What factors contribute to inequality within the educational system in the united states?

For decades, black students in the United States have lagged behind their white peers in academic achievement. In 2014, the high school graduation rate for white ­students was 87 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. For black students, the rate was 73 ­percent. Test scores show a similar racial gap.

To be sure, many factors contribute to the achievement gap, including home and neighborhood environments and school factors unrelated to teachers' performance. But one dynamic is becoming impossible to ignore: Notable differences in the way black students are treated by teachers and school administrators.

Research shows that compared with white students, black students are more likely to be suspended or expelled, less likely to be placed in gifted programs and subject to lower expectations from their teachers.

The disparities can be tough to discuss, says Anne Gregory, PhD, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University. "There's this idea that if we name the phenomenon, it's teacher blaming."

Yet in many cases, such differences in treatment aren't malicious or intentional. Some disparities arise from cultural misunderstandings or unintentional "implicit biases" that unknowingly affect our thoughts and behaviors.

"Everyone holds biases of one kind or another," says University of Maryland psychologist Melanie Killen, PhD. "Maybe we can't eliminate them, but we can do all we can to avoid acting on them."

Evidence of Disparities

A variety of recent studies help to illustrate the differences in the ways black and white students experience a school day. Teachers might be less likely to spot black students who excel academically, for instance. Using national data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Sean Nicholson-Crotty, PhD, at Indiana University, and colleagues found black students were 54 percent less likely than white students to be recommended for gifted-education programs, after adjusting for factors such as students' standardized test scores. But black students were three times more likely to be referred for the programs if their teacher was black rather than white ( Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2016).

Such disparities might have something to do with teachers' expectations for students. Seth Gershenson, PhD, at American University, and colleagues reported that when black and white teachers evaluate the same black student, white teachers are 12 percent less likely to predict the student will finish high school, and 30 percent less likely to predict the student will graduate from college ( Economics of Education Review , 2016).

Teachers' expectations for themselves also come into play. In a series of studies, Rutgers University psychologist Kent Harber, PhD, studied white middle-school and high-school teachers in mostly white, upper-middle-class districts and more diverse, working-class districts in the northeastern United States. He found that when white teachers give feedback on a poorly written essay, they are more critical if they think the author was a white student rather than a black one ( Journal of Educational Psychology®, 2012).

What's more, Harber can essentially turn that bias on or off by enhancing or allaying the teachers' concerns that they might appear prejudiced. In other words, white instructors might go easy on their black students in order to avoid appearing racist, if only in their own minds. In their attempts to be egalitarian, however, they might avoid constructive criticism that would benefit black students.

Giving feedback is difficult for teachers in any circumstance, Harber points out. Teachers must strike a balance between being assertive and respectful. "Add the issue of race and teachers might worry they're displaying a lack of racial sensitivity. That can tip the scale and lead to a positive bias," Harber says.

White teachers' implicit prejudices or stereotypes can also make them less effective when teaching black students, suggests a study by Drew Jacoby-Senghor, PhD, at Columbia University, and colleagues. The researchers recruited white college students to prepare and present a history lesson to either a white or a black student.

When the "teachers" had higher levels of implicit racial bias, their black (but not white) students scored more poorly on a history test based on the lesson. Later, the researchers played recordings of the lessons to white students. Those who watched recorded lessons originally presented to black students also did more poorly on the history test, suggesting that the quality of the lesson itself, and not the student's aptitude, was to blame. Teachers who gave lectures to black students appeared more nervous, the researchers found, which seemed to impair the quality of their lesson ( Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2016). Although the study didn't evaluate actual teachers, it does suggest that student performance can be significantly influenced by the way that lessons are taught.

The discipline divide

Racial bias doesn't just influence how teachers teach. Bias also affects whether and how they discipline students for misbehavior.

According to 2013–14 data collected by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, black K–12 students are 3.8 times as likely as their white peers to receive one or more out-of-school suspensions.

And that's not necessarily because black students are causing more problems, Gregory notes. A variety of studies have found that even after taking achievement, socioeconomic status, self-reported behavior and teacher-reported behavior into account, black students are still punished disproportionately.

Students who are suspended are more likely to drop out of school and have run-ins with the juvenile justice system, a pattern so well documented in the literature that it has earned its own dubious moniker—the "school-to-prison pipeline."

