According to the
National Center for Education Statistics, 43% of black fourth-graders do one hour or more of homework per night, as do 45% of whites and 47% of Hispanics. Although Asian fourth-graders are more likely than any other group to study one or more hours per night (56% do so), the differences between whites, blacks and Hispanics are too small to explain performance differences, and certainly contradict the notion that blacks or Latinos devalue education relative to whites.
In fact, black and Hispanic fourth-graders are both more likely than whites that age to do more than one hour of homework, with 18% of Hispanics, 17% of blacks, but only 15% of whites putting in this amount of study time daily.
Also Black students are twice as likely as white students to get help from their parents on homework every day of the school week (twenty percent compared to ten percent), and while roughly half of black students get help from parents on homework at least three times each week, approximately two-thirds of whites get such help two times or less, with whites a third more likely than blacks to work with parents rarely if ever on their homework.
Likewise, and countering commonly held class biases, the poorest students (those from families with less than $5,000 in annual income) are actually the most likely to get substantial homework help from their parents, while those from families with incomes of $75,000 or more annually are the least likely to do so. Half of the poorest students work with their parents on lessons three or more times weekly, while only a third of the wealthiest students do.
Likewise, evidence indicates there is no substantial difference between white and black students in terms of whether their parents attend parent-teacher conferences or school meetings. Black parents and their children are also equally likely as their white counterparts to visit a library, art gallery, zoo, aquarium, museum or historic site, as well as a community or religious event—further countering the notion that black parents take less interest in providing educational opportunities for their kids.
Furthermore, and contrary to popular belief, three of four black children are read to by their parents when they are young, and black youth are equally or more likely than whites to be taught letters, numbers and words by their parents between the ages of three and five.
Of all the evidence rebutting the notion that blacks place less value on education than whites, nothing makes the point more clearly than attendance information. Black twelfth graders are more than twice as likely as whites to have perfect attendance (16% versus 7.4%), and are even more likely than Asians to have perfect attendance.
Whites are more likely than blacks to have missed seven or more days during the last semester, while blacks are less likely than members of any racial group to have missed that many days of school. There is also no significant difference between whites, Asians and blacks in terms of their likelihood to skip classes.
Black students are only half as likely as whites to be placed in high-tracked English or math classes, and 2.4 times more likely than whites to be placed in remedial classes. Even when blacks demonstrate equal ability with their white counterparts, they are less likely to be placed in accelerated classes.
When kids from lower-income families—who are disproportionately of color—correctly answer all math questions on a standardized test, they are no more likely to be placed in advanced or college tracks than children from upper-income families who missed a fourth of the questions, and they are 26% less likely to be placed in advanced tracks than upper-income persons with comparably perfect scores. Even the President of the College Board has acknowledged that black 8th graders with test scores comparable to whites are disproportionately placed in remedial high school classes.
The impact of being tracked low in school has been shown to be profound. One of the nation’s leading experts on tracking, Jeannie Oakes, reports that according to her own studies and those of others, being tracked low fosters reductions in student feelings of their own abilities and helps depress aspirations for the future among low-tracked students.
references:
http://academic.udayton.edu/race/04needs/educate01.htm
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Its long read but its very informative...kinda of debunks the notion that african americans place less value on education than the rest of the population
*shrugs*
