Gold Rush of Megabytes

Internet access in California public schools increased considerably after E-Rate was introduced. A database maintained by the state’s department of education since 1996–97 contains information about the number of classrooms in each school that were connected to the Internet. During the 1997–98 school year, the year before the first E-Rate funding was awarded, only 55 percent of California’s 8,186 public schools had any Internet connections in classrooms. Using the number of teachers in each school as a rough proxy for the total number of classrooms lets us estimate the percentage of classrooms with connections: a quarter of classrooms in California had Internet access.

As the E-Rate funds grew, Internet access became more widespread. By 2000–01, 85 percent of California schools had at least one classroom with Internet access, while two-thirds of all classrooms in California had such access.

The simultaneous increase of Internet access and the advent of E-Rate funding do not, of course, prove that it was E-Rate that improved access, as there was already a clear upward trend in the fraction of public schools with Internet access before the E-Rate program began. According to data from surveys conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, the share of public-school classrooms nationwide with access to the Internet increased fivefold from 1994 to 1996 (from 3 percent in 1994 to 15 percent in 1996), followed by continued growth through 1999 (51 percent in 1998 and 63 percent in 1999). Similarly, our data from California indicate that Internet access in California classrooms increased by 53 percent between the 1996–97 and 1997–98 school years (from 17 percent to 26 percent of classrooms). The spread in Internet access before E-Rate suggests that, even in the absence of the federal subsidy, many schools would have chosen to make Internet investments.

Closing the Digital Divide

Did the federal government spend billions of dollars to encourage Internet investment that would have happened anyway? Another common concern about E-Rate is that rich schools might receive the lion’s share of the subsidy money, despite having a lower subsidy rate, because they have more funds available for computer and Internet investment.

Our data, however, confirm that E-Rate funding in California through 2001 went disproportionately to schools with higher poverty rates. During the first three years of the E-Rate program, school districts with 50 percent or more of their students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, and subsidy rates of 80 and 90 percent, received almost 90 percent of all public-school funding (see Figure 1). There was some distortion in the very wealthiest sections of the state: the 10 percent of districts with less than 1 percent of their students eligible for the federal-lunch program received, on average, seven times as much funding per pupil as districts with between 1 and 20 percent of students eligible ($127 and $17, respectively). The poorest districts, however, received substantially more funding per pupil than even the richest schools. Schools with 75 percent or more of their students eligible for the lunch program received the most funding per pupil: $341.

The additional spending by poorer districts during E-Rate’s first three years dramatically narrowed the digital divide. During the 1996–97 school year, districts with the highest poverty rates had the lowest percentage of their classrooms online. Over the next year (and still before the E-Rate program) this gap grew even wider. Once the E-Rate program began in 1998, however, the poorest schools, which had the largest subsidy rates, accelerated their adoption of Internet technology, and the gap between rich and poor schools began to close (see Figure 2).

Subsidized Investment

These patterns suggest that E-Rate worked as intended to encourage new Internet investments within the poorest districts, but they do not rule out the possibility that some other difference between poor and rich schools was responsible for the convergence. We therefore also examined how each school’s rate of growth in the percentage of rooms connected changed annually from 1996–97, two years before any subsidies were awarded, through 2000–01. If, all other things being equal, schools with larger potential subsidy rates increased their Internet capacities by more than schools with lower potential subsidy rates, we would have strong evidence that the subsidies were the incentive to increase investment.

When making these comparisons, we also controlled for any effects of differences in the fraction of students in a school eligible for the federal school-lunch program. As mentioned above, schools with more school lunch–eligible students were actually spending less on Internet technology before E-Rate’s implementation. Nonetheless, including this poverty measure enabled us to differentiate the more rapid growth we would expect among higher-poverty schools as they play catch-up and the slowing of investment among higher-income schools as they near full Internet access for their school.

We found that the bigger the subsidy, the more a school increased its growth rate of Internet access over what it would have invested without the subsidy. On average, a 10 percent increase in the E-Rate subsidy led to a 1.36 percent increase in the number of classrooms with Internet access per year. If a school with average Internet growth before E-Rate had received no subsidy between 1996–97 and 2000–01, our results indicate that only about 40 percent of classrooms would have had Internet access by the 2000–01 school year. In fact, access at this same school with the subsidy was 66 percent of classrooms online, or 68 percent higher than expected.

