The numbers do not add up.

According to the The Schott Foundation for Public Education, in 2008, the graduation rate for black male students was 47 percent in the U.S., whereas the rate for white male students was 78 percent.

In a nation that promotes equality for all citizens, why do we see a 31 percent gap in the graduation rate among these two races?

There could be many causes of this phenomenon. Many attribute it to the lack of funding in inner-city school districts or the poor home lives of students at those schools.

I don’t believe it’s that simple, partially because not all students who attend school at inner-city school districts are black.

The theory with most evidence is slowly becoming known as “stereotype threat.”

Claude Steele, a professor of social psychology at Stanford University, explained in an interview with PBS that stereotype threat as any situation in which “a negative stereotype about your group could apply.”

According to Steele, when a stereotype threat situation happens, a person may start to worry whether his or her performance will confirm that negative stereotype. This in turn often compromises your performance in a given task.

If this is true, it might be the reason for the huge racial gap in our educational system. However, to find the solution, our educators must know how it works.

In Steele’s book “Whistling Vivaldi” he cites a number of experiments confirming his hypothesis. Two in particular demonstrate this theory perfectly.

A group of psychologists at Princeton University created a test of golfing ability and had groups of white and black athletes complete it. In one group, the experimenter said the test was to measure “natural athletic ability;” in the other, he said it was a test of “sports intelligence.”

In the test where the experimenter used the words “natural athletic ability,” the group of white students did much worse than the group of white students who were told nothing. In the test where the experimenter used the phrase “sports intelligence,” the black students did worse than the white students.

Why? Well, our society has stereotyped black people as better athletes and white people as more intelligent.

Research shows this is not true but the reality is that when you are in danger of proving a negative stereotype, your performance in the assigned task is compromised.

When we apply this principle to school, it is easy to see why non-white students underperform. In schools we are always measuring intelligence. Therefore, students stereotyped to be less intelligent will be worrying so much about proving the stereotype that they will not perform to the best of their ability.

If we as educators realize this threat to our children, maybe we can close that racial gap we have in our schools.

We know every child can learn and we know intelligence is equally distributed among the races, but teachers need to work to break down the barriers of social injustice created by stereotypes.

We protect our kids from the threat of bullying, the threat of peer pressure and the threat of violence. What we often don’t realize is we need to protect our kids from something more: the threat of stereotypes.