Last tuesday's release of what is known as the "Nation's Report Card" for math and reading is likely to reignite talk of the so-called racial achievement gap. Despite some good news, the report, published by the Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, shows that Latinos, like blacks, haven't made progress in catching up to the test scores of whites.
But the dour assessment of Latino educational achievement has nothing to do with a racial gap. We can't use the same lens to interpret Latino data as we do to explain the differences between white and black achievement.
When it comes to Latinos and education, what we're seeing is an assimilation gap. The disparity in academic achievement between whites and blacks is the complicated result of more than 400 years of discrimination by one racial group against another, so it makes sense to describe this gap as racial. The problem with describing Latino achievement in the same terms is that it attributes to race certain facts and trends that are more easily, and more accurately, explained in other ways.
Latinos, and Mexicans in particular, have been immigrating to the U.S. on a near constant basis for about 100 years. There are thus vast differences in how deeply their generational roots extend into American soil. Though they tend to be seen as a largely foreign group, nearly a third of all Mexican Americans trace their roots in the U.S. back three generations or more.
The "race gap" explanation assumes that Latino children growing up in poor, immigrant-headed households are no different than the great-grandchildren of immigrants living in middle-class homes because they share the same "race." But obviously, grouping the large number of poor immigrants in this country with fourth-generation Americans of Latino descent drives down averages for the entire group, providing an overly bleak assessment of educational progress.
The "report card" provides no information on generational differences, but it stands to reason that Latino scores are weighed down by the roughly one-third of Latino fourth-graders and one-fifth of Latino eighth-graders who the report classifies as "English-language learners." So purely racial explanations are guilty of what demographer Dowell Myers calls the Peter Pan fallacy: assuming that the Latino population doesn't change in its educational achievement despite the passage of time.
