Last Friday, I quoted columnist Clarence Page, who was paraphrasing an item from Abigail Thernstrom’s & Stephan Thernstrom’s No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning:
In the survey by Laurence Steinberg, a Temple University social scientist, published in his 1996 book, “Beyond the Classroom,” most of the black and Hispanic students surveyed said they could avoid trouble at home as long as their grades stayed above C-minus.
Most of the whites, by contrast, said their parents would give them a hard time if their children came home with anything less than a B-minus.
By contrast, most of the Asian students, whether immigrant or native-born, said that their parents would be upset if they brought home anything less than an A-minus.
I said that this was a fair summary of what the Thernstroms said, but I was working from memory — and my memory was subtly mistaken, as was Page’s quotation: The Steinberg study reports that, to quote the Thernstroms, “Black and Hispanic students got into trouble at home only when their grades fell below C-” — not that they could avoid trouble as long as their grades stayed above C-, which literally means they got into trouble only when their grades fell below an unmodified C. Not a huge difference (especially since studies like this can’t be very precise, and thus might not really be able to measure subtle differences between parents’ likely reaction to a C- and parents’ likely reaction to a C), but it is a difference, and a reminder to always check the original, since even well-intentioned paraphrases can often mangle things, and multiple paraphrases can yield a game of broken telephone.
Incidentally, I did check the Steinberg book, and can say that the Thernstroms are properly reporting the Steinberg study.
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