From the New York Times:

Advanced Placement Tests Are Leaving Some Behind - African-American students, who made up 14 percent of the student population last year, were only 7 percent of the participants in Advanced Placement courses.

One thing the article doesn’t mention is that how a student does in the educational system is linked to their socio-economic status. ^[1] A student raised in a high-income household will do better than one raised in a low-income family. That alone is a reason we need to change the economics of education. There is no inate reason for me to suspect that income level has any connection to intelligence. Looking for other factors that enable someone to do well in school, I believe motivation may be a problem. I know when I was in grade school that I didn’t want to go to school in the morning. That may be because I grew up in Minnesota where the average minimum temperature in January is 2.8F (-16.2C), ^[2] but I believe it’s because no child wants to go to school. It was parental motivation that made me go everyday, and parental motivation that made me do the required homework. If a students parents or guardians do not provide motivation, a student is likely to fail.

As shown above, students in low-income families have been shown to do worse in school than high-income families. And low-income families are generally located around large cities, ^[3] as shown on this map. When compared to a map of where there is a large percentage of African-Americans, ^[4] we see that there is a high spatial correlation. Therefore, I don’t think this article is totally correct when it says that African-Americans are doing worse on Advanced Placement tests. What it tells me is that since African-Americans are largely congregated in large cites with a high poverty rate, they are more likely to fail because of their surroundings.

Also, you may have noticed my blurb from the article source - in this case the New York Times - was shorter than normal. This is in an attempt to comply with the over-restrictive copyright notice on their site. ^[5] I’m pretty sure this would fall under fair use, ^[6] but I don’t want to be sued. In the future, I’ll probably try to find a site that has a less restrictive copyright notice - though I doubt I’ll find one. Yes, I was stupid and actually looked at their copyright before posting it. If you look through past posts you’ll notice at least one with a quotation that is longer than they say it should be, and I’ll shorten it if asked.

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