All schools did not respond to the incentive in the same way. Rural schools proved to be much less responsive to the subsidy program than urban schools, perhaps because they faced higher prices for Internet services or were unable to get the T1 broadband at all, which would have meant that their total cost for new investment would have been greater despite their having higher subsidy rates. Primary and middle schools (all those with no students in grades 10–12) saw an especially large increase in investment in Internet technology in response to the incentive; the response among high schools was smaller. Finally, schools that are heavily black and Hispanic were more responsive to the subsidy than schools with mostly white and Asian student bodies. Perhaps schools with larger minority populations were more budget constrained and therefore more responsive to the subsidy rate.

Student Achievement

E-Rate spurred schools to invest more in the Internet, and by that measure it was a great success. But did improved Internet access boost student achievement, as many of its strongest proponents had hoped? To answer this question, we gathered data on each school’s performance on the Stanford Achievement Test (not to be confused with the SAT or Scholastic Aptitude Test given to high schoolers), which has been administered to public school students in California since the 1997 school year. For each of the six subjects tested—math, reading, science, language, spelling, and social studies—we calculated three separate measures of school-level achievement: the mean test score in the school, the fraction of students scoring above the 75th percentile score for the nation, and the fraction of students scoring above the 25th percentile score for the nation.

Using these measures, we examined whether schools with high subsidy rates improved their performance more than schools with lower subsidy rates. Since schools receiving high subsidies increased their percentage of classrooms with Internet-accessible computers at a greater rate than low subsidy schools in response to E-Rate, the results should tell us whether the additional online classrooms due to E-Rate resulted in higher test scores.

We initially looked for the impact on student performance in the year following the onset of the program (and of any changes in the school’s subsidy rate thereafter). This one-year lag allows time for the technology to be set up within the school, for teachers to integrate the technology into the curriculum, and for students to use the technology.

For all six subjects, each of our estimates of the effects of the subsidy was very small; none was statistically different from zero, indicating that E-Rate did not have a large effect on student test scores. For schools in the typical district, which was eligible for a 63 percent subsidy, we can reject with 95 percent confidence the possibility that E-Rate increased test scores by one-tenth of a standard deviation.

But could improved access to the Internet have improved education with more than a one-year lag? In fact, when we looked at the program’s impact after two years, the estimated effects go down, not up. At least in the short run, there is no evidence whatsoever that schools with E-Rate subsidies learn over time how to use Internet technology in a way that improves test scores.

Of course, it is always possible that improved access to the Internet enhanced students’ learning in ways that do not show up on standardized tests. For the few nontest outcomes we have, though, such as the probability of taking advanced classes, the share of graduates going into the University of California system, and the overall dropout rate, we found no significant impact of Internet connections on student performance. (It was probably a stretch to expect to find the impact of technology subsidies on most of these variables anyway, given that we saw no significant effect on Internet subsidies for high schools.)

E-Rate may have failed to boost student achievement measurably for any number of reasons. For one, this technology may not help measurable student achievement, though it may build skills that are unmeasured by standard tests. An equally plausible explanation is that people simply did not use the technology once they got it. This would certainly be consistent with a 1999 U.S. Department of Education survey, which found that only one-third of teachers reported that they were well prepared or very well prepared to use computers and the Internet. Without direct evidence of teachers’ use of time in the classroom, we can only estimate the effect of Internet access and not of Internet use.

It is also possible that technology improved student achievement after more than a two-year lag. Even if there were a large benefit to Internet investment that we cannot yet measure, however, we should not view a delayed effect as having no cost. The subsidy costs more than two billion dollars per year, and the subsidies may lead schools to get locked into inferior technologies or, at the least, lead them to buy at higher cost (given the extremely rapid declines in the price of computer-related goods). Consider that almost 80 percent of total E-Rate funds were allocated to “Internal Connections,” which includes the cost of wiring schools. Had the subsidy not accelerated investments, many schools could have avoided the costs of physical infrastructure by using the now-common (and inexpensive) wireless networks.

Conclusions

Judged solely as a policy to close the digital divide, the E-Rate program registers as a success. The E-Rate subsidy led to substantial increases in Internet investment in California’s public schools. With the important exception of rural schools, which did not respond to the subsidy, the funding went disproportionately to schools on the low side of the digital divide, as it was supposed to. By the end of the 2000 school year, three years after the E-Rate program granted its first subsidies, the program had increased the number of California public-school classrooms with Internet access by 68 percent. Judged as a means of improving student performance, however, the E-Rate has shown little success on any testable measure.

In the end, the E-Rate program has helped get basically every school in the country hooked up to the Internet. The Internet itself, though, seems unlikely to be a silver bullet for solving the problems of America’s public schools.

Austan Goolsbee is professor of economics and Jonathan Guryan associate professor of economics, the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago. They are research associate and faculty research fellow, respectively, at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).  This article is adapted from a study that will appear in The Review of Economics and Statistics.