Reaching the Top: A Report of the National Task Force on Minority High Achievement

Executive Summary

Introduction
The College Board organized the National Task Force on Minority High Achievement in 1997 to study and make recommendations for addressing a crucial, if little known, national issue: the chronic shortage of African-American, Latino, and Native American students who achieve at very high levels academically. Because of this shortage, the vast majority of students who earn high grades in school, who score highly on standardized tests, and who earn bachelor's and advanced degrees are still White and Asian American.In creating the Task Force, a group of 31 distinguished leaders from education and other sectors, the College Board recognized that until many more students from these underrepresented groups become high achievers, it will be virtually impossible to integrate completely the professional and leadership ranks of our society. Our nation also will not come close to tapping the full range of talents of our population in an era when the value of an educated citizenry has never been greater and the minority share of the population is growing rapidly.

During their research and deliberations over the past two years, members of the Task Force found the minority high achievement problem to be far-reaching. It extends to the academic underachievement of minority students at virtually all socioeconomic levels. Even minority students who have done very well in high school are often unable to maintain the same high level of academic achievement in college.

The Task Force has concluded that the limited presence of Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans among top students is a product of several forces, including intense poverty experienced by many minority youngsters, schools with inadequate resources, racial and ethnic prejudice, the limited educational resources of many minority families and communities, and even cultural differences.

Encouragingly, however, a number of proven or promising strategies for raising minority achievement levels are now available. Thus, there is every reason to believe that substantial growth in the number of top minority students can be achieved in the future. Making substantial progress will require the pursuit of an extensive array of public and private policies, actions, and investments. These initiatives collectively provide much more opportunity for academic development for underrepresented minority students through their schools, colleges, universities, homes, and communities. The Task Force summarizes this as a commitment to affirmative development. This commitment reflects a recognition that underachievement among minority students will need to be addressed wherever it occurs and with every means available. It will require leadership from a diverse group of societal actors, ranging from minority parents and communities to officials of higher education institutions.

Dimensions of the Minority High Achievement Problem
A bachelor's degree and usually an advanced degree are now required for entry into most professions in this country. Yet, African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans remain heavily underrepresented among higher education degree recipients. In 1995, they accounted for only 13% of the bachelor's degrees, 11% of the professional degrees, and 6% of the doctoral degrees awarded by U.S. colleges and universities, despite making up about 30% of the under-18 population.

A similar situation exists in terms of school grades and standardized test scores. Among high school seniors in 1998, Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans made up only about one-tenth of the students who scored at the highest level on the federal government's National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading, math, and science tests. That year, these groups accounted for only about one in twenty of the students who had very high scores on the SAT I, scores typical of individuals admitted to highly selective colleges and universities.

Moreover, this pattern of heavy underrepresentation of these groups among top students emerges rapidly in the early years of school and changes little thereafter. For example, minority-majority test score gaps on NAEP tests in the fourth grade are very similar to those found on NAEP tests in the twelfth grade.

Educators have long recognized that minority-majority academic achievement gaps are associated in part with the high percentages of African-American, Latino, and Native American students growing up in disadvantaged circumstances. This is an important factor, because students from low-income homes, or from families in which the parents have little formal education, generally do much less well in school than students from advantaged families. This pattern explains why efforts to raise minority achievement levels have focused heavily over the years on urban school districts that serve large numbers of disadvantaged minority youngsters.

But this is only part of the story. At virtually all social class levels, underrepresented minority students are not doing nearly as well in school as their White and Asian American counterparts, particularly as measured by NAEP and other standardized tests. Significantly, much lower percentages of both poor and middle-class minority students are high achievers than is the case for Whites and Asians.

Since most top students in the United States and other industrialized nations are drawn from educationally and economically advantaged families, the much lower than expected performance of middle-class students from underrepresented groups is a very serious matter. It is made even more serious by the fact that the number of middle-class African-American and Latino students is growing-and they are not doing nearly as well as European Americans or Asian Americans in affluent suburban school systems across the country that have historically had many high achieving White students.

Another significant dimension of the minority high achievement problem is at the college level. Research has documented that African American, Latino, and Native American students earn significantly lower grades at traditionally White colleges and universities than White and Asian students who have similar college admission test scores. Importantly, this pattern has been found among top Black and Hispanic students attending selective institutions. Thus, while increasing the number of top minority students at the elementary and secondary school levels is essential, these gains will be diluted if many students are subsequently unable to continue to achieve at high levels in college.

