With national unemployment figures parked above 9% and Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., openly questioning President Obama’s fidelity to the black community, Obama tapped Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist and former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, to chair the White House Council of Economic Advisers, a decision that might subtly figure into Obama’s expansion of outreach to the black community, given Krueger’s expressed interest in “the legacy of racial inequality in academic and economic opportunity.”
Throughout his career, Krueger contributed to multiple studies of race as a factor in educational and economic success. Most recently, Krueger coauthored a 2005 study about affirmative action policies, in which he expressed his belief that vestigial discrimination and the “legacy” of racial discrimination has compromised the opportunity for success among the black community.
In this particular study, Krueger questioned whether universities could suspend affirmative action policies in the foreseeable future without a significant drop in the number of black students at the best schools in the country. Answer: no, because “there will simply be too few high-scoring black students,” Krueger says, to match the numbers of students who currently benefit from racial preferences in admissions policies.
To what does Krueger attribute this bleak forecast for black students’ academic achievements? From the outset, Krueger points to “the legacies of de jure segregation and racial discrimination in the United States” which, in concert with “continuing bias,” results in a “substantial gap in measured academic performance between black children and white children.” The academic gap, of course, derives to a large degree from an income gap between white and black parents. Fortunately, as adult black workers since the civil rights movement earned more money due to “a reduction in discrimination in conjunction with normal market forces,” that academic gap diminished.
At this point, Krueger offers an observation that, at face value, seems terribly significant to the questions at hand:
To continue, Krueger notes that as of 2002, only “35% of black children resided in families with two parents, down from 59% of black children in 1968; for white children, 74% resided in families with two parents in 2002.” Given the universally accepted importance of parental involvement in a child’s education, the “deterioration” of the black nuclear family in the United States would seem important in a study about black student achievement; insofar as Krueger intends to address the disparity between white and black student achievement, he might consider the social or political causes for such a sharp decline in two-parent black households since 1968.
Instead, Krueger mitigates the significance of family incomes, despite the emphasis on that statistic hitherto, by acknowledging that “there remains a sizable racial gap among families of similar incomes.” At this point, Krueger throws a glance at the difficulty of explaining this phenomenon before resurrecting the specter of segregation. Because most black SAT-takers attend majority-black schools, while most white SAT-takers attend majority-white schools, Krueger asserts that “Schools are not just separate, but unequal: Anecdotally, black students attend substantially lower-quality schools, on average, than do whites, and our data confirms this impression.”
In a nation with a sprawling, but too-often inept, public school system, this assertion merits longer attention. Why do public schools, in Krueger’s estimation, fail to educate black students but not white students? Does Department of Education or perhaps local governments maintain these weaknesses?
There is an indictment of the public school system waiting to be made, especially given the way teachers’ unions in Washington D.C., for instance, killed a school voucher program that specifically benefited poor and minority students who could not afford to leave bad public schools without the vouchers. This question ought to rank among the most important of all the issues at play in this study given Krueger’s ultimate conclusion that “increasing black students’ pre-collegiate performance is critical to any hope of eliminating the need for affirmative action.”
Unfortunately, Krueger ignores issues of the public school system and the role of government programs in weakening the black community. Instead, he returns doggedly to ongoing discrimination to account for the struggles that face black students seeking an education, directing his readers to “the legacies of separate and unequal schooling and of labor market discrimination.”
Such conclusions overlook his own caveat that black adults’ success in the labor market has not translated to success for their children in school (because of the breakdown of the family) and avoid an obvious and primary culprit in the education problem: the education system itself.
It will be interesting to see how Krueger attempts to ameliorate the “black-white relative distribution of income” and the “legacies . . . of racial discrimination” from his position as lead White House economic adviser.
