It was a completely inappropriate outburst, but it may be one of the most important questions ever asked about the achievement gap:

“Why don’t you guys study like the kids from Africa?” a frustrated English teacher, Patrick Welsh, asked his class of African-American seniors who had just flunked yet another test.

The students’ answers may be more enlightening than any of data and statistics we’ve been looking at for years.

Welsh writes in the Washington Post, “A kid who seldom came to class — and was constantly distracting other students when he did–shot back: ‘It’s because they have fathers who kick their butts and make them study.’ Another student angrily challenged me: ‘You ask the class, just ask how many of us have our fathers living with us.’ When I did, not one hand went up.”

Welsh’s question stemmed from an experience with an African student who went on to major in engineering at Virginia Tech, whose father and family had instilled the importance of an education in him. But the larger issue, he writes, is that schools have become hung up on race as the reason many students do not perform well, when it’s actually a larger issue of socioeconomics.

Students who do not have a strong familial support system are most likely to flounder—regardless of race. While U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and many others have started calling the disparities in white and minority test scores “the biggest civil rights issue of our time,” the reality is that getting these students on par with their more privileged peers is much more complicated.

As an example, he points to two colleagues at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., who sought remedial help for black students who didn’t have the basic skills to keep up with their classwork. Instead of placing these students in a more appropriate, albeit lower level, class, an administrator told the teachers that the problem was their low expectations, not their students’ skills.

 “Administrators focused solely on race are stigmatizing black students,” Welsh writes. “At the same time, they are encouraging the easy excuse that the kids who are not excelling are victims, as well as the idea that once schools stop being racist and raise expectations, these low achievers will suddenly blossom.”

Welsh takes issue with his superintendent in the Alexandria school system, Morton Sherman, who came under fire last year when he put up banners showing the discrepancies in test scores among white, black, and Hispanic students. Sherman has taken a hard look at the achievement gap and scheduled “Equity and Excellence” conferences to address it. But Welsh says until schools can find ways to address the socioeconomic disparities, these efforts will be doomed.

Duncan has already pledged to ditch the “No Child Left Behind” name in the upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The harder part will be finding a balance between high expectations and the adequate supports that these underprivileged students need.

Joetta Sack-Min, Associate Editor