Sources of Achievement Differences
Efforts to eliminate educational differences among groups must address the enormous challenges facing poor children, their families, and the schools that serve them. This is especially true for efforts to eliminate the shortage of minority high achievers. The Task Force found that one of the greatest poverty-related obstacles is family and school instability. Poor families tend to move frequently in urban areas, and the associated school changes disrupt their children's education.

Because of the high turnover of students in low-income schools, the pace of the curriculum often slows down, which undermines learning even for the students who do not move. Teachers are often less experienced, have fewer credentials, and turn over more rapidly in these schools. With Latinos and African Americans expected to become an increasingly large majority of disadvantaged students in the years ahead, the consequences of poverty on racial and ethnic achievement gaps almost certainly will continue to be substantial.

The Task Force believes that differences in education levels of parents are another significant source of racial and ethnic achievement gaps. Parents who have earned college degrees tend to know much more about how to support their children's educational development than do parents with a high school education or less. Well-educated parents often are able to do many things for their children-such as read extensively to their preschoolers, seek out tutors, or help their children gain access to college preparatory classes-that can be especially helpful in fostering high achievement.

European Americans and Asian Americans still account for most students who have parents with college degrees, and Latinos and African Americans constitute the majority of students who have parents without high school diplomas. Finding ways to reduce the impact of these parental skill gaps may be an essential part of efforts to increase the number of top students from underrepresented groups for years to come.

The Task Force found compelling evidence that racial and ethnic prejudice and discrimination continue to take a toll on the achievement of minority students in several ways. One way is through the lower academic expectations that some teachers may have for African-American, Latino, and Native American students than for White and Asian students. Another way is that some underrepresented students' confidence and performance in demanding academic situations may be eroded by the longstanding negative stereotype that their groups are less academically capable than White students for innate or cultural reasons. An additional concern is that some disadvantaged minority students may lower their academic effort partly out of a belief that success in school is only for White or Asian students.

The Task Force also looked closely at the growing evidence that cultural differences contribute to achievement gaps among groups. Some of these differences are school-related, such as having a curriculum that does not effectively tap students' cultural experiences. Others relate to differences among groups in how families and communities support their children's academic development. For example, using their own resources, the most academically successful groups provide much more extensive supplementary education opportunities than less successful groups, from preschool through high school. Some also are more effective at helping their children learn how to work together to improve their academic performance. This can contribute to stronger peer support for high academic achievement.

Although definitive assessments of the impact of these factors on group achievement gaps are not yet available, the Task Force concluded that collectively these factors are having a major impact on the underrepresentation of minorities among top students.

Strategies for Improving Minority Achievement
The Task Force reviewed strategies that are being pursued in the current period of educational reform to improve minority achievement, including strengthening preschool and parent education programs, raising elementary and secondary school academic standards, and pursuing school-level changes in such areas as curriculum, instruction, teacher professional development, and home-school relations. The Task Force found that most of these efforts are targeting disadvantaged minority students who are at risk of achieving at low levels. For example, this has been a primary focus of efforts to expand early childhood education and parent education programs.

Unsurprisingly, these efforts also tend to be evaluated in terms of how many low-performing students are brought to acceptable achievement levels. Little attention is given to whether these efforts have a capacity to increase the number of high-achieving disadvantaged students. Addressing unmet educational needs of middle- and high-income minority students is largely outside the focus of this work.

Nonetheless, the Task Force found evidence that some elementary school reform strategies, in particular, can help increase the number of disadvantaged students who perform at well above average achievement levels. These strategies tend to have academically rich curricula and instructional approaches that offer students sufficient opportunities to master key knowledge and skills (such as reading). They also may stress the development of strong home-school relationships. And, they tend to emphasize teacher development and support, in order to ensure that the programs are implemented as intended.

State efforts to raise educational standards hold promise of helping to increase the number of top minority students, because many states are now monitoring achievement patterns at the district and school level by race and ethnicity. But these monitoring systems have not yet begun to focus heavily on minority representation among top students.

