I don’t know why I read people’s comments on articles; they invariably make me want to vomit. This linked article is about the elite public high schools in NYC and how the exam-based admissions system (predictably) yields incredibly un-diverse student populations. I am ranting about the myriad comments that suggest that Latino and black students do not do well, cannot compete, do not test well, do not deserve challenging learning opportunities, because their families do not value education.

Can we clear something up? Latino and black families DO value education. The vast majority of people do not want their kids to end up dropping out of high school and working low-wage, menial labor jobs for the rest of their lives. Everyone knows the value of education and wants their kids to go to college, get a good job, yada yada yada. The level or rate of educational attainment of a particular ethnic group is influenced by many factors. Certainly cultural values play a role, but not in the way that you would think—we’ll get to that later. The most important predictor of educational achievement and success is really socioeconomic status. This is where the cynics will pull out their arguments about personal agency and responsibility. The American dream is based on the triumph of guts, hard work, and determination over adverse circumstances, but it’s not that simple. When the cards are stacked against your academic success, and you don’t have any guidance or someone to push you forward, it’s easy to let yourself fall behind. Everyone needs a little bit of inspiration.

The truth of the matter is that many African-American and Latino parents do not have the time or resources to pour into their kids’ education the way that many (usually middle-class) Asian and white parents do. Research looking at race, parental income, and educational attainment generally finds that most (although not all) racial differences in educational attainment disappear when comparing people in similar income brackets.

Something you probably already know: Black and Latino families tend to be poorer than white and Asian families—they have higher rates of poverty and lower median household income. According to the 2007 American Community Survey, the national poverty rate was 13.0% (the percentage of households and individuals at or below the federal poverty level), but 9.0% among whites, 10.6% for Asians, 24.7% for African-Americans, and 20.7% for Hispanics. From the same survey, the median household incomes for non-Hispanic white, Asian, black, and Hispanic families were: $55,096, $66,935, $34,001, and $40,766. However, if you break down the “Asian” classification into various ethnic subgroups, it’s clear that a few of them have socioeconomic statistics similar to blacks and Latinos. Census demographic data don’t tell you anything about values, but clearly economic resources are closely associated with educational attainment. Check out these charts that I threw together with data from the 2007 American Community Survey.

Minority and poor students are disadvantaged by both a lack of access to/awareness of opportunities and a lack of support to pursue those opportunities. (By lack of support, I mean that some parents don’t understand why it might be a good idea to send their child away from home to a summer enrichment program. Trust me, I know.) Add to the access and support problems the lower quality schools in poor neighborhoods, and the likelihood of feeling alienated by the education system because of, say, underdeveloped English language skills that impair communication with teachers and classmates, and you’ve got some major obstacles to educational attainment. The way I see it, minority groups are starting out on a lower rung of the educational achievement ladder as a group. It takes time to build an educated middle class, especially since having more educated, middle class people really helps move that along.

I’ve spent some time tutoring for a private test prep company this past year, and it has been painfully clear how wealthy families can really pour money and time into their kids’ education to ensure that those kids get to college whether they like it or not. I can tell you stories. Recently I heard Chris Rock describe the civil rights struggle as giving the mediocre black people the same opportunities as mediocre white people to attain a comfortable life and a certain level of success. How true that is.

A few words about the data above: I’d bet good money that the major cause of the differences between the Chinese and Indian subgroups and the Hmong, Cambodian, and Vietnamese subgroups has to do with immigration. The Hmong, Cambodians, and Vietnamese in the US came mostly in the 70s and 80s as war and political refugees; most of them poor and not terribly educated in the first place. The challenges of assimilation and the inevitable intergenerational conflict within immigrant families add yet another layer of pressure. We can argue about the influence of immigration status on education. I’ll admit that now I’m speaking from personal experience rather than an objective knowledge base, and that there is hardly a universal immigrant experience based on which I can generalize. Let me know.

All that said, cultural values really do come into play, and this is very clear when you look at educational attainment rates for women and men in the Asian subgroups. The percentage of men who have advanced education (bachelor’s and graduate degrees) is always 15-20 points higher than the percentage of women with advanced education. Why don’t people talk more about that?

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