Countering The Cultural Theory of Academic Gaps
Adding to the spate of recently published books supporting an environmental theory that accounts for the phenomenon of performance disparity in modern society was an offering by New Yorker columnist Malcolm Gladwell entitled, Outliers, The Story of Success. Gladwell’s persuasiveness and popularity are rooted in a rhetorical technique that marshals selective anecdotal evidence in support of his pet social presuppositions. Among his cherished causes is the notion that genetic factors (such as intelligence) play little or no part in predicting success in modern economies, an assertion which tends to defy not only common observation, but also increasingly voluminous evidence from controlled studies. Gladwell’s insouciant and engaging style has the remarkable effect of suspending disbelief and projecting credibility just long enough that the anecdotal is taken by many as empirically unassailable. But looks are often deceiving. Evidence that tends to run counter to Galdwell’s hypothesis is, predictably, elided. Observations on the performance of separated twins and trans-racial adoptions are absent from Gladwell’s battery of charming stories.
Contrary to “culture” theory, ethnic academic gaps are nearly identical for trans-racially adopted children, and to the extent they are different they move in a direction counter to that predicted by culture theory. The gap between whites and Asians fluctuated from 19 to .09 in available National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data while the gap in the adoption data is from 0.33 to 3 times larger. This finding is quite consistent with the Sue and Okazaki paper showing that, contrary to popular anecdotes, the environmental values that lead to higher academic grades are actually found more often in white homes. This contradicts rather directly Gladwell’s contention that the explanatory variable for Asian performance in math is cultural and environmental.
To put it differently, Asian-Americans perform well in spite of cultural factors present in the home environment, and not because of them. And, though the population size in the study is smaller than one would prefer, it is telling that the disparity between black and white adopted children in the study was virtually identical (within just 4-6 points) to the gap between whites and blacks in the general population, just as in the Scarr adoption study.
The conclusions that present themselves run counter to the conventional explanations for differences in performance, despite Gladwell’s mountains of anecdotes. Clearly the convention derives from some other compulsion than objective handling of the relevant data, and speaks to the philosophical and social commitments of the author, who is personally and emotionally invested in “problematizing” differences in educational and economic outcomes that are easily explained by biological mechanisms. This problematization is characteristic of the liberal impulse to engineer “fair” (read equal) outcomes, and to both denigrate nature as the author of both opportunities and inexorable constraints in man: phenomena which are beyond effective melioration through government policy.
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