Similar to school reform, many efforts to expand after-school and other supplementary education opportunities for minority students are focused on programs for helping low-achieving disadvantaged students. This is increasingly true in large urban school systems in which many disadvantaged minority students are at risk of being retained in grade as education standards are raised. However, the Task Force believes that some of these out-of-school interventions have the potential to help improve the academic performance and productivity of a wide range of minority students.

In higher education, the Task Force also found little institutional attention being given to efforts to increase the number of high-achieving minority students. This is occurring despite growing evidence that many of the most academically promising African-American and Latino students are not performing as well as their European American and Asian American counterparts. Yet, the Task Force also found that several proven and promising programs exist at colleges and universities around the country for promoting high academic performance among minority students. These programs often provide students with an active system of personal support and advising; opportunities to gain in-depth knowledge and skills in areas such as mathematics that are central to success in their majors; opportunities to develop strong academically oriented peer networks; and sufficient financial aid so that students can devote full attention to their studies.

Recognizing that a great deal remains unknown concerning the causes and dynamics of academic underproductivity in some groups of ethnic minority students, the Task Force also recommended that the College Board lead a program of research and development focused on better understanding and facilitating high academic achievement in African-American, Latino, and Native American students. The R&D program should include:

Recommendations for Action
The Task Force has concluded that, if the number of top African-American, Latino, and Native American students is to grow rapidly, promoting high minority achievement will need to become a priority at all levels of the educational system. In addition, underrepresented minority students will need access to a much expanded set of supplementary education opportunities outside the schools.

In higher education, the Task Force is calling for senior college and university officials to make raising minority achievement, including increasing the number of top students, a priority on par with increasing minority enrollment, retention, and graduation rates.

Operationally, this not only will require a commitment to eliminating differences in achievement between similarly prepared minority and majority students but the creation of organizational capacities designed to address them. The Task Force recommends that colleges and universities organize consortia to promote widespread use of strategies available for helping minority students perform at high levels. Colleges and universities, along with state education agencies, should create information systems designed to monitor progress and to help inform efforts to design more effective strategies.

At the K-12 level, the Task Force recommends that local, state, and federal educational leaders place the goal of increasing the number of top minority students high on the school reform agenda. From an operational standpoint, this means testing and selecting promising elementary and secondary school reform approaches partly from the perspective of whether they help increase the number of minority high achievers. It also means testing and using the best of these strategies in a wide range of schools, from those serving high concentrations of disadvantaged students to those with more middle-class populations.

The Task Force recommends that policymakers work to expand access to high-quality preschool and parent education programs to underrepresented minority children and parents from all socioeconomic levels, not simply the disadvantaged.

The Task Force recommends that national and community organizations concerned with improving minority education work with educational reformers and researchers to expand and strengthen supplementary education opportunities available to underrepresented minority students, from preschool through high school. Although many after-school, weekend, and summer programs are currently designed to serve low-achieving disadvantaged youngsters, much of the expansion of supplementary education also should target high-achieving and above-average students from all social classes. The objective should be to provide supplementary education opportunities for underrepresented minorities that are equivalent in scope and quality available to many youngsters from the nation's most academically successful groups.

The Task Force recommends that minority leaders and parents become stronger advocates for school reform and supplementary education approaches for increasing the number of top minority students. Where feasible, minority parents should become more directly involved in providing or arranging for supplementary education for their children.

Because public investment in the creation of strategies to increase the number of top Black, Hispanic, and Native American students is still very limited, the Task Force recommends that foundations make substantial investments in this area. Corporations also should provide more philanthropic support for such initiatives, as should government agencies in a position to invest in minority education in their fields of interest.

Conclusion
The continued educational underdevelopment of so many segments of the African-American, Latino, and Native-American communities makes a very strong case for expanding their access to good schools and to high-quality colleges and universities, the latter of which have been a primary focus of affirmative action. However, as the Task Force has found, expanded access does not translate directly into higher academic achievement. This is why the Task Force has issued a wide-ranging set of recommendations that, collectively, will provide many more opportunities for academic development for underrepresented minority students through the schools, colleges, and universities they attend, through their homes, and through their communities. This is what the Task Force means by instilling a commitment to a policy of affirmative development across many sectors of society. It is a policy that not only can and should emerge but is already emerging.