[Music] good afternoon so I'm a sociologist and sometimes when I tell people that they say oh you you help people you help people who need a lot of counseling and I slightly taken a back one wondering if they're thinking I'm a social worker or perhaps a clinical psychologist I answer meekly no that's not quite what I do I'm a researcher um and I think about how Society operates and I do that by thinking about how different groups of people relate to each other specifically I study how we all contribute to the problems of social inequality
in our society through the choices and behaviors that we engage in in through our schools in our communities through the choices that we make with our friends in our partner selections through the behaviors that we engage in as we compete with one another trying to make it to the top often unconscious and unwittingly engaging in behaviors that sometimes may adversely affect the welfare of others so several years ago I decided to go back to high school after many years now that's not something I'll do again and I visited eight high schools in two countries this
country in South Africa all of these schools were relatively high- performing schools half of them were schools attended by students predominantly of color half of them were white dominant schools and I remember on a particular day I was going into a school and it was all a buzz because the students were about to attend an assembly it was an ass simply about a new program being introduced to this school and it was on social differences well afterwards I was given the opportunity to debrief with a group of kids and as we sat and we dialogued
and they shared their opinion some of them even cried as they shared their stories I noticed that a young boy turned to another an African-American male and he said and I quote oh she's so smart and she looks just just like us now for some that may have sound like a compliment but for me that was sobering and I was disturbed because you see this kid was attending an ethnically diverse and very affluent High School where he had never seen any models of African-American intelligence among his teachers that was sobering to me because I grew
up in the Mississippi Delta in the 1970s and 80s where I had teachers who empowered my classmates to me to believe that we could do absolutely anything we wanted to do provided that we worked hard enough mind you the forces of segregation made it hard for us to actually have the kinds of resource sources that kids across town had but they believed in us and they empowered and instilled in us the idea that we could achieve so fast forward over 25 years later and I'm in one of the country's best high schools where there groups
of kids getting signals and signs about what was possible or not possible so when I visited this school and several others like it I noticed several things I notice for example that I nervously had to make decisions about where to sit when I visited the school cafeteria sometimes that happened in the teachers lounges because you see kids were actually dividing themselves according to different social lines I noticed that when I entered the upper echelon of courses in these high schools the courses that presumably were preparing kids for the rigors of college and university I saw
very few kids who look like me African-American or Latino I also noticed in some of these schools that baseball into cheerleading went to white boys and white girls respectively while basketball and step dancing were to black boys and black girls respectively this was curious to me we're often uncomfortable moving across our social and cultural Comfort zones aren't we and so what I chose to do as a sociologist putting my hat on is I wanted to understand what were the factors in a school context that would facilitate the ability for kids to cross academic social and
cultural boundaries and so I developed a survey and on this survey I asked kids about their friendship PR preferences I asked them how much of a difference would it make for you to have a friend who is of A different race or ethnicity religion gender who had different cultural and social tastes from you and here's what I found I found a number of things first one of them was that context matters and context mattered in different ways first of all those kids who were engaged in some of the most rigorous and Hands-On courses reported higher
levels of what I call cultural flexibility from this scale I also noticed that the kids particularly among white students those living in the northern States reported higher cultural flexibility than those who were living in the southern states being a southerner I kind of got that the boundaries are rigid in the South but here is the one I want to focus on the most I recognize that among African-American students those who were attending the majority minority schools that were not as affluent reported higher levels of cultural flexibility than the kids in the school that were presumed
to be more diverse and more affluent and that posed a conundrum for me seriously a paradox if you will because you see we social scientists have found that academic resource is strong School context matter to the overall educational outcomes of kids but it is true that many students come from very disperate contexts when it comes to their family backgrounds yet at the same time if we want them to move up the proverbial ladders to college and university they need the resources invested you see I know this when I was 16 years old a high school
history teacher a white woman gave me a blue book and that blue book was information about a summer program at an elite boarding school on the East Coast that book that moment changed my life's trajectory forever I wouldn't be standing here without it that book introduced me to Philips Andover Academy where I had two pivotable Moments One I got my first Royal academic butt kicking and second I met my besties that summer who introduced me to a place that I thought was named after a color they were going to take a college visit to this
University in New England and they said Prudence you have to come this place is great and I was like oh okay I'd never heard of it the tickets were sold out by the time I got out there is this university called Brown have you heard of it at any rate that fall when I was getting ready to apply to University and I didn't know very much about how to apply to selective colleges and universities I got a catalog in the mail and I decided on the whim to apply to Brown and I got in I
had done well in high school very well actually my test scores were good but what was more important about that is that that teacher who gave me that book created an opportunity and became like Professor hoxby talked about this morning an informational resource for a student who was coming out of a disperate context she became social capital and my besties did too by introducing me to this place called Brown because I didn't have the cultural capital the noow about this place so this is how I know that these really great opportunities matter but here's what
I found out in my research while resourcer educational opportunities and context are absolutely necessary they're not sufficient when it comes to many groups of kids who are in who need to be incorporated I found in my research that we also have to concentrate on the social and cultural environment of the school if we want to understand more effectively how to move kids from the margins to the center of education so you see here's the second part of that conundra that Paradox is that African-American students who are attending schools and came from backgrounds just like the
kids who were attending the more affluent schools were actually doing better and reported higher levels of cultural flexibility were more deeply engaged because in their schools they were going they were enrolled in the higher Echelon courses the advanced courses they were going to model you they were par participating in Debate Club they were traveling with the chorus in the band they weren't segregated and that explained a lot of what I was seeing and so this study actually showed to me that diversity is not enough to get to integration diversity is about demographic change integration is
about cultural and organizational change one of the students I'll call him Judah who attended this one of these affluent high schools his mother and his father wanted him to have an excellent education just like many parents do but Judah and his peers suffered there was a strong academic Gap in their high school and he said to one of my research assistants if we want to reduce the academic Gap then we have to also eradicate the empathy Gap that's a very incisive comment for a 15-year-old and what Judah was referring our attention to through our interviews
and observations was how these kids didn't feel like they necessarily belonged when something would become missing in the school often times the kids from the inner city were presumed to have taken it there were lower expectations about them many of them didn't I weren't encouraged to have the higher aspir aspirations like I did to go on to better in more rigorous places and so Judah and his colleagues while they were in in Rich resourcer schools were not necessarily aspiring and breaching as far as many of their peers and classmates so from all of this research
I tend to ask myself and I tend to ask Educators when you're teaching kids from different backgrounds do you consider how you create communities of difference that bring all students toward the center how aware are you about the limitations of your own College Cal knowledges and what's there and what's not there I also ask how aware we symbolically about how we create Lines within our schools separating the us from the them these are the kinds of things that we as researchers know in fact social psychologists my colleagues here at Stanford Jeff Cohen and Greg Walton
have found that the more students feel that they belong in an educational context the better they perform which is why why I found in some schools that kids who were just like the ones I was studying in the more diverse and affluent schools were really doing much better despite the fact that they didn't have the stratospheric test scores so I know that we can do better I know that history tells us and informs us that we can make progress through our educational institutions and what I have come to conclude from my research is that we
can all shift the tide of Social and educational inequality if we provide ample resources and opportunities if we cultivate culturally flexible minds and if as that wise 15-year-old said we come with empathic Hearts thank [Applause] you
