{"id":2155,"date":"2010-08-11T11:31:18","date_gmt":"2010-08-11T15:31:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=2155"},"modified":"2010-08-11T11:31:18","modified_gmt":"2010-08-11T15:31:18","slug":"barton-and-coley-ignore-their-own-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=2155","title":{"rendered":"Barton and Coley ignore their own data"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, John Thompson<\/a> wrote about Barton and Coley report from ETS<\/a> on long-term trends in the Black-White achievement gap. Like Barton and Coley, Thompson thinks Daniel Patrick Moynihan was correct about family structure and life chances. I’m sighing this morning, because Barton and Coley’s data undermine their argument, and I’m puzzled at how they could look at the same data–they produced the charts I’m going to discuss in the next paragraph–and draw such different conclusions.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The argument Barton and Coley make from the achievement-gap trends is that the late-20th century “decline of the Black family” is the best explanation given what they see as a cohort-based change from a reduction in the achievement\/attainment gaps after WW2w to a stagnant pattern over the past two decades. The problem? The data doesn’t support the cohort argument. If you head to the report, and the NAEP gap trend figures on page 6, you’ll probably see what I do: in reading, there’s a notable decline in the gap thorugh the 1988 test. That’s true for 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students. And then we get the squiggling-around-a-flat-trend period since. No cohort effect. A period effect.<\/p>\n

In math, the story is more complicated. You could make an argument that the end of the declining-gap trend hits 1986 for 13-year-olds and 1990 for 17-year-olds, and that looks like a cohort effect, possibly. So let’s back the years up and figure out when this last group of kids was born: 1973. That was also the point at which American working-class wages began stagnating in real terms. I’m not saying that this is a monocausal connection, just that the Barton-Coley argument has some serious problems.<\/p>\n

Unlike some others, Barton and Coley do the right thing in their argument by noting that the proportion of children born to unmarried mothers rose for all<\/em> demographic slices in the late 20th century. And here things get tricky for their argument, because the gap in unmarried-childbirth rates rose until… the early 1970s, at which point the proportion of children born to White mothers who were unmarried (out of all White mothers giving birth) also began to rise at about the same clip. So if you look at the possible cohort effects in math, the decline in the math achievement gap coincides with rising rates of Black children born to unmarried mothers until the point when the rates of White children born to unmarried mothers also began to rise. Anyone else see that as a problem for the Barton-Coley argument?<\/p>\n

A more general problem with the paper is that it holds different standards of consistency for the explanations they review. Arguments based on desegregation (and the consistently increasing proportion of children in the South affected by desegregation until the late 1980s) are poked because of inconsistencies, but the preferred explanation revolving around family structure doesn’t endure the same scrutiny. It’s an interesting rhetorical structure whereby the garbage-can hypothesis is introduced last, gets the least critical examination, and wins the day. It’s fair enough for a speculative piece, but the conclusions drawn here are much stronger than I think are warranted.<\/p>\n

One of the important contexts that’s underplayed in the report is the tremendous growth in urban hypersegregation since 1970. (Residential segregation appears in three disparate paragraphs sprinkled in the report. That’s it.) I rolled my eyes when I read the I-guess-obligatory reference to Jewish immigrants at the turn of the 20th century because the immigrant ghettoes then were not nearly as isolated as pockets of concentrated, segregated poverty today. A good deal of William Julius Wilson’s arguments by the mid-1990s was trying to sort out what might be happening with hypersegregation. In 1996, he used the term transmission by precept<\/em> to describe the influence of being surrounded by a critical mass of neighbors who engage in a certain behavior. <\/p>\n

And that’s part of why I’m so irked that the authors ignored the work of Frank Furstenberg<\/a>, a family sociologist who has done more detailed work on family structure than William Julius Wilson. That isn’t meant to undermine Wilson’s work, but some part of Furstenberg’s projects tried to figure out what happened with teen mothers in different communities, and, lo! and behold!, White working-class communities had more resources to construct support networks around the young mothers than Black working-class communities. This report reads like cherry-picking for a speculative argument instead of something informed by a comprehensive review, and those who read the brief need to know they’re not going to be getting a complete picture of the relevant literature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, John Thompson wrote about Barton and Coley report from ETS on long-term trends in the Black-White achievement gap. Like Barton and Coley, Thompson thinks Daniel Patrick Moynihan was correct about family structure and life chances. I’m sighing this morning, because Barton and Coley’s data undermine their argument, and I’m puzzled at how they could […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy","category-history"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-yL","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2155"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2166,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2155\/revisions\/2166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}