Three studies of racial bias

Here, I present three studies that address interesting racial biases. First,  Elenbaas Luken Raz, Ackerman & Kneeskern (2022) published “This kid looks like he has everything”: 3- to 11-year-old children’s concerns for fairness and social preferences when peers differ in social class and race in Child Development. Here’s the abstract:

This study investigated 3- to 11-year-old US children's (N = 348) perceptions of access to resources, social group preferences, and resource distribution decisions and reasoning when hypothetical peers differed in social class (poor or rich) and race (Black or White). Results revealed both marked age differences in children's perceptions, preferences, decisions, and reasoning and specific combinations of peer group memberships that were especially likely to receive preferential treatment. With age, children perceived that rich peers had greater access to resources than poor peers, but when both peers were poor, White peers were perceived to have more resources than Black peers. Social group preferences changed with age, from mixed social class and racial group preferences, to preferences for rich peers, to dislike for rich peers. Resource allocation decisions and reasoning reflected both social group and fairness concerns: young children distributed more to White peers especially if they were also rich, participants in middle childhood explicitly favored rich peers regardless of their race, and older children distributed more to poor peers and reasoned about either moral concerns for equity or social class stereotypes. Thus, overall, younger children's responses often reflected broader economic and racial inequalities while older children often sought to create more equity, though not always for moral reasons.

This makes sense to me because the younger children are imperial – they like and admire power and see White and rich children as having it. There is some satisfaction in the older children being more equitable.

The second study, the Harvard Gazette (2022) published “Remote Learning Likely Widened Racial, Economic Achievement Gap” involving an interview with an economist, Thomas Kane, who worked with a team analyzing data from 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools across 49 states. Here is edited material from that interview:

They found that high-poverty schools both spent more weeks in remote instruction during 2020-21 and suffered large losses in achievement when they did so. Districts that remained largely in-person, however, lost relatively little ground. Experts predict the results will foreshadow a widening in measures of the nation’s racial and economic achievement gap.

The striking and important finding was that remote instruction had much more negative impacts in high-poverty schools. High-poverty schools were more likely to go remote and their students lost more when they did so. Both mattered, but the latter effect mattered more. In high-poverty schools that were remote for more than half of 2021, the loss was about half of a school year’s worth of typical achievement growth.

There are 50 million students in the U.S. About 40 percent, or 20 million students, nationally were in schools that conducted classes remotely for less than four weeks, and 30 percent, or 15 million students, remained in remote instruction for more than 16 weeks. It is the dramatic growth in educational inequity in those districts that remained remote that should worry us.

Interestingly, gaps in math achievement by race and school poverty did not widen in school districts in states such as Texas and Florida and elsewhere that remained largely in-person. Where schools remained in-person, gaps did not widen. Shifting to remote instruction was like turning a switch on a critical piece of our social infrastructure that we had taken for granted. Our findings imply that public schools truly are the “balance wheel of the social machinery,” as Horace Mann would say. 

We would expect the achievement declines to translate into lower high school graduation rates (since students may not have the math or reading skills required for upper-level courses), lower college-going rates, and lower earnings. To be more concrete, students in high-poverty schools that were remote for more than half of 2020-21 would be expected to see a 5 percent decline in average earnings over their career, given past relationships between test scores and earnings. That may not sound like much, but when calculating losses for all 50 million students in K-12 education in the U.S., it would amount to a $2 trillion decline in lifetime earnings. 

The students in high-poverty schools that were remote for most of 2020-21 lost about 0.45 standard deviations in math. There are very few educational interventions that have ever been shown to have an impact that large. One example is high-dosage tutoring — which involves tutoring sessions two to three times per week in groups of one to four students with a trained tutor all year. Pre-pandemic research implied that such a program would generate about 0.38 standard deviations. In other words, a district could provide a high-quality tutor to every single one of the students in a high-poverty school and still not expect to make up the decline. 

Based on our estimates, those dollars ($190 billion) would be enough if school districts, especially the high-poverty school districts that were remote for much of 2021, were to spend nearly all of it on academic recovery.   School districts have until the end of 2024 to spend the federal aid for academic recovery. Most of the district plans I have seen are undersized. It’s worse than that. The American Rescue Plan — passed in March 2021, before the magnitude of the losses were clear — only requires districts to spend 20 percent of the federal aid on academic recovery. Most districts seem to be following the federal guidance, and spending between 20 and 30 percent on academic recovery. That’s not going to be nearly enough in the lower-income districts that spent much of 2020-21 in remote instruction. Local business leaders, parents, and school boards need to engage with their school districts and make sure that the district recovery plans are commensurate with the losses. If not, these achievement losses will become permanent.

This may be helpful in questioning the validity of achievement data for students in high-poverty school districts who spent substantial time in remote learning during the pandemic. This applies to both White students and students of color but may lead to teacher bias regarding student promise.

The final study more directly speaks to effects of suspension and expulsion. Sanders, Mishna, Fallon & McCready (2022) published “Experiences of Adversity Among High School Students Who Have Been Suspended or Expelled: Systemic racism, inequity, school and community violence” in Traumatology. 

This constructivist grounded theory study aimed to explore adverse experiences among students who are disciplinarily excluded in Ontario, Canada. Participants (n = 31) were recruited through suspension and expulsion programs across two school boards in urban and urban emergent areas of Southern Ontario. Fifteen students were interviewed, (male, n = 11; Black, n = 10; identified as having special education needs, n = 9) and 16 multidisciplinary staff. Students had consistently experienced multiple and diverse forms of adversity. Of particular note were expanded forms of adversity, which included school and community violence and systemic racism and inequity. Experiences of adversity are rarely explicitly identified among students who have been suspended or expelled, particularly expanded forms. Important experiences are not conventionally acknowledged as adversity, and certain students are not viewed as traumatized by their experiences. The findings indicate a need for trauma-informed and culturally/race aware school and disciplinary approaches, research on adversity within disproportionate disciplinary activity, and consistent acknowledgment of expanded forms of adversity, particularly among this group of students, in research and practice. 

While this is a very small study, it suggests that clinicians ask more thorough questions about students’ experiences. I’ve written previously about adverse effects of school discipline. Taken together, these studies highlight subtle and easily neglected impacts on children of color.