Minorities and Mathematics: Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

A fundamental goal of schooling in the United States is to provide equity in educa tion for all students. There are at least two ways that equity might be defined: (1) in terms of opportunities provided by schools or (2) in terms of student outcomes. From the second perspective, one can argue that if any population of students is achieving significantly below their peers in the nation as a whole or is participating in fewer ad vanced level mathematics courses, then equity in education is not being provided. This does not imply that schools are totally responsible for differences in achievement patterns of different population groups. There are many other factors within our social structure that affect students' per formance in school. But it is a matter of ut most concern when large segments of the population score significantly below their peers on achievement tests and fail to de velop the academic skills required to enter many occupations. The elimination of these deficiencies should be a primary goal of education. Results from the second mathematics as sessment of the National Assessment of Ed ucational Progress (NAEP) clearly docu ment that serious inequities exist in the mathematics education of black and His panic students in the United States. Na tional Assessment results are based on the performance of a carefully selected, repre sentative national sample of over 70 000 9-, 13-, and 17-year-olds. Between 250 and 450 exercises that covered a wide range of basic mathematics objectives were administered to these students during the 1977-1978 school year. In addition to assessing mathe matics achievement, data were gathered on a number of affective variables and on the mathematics courses taken in high school. An important objective of National As sessment is to describe the performance of major groups within the national popu lation. The groups were identified on the basis of region of the country, sex, race, level of parents' education, and size and type of community. The focus of this ar ticle is on the assessment results for blacks and Hispanics. Other minorities are not in cluded because they were not sampled in sufficient numbers to provide reliable mea sures of performance. Approximately 14 percent of the sample were black, 5 percent were Hispanic, and 1 percent were identi fied as other minorities. These classifica tions were based on self-report at age 17 and on appearance and surname at ages 9 and 13. Although the focus of this article is on blacks and Hispanics, selected results based on type of community and parental educa tion have been included because they pro vide a perspective on the performance of blacks and Hispanics. Type of community is defined on the basis of occupation. High Metro students live in a metropolitan area where a high proportion of the adults are employed in professional or managerial po sitions and a low proportion are factory or farm workers, not regularly employed, or on welfare. Low Metro students live in areas where a high proportion of the adult population is not regularly employed or is on welfare and a low proportion is em ployed in professional or managerial posi tions. The type-of-community classification is made for each school on the basis of the