The Opportunity and Black/White Academic Achievement Gap: It’s the Economy Stupid

The black-white test score gap in the United States is an empirical problematic that dates back to the 1940s. On many standardized tests the mean scores of black students on average are typically at least 1 standard deviation below the mean scores of white students. For the most part, the test scores indicate that on average black American students have more limited skills in processing information from articles, books, tables, charts, and graphs compared to their white and Asian counterparts. Most conservative scholars attribute the problem to black intelligence and effort, while liberal scholars attribute the test score gap to what is commonly referred to as the opportunity gap, i.e., poor quality teachers, schools, and resources among other things. In this article, we offer an alternative conceptual framework, based on Paul C. Mocombe‟s phenomenological structural Marxist logic, “a mismatch of linguistic structure and social class function, within which to understand the black-white academic achievement problematic.

Keywords: Ideological domination, Linguistic Structure, Mismatch of Linguistic Structure and Social Class Function, Capitalism, Opportunity Gap, Social Structure, African Americans, phenomenological structuralism.