I just came across this headline from The Virginian-Pilot:
In Virginia Beach, white students are nearly twice as likely to return for in-person classes than Black students.
In Virginia Beach, 72% of white students and just 38% of Black students have chosen to return for in-person classes as schools have reopened.
I couldn’t read the full story because it resides behind a pay wall. But I would be surprised if the article doesn’t try to explain the racial discrepancy. There very well may be race-based reasons why blacks are returning at only half the rate of whites, but we should not assume that to be the case. Sociological or socio-economic reasons might better explain the differential.
The problem is that we know the race of public school students because we measure it. We also measure a single metric of socioeconomic status, “disadvantaged” versus “non-disadvantaged” based on participation in school lunch programs. If our analysis is largely limited to this data, it is easy to assume that these factors are driving school attendance.
Let’s look at the numbers a different way. Twenty-eight percent of white students are staying home, and 62% of black students are staying home. Clearly, factors that apply to both races are at work. What are the characteristics of those households?
Do the stay-at-homes tend to be poor families with unemployed bread winners — or lower-income families with working parents? Do many stay-at-homes come from middle-class families? How many parents are there in the family? Are two-parent households more or less likely to send their children back to school? Is the number of children in the household a factor? Do stay-at-home students tend to live in more crowded living conditions, or in multigenerational households with elderly grandparents, or with parents who still haven’t been vaccinated? We don’t track those statistics, therefore we tend to exclude them in any analysis of what’s happening inside our schools.
When the only prisms you use to examine issues are race and income, every disparity looks like a problem of race or income. I hope the Virginian-Pilot article didn’t fall into that trap.
— JAB
