3 Responses to “‘Helping Smart Kids Get Smarter’”

1. bill Says:
   July 5th, 2007 at 11:07 pm

   wow this articl put me 2 sleep

2. Teresa Mosley Says:
   July 6th, 2007 at 8:02 pm

   Thank you for writing this article. My 13 year old will enter the 9th grade for the 2007-2008 school year. She will attend Brooks/Debarllito Collegiate High School in Tampa, FL. I hope that she will gain the opportunities that your students received. Please partner with them to help another student of color(Victoria)becomer smarter than ever before. Keep on writing articles like this one.

3. L. Scott Miller Says:
   August 14th, 2007 at 1:29 am

   I began working to increase the number of high achieving African American, Latino, and Native American students a quarter century ago—a time when very little work on this issue was being undertaken by educators, the federal or state governments, or private foundations. Thus, it was encouraging when Nellie Mae began to make some investments in this area six or seven years ago. Nonetheless, the overall amount of work that educators, foundations, government departments and agencies, and others are currently doing to address this issue remains woefully inadequate.

   Not only is the collective effort still very small relative to the need, there also is still only a modest amount of work being done on a closely related issue: the much lower achievement of high SES and middle class African Americans and Latinos than their White and Asian American counterparts. For example, I recently analyzed data for twelfth graders from the most recent administrations of all of the NAEP subject area tests, from math to the new economics assessment. In each case, the scores of the Black students with at least one parent with a college degree were not only much lower than their White counterparts, they also were about the same as those of the White students with no parent with a high school diploma. There were large gaps for Hispanics as well. The table below on the NAEP science results in 2005 illustrates these patterns.

   Percentages of Public High School Seniors Nationally Who Scored at or above the Proficient Level and at the Advanced
   Level on the NAEP Science Assessment in 2005, by Race/Ethnicity and Parent Education Level

   At or Above Proficient Advanced
   All No H.S.
   Degree H.S.
   Degree Some
   Postsec. Education Bach. Degree
   or More All No H.S.
   Degree H.S.
   Degree Some
   Postsec. Education Bach. Degree
   or More
   White 22.9 6.8 12.7 19.9 30.5 2.3 0.2 0.6 1.5 3.7
   Black 2.3 0.5 0.3 2.2 4.1 0.1 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.3
   Hispanic 4.7 1.6 3.3 7.7 8.1 0.5 0.0 0.1 0.7 1.6
   Asian 21.5 NA 13.4 16.4 31.9 2.6 NA 1.5 0.6 4.3
   N.Amer. 13.0 NA NA NA NA 0.2 NA NA NA NA
   Source: Unpublished analysis of NAEP data by L. Scott Miller

   There is nothing much new about such findings, of course; many other data sets going back to secondary analysis of the Coleman Report data set in the late 1960s have found large “within-social-class” achievement gaps. What is striking is that over the past 40 years there has not been a huge mobilization of resources directed at strategy design, testing, and evaluation to address the within-class gaps or the high achievement issue.

   Finally, far too little work on either the high achievement or the high SES/middle class achievement issues is taking place in the early childhood years—the period from infancy through the end of the primary grades. The latter is an extraordinarily costly limitation, because the gaps in the middle school, high school, and college years are largely established by the end of the third grade.

   As far back as the early to middle 1990s, I began recommending the creation of some new foundations that could specialize in underwriting the extensive long-term R&D that will be required to develop an substantial set of proven strategies from preschool through graduate school—and to promote their widespread use. Twice I have even written prospectuses for creating such entities. (The first occasion was in 1994 and the second was in 2000, after some colleagues I completed the work of the National Task Force on Minority High Achievement.) There continues to be little interest in the idea of creating specialized foundations to provide much more extensive funding leadership on these issues than has been possible to date. But it is hard to see how we are going to get a critical mass of long-term investments, whether for early childhood education strategy development to increase the percentage of high SES/middle class children from these groups that get off to an excellent start in the primary grades or to increase the number of undergraduates from these groups that graduate summa cum laude. magna cum laude, and cum laude from highly selective colleges and universities. The continued lack of a critical mass of funding capacity is particularly sad at this juncture, as there are a number of valuable leads for improving outcomes at all levels, despite the lack of empirically demonstrated strategies at multiple locations. L. Scott Miller

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