Unfortunately, children can be pegged as troublemakers before they even start kindergarten. The U.S. Department of Education's 2013–14 data reveal that black children represent 19 percent of preschool enrollment, but 47 percent of the out-of-school preschool suspensions. White kids, meanwhile, represent 41 percent of preschool enrollment but just 28 percent of suspensions.

Walter Gilliam, PhD, who directs the Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy at Yale University School of Medicine, has spent the last decade documenting preschool expulsions. When it comes to child-­related factors, he's found three things make a child more likely to be kicked out of preschool: Being black, being male and looking older than their classmates ( Foundation for Child Development, 2005). "If you're a big, black boy, the risk is greatest by far," he says.

That squares with a series of field and laboratory studies by Phillip Atiba Goff, PhD, and colleagues, who found that college students of various racial backgrounds overestimated both the age and culpability of black children from toddlers to teens (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2014). "In terms of implicit biases, we might see an African-American boy not only as more culpable, but perhaps more dangerous. That imagination might make it more likely they'll be expelled," Gilliam says.

Interventions to reduce bias

Research points to ways to start chipping away at bias in schools. Most of those methods have one important thing in common: More support for teachers.

In his work with preschools, Gilliam has found teachers who had regular relationships with a behavioral consultant had the lowest expulsion rates. Ending the practice of expulsion would be good not only for black children, who are disproportionately affected, but for all preschoolers, he says. "There is only one type of child who doesn't benefit from preschool programs, and that's the one who was expelled."

At the high school level, Gregory and her colleagues have developed a program, My Teaching Partner-Secondary, which pairs teachers with coaches for two years. Teachers submit videos of their classroom interactions with kids, and the coaches review the videos and make specific suggestions to help teachers better engage with and motivate students.

In a randomized controlled trial, teachers in the control group asked black high-school students to leave their classrooms for misbehavior at two to three times the rate of non-black students (a group that included white, Latino and Asian-American students). In coaching classrooms, there was no difference in discipline referral rates. Encouragingly, the improvements still held a year after the coaching ended ( School Psychology Review , 2016).

"The target of our intervention wasn't necessarily classroom management, but on how to create more engaging instruction for the whole class," Gregory says. Yet teachers who created more opportunities for higher-level thinking and problem-solving had more equitable disciplinary patterns. That fits with previous research that shows when students are more engaged, teachers are more likely to avoid misunderstandings and defuse misconduct, she notes.

When it comes to increasing black students' representation in gifted programs, Nicholson-Crotty and his co-authors recommend recruiting more teachers of color to diversify the teaching force. In the meantime, they suggest screening all students for giftedness, and not relying solely on referrals from teachers and parents.

Other research highlights helpful ways for teachers to communicate with students. David Yeager, PhD, at the University of Texas at Austin, and colleagues have developed a strategy known as wise feedback, in which teachers emphasize their high standards and convey their belief that students are capable of meeting their expectations. In one set of studies with junior and senior high school students, wise feedback was shown to improve the quality of students' work and also reduce feelings of mistrust between black students and their teachers ( Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2014).

But teachers can't do it alone. Harber's research on critical feedback showed that teachers who reported generally strong social support from fellow teachers and administrators were less likely to offer false praise when critiquing the work of black students.

Christopher Liang, PhD, a professor of counseling psychology at Lehigh University, is developing methods to help principals recognize and avoid patterns of racial inequities in their schools. "Principals often report they're aware [of equity issues], but they don't know what to do," he says.

Gregory has seen a growing willingness among educators to confront the touchy topic of racial disparities. "More and more, these dialogues are coming to the surface," she says.

But translating awareness to action will be challenging, especially in the era of standardized testing.

"A lot of the solutions to reduce disparities are focused on social-emotional learning, better relationships and building community, which comes into direct conflict with the accountability movement and focus on test scores," she says.

Still, Gregory sees reasons for optimism in the work teachers are doing every day. "There are wonderful educators and administrators who are showing us, in their daily practice, the way to engage youth and prevent ­problems," she says. "As researchers we need to ferret out those best practices and figure out how to scale them."

• To learn about new ways to support teachers, read the February 2012 Monitor article " Support for Teachers ."

Which factors contribute to inequality in the educational system in the United States?

What are some factors that contribute to educational inequality in the United States what can be done to reduce or even eliminate the inequality?

What factors contribute to inequality within?

What are the major factors that affect education systems?