Joanne Jacobs comments on research by Claude Steele which finds that peoples' tested intelligence can be raised or lowered by communicating lower or higher expectations:

He lowered white students' scores by telling them Asians tended to score better on a math test they were taking. He lowered female students' scores by telling them the test was biased toward males. And he lowered black students' scores simply by asking questions before the test about basketball and hip-hop music, reminding them of their racial identity.

Joanne continues:

Steele's argument is that standardized test scores for blacks don't reflect their true abilities, because "stereotype threat" has lowered their scores. However, there's no evidence that SAT scores underestimate black students' college performance. In fact, blacks tend to do slightly better on the SATs than they do in college.

Of course, black students face negative stereotypes in college too. There's evidence that blacks earn higher college grades if they're in an environment that encourages them to think about the academic challenges they face as typical of all students, regardless of race. Sadly, much of the counseling that's provided encourages students to see everything in racial terms.

Steel then follows this logic a little further:

Steele advises teachers to "tell the students that you are using high standards (this signals that the criticism reflects standards rather than race), and that your reading of their essays leads you to believe that they can meet those standards (this signals that you do not view them stereotypically)." He says that "black students who got this kind of feedback saw it as unbiased and were motivated to take their essays home and work on them even though this was not a class for credit. They were more motivated than any other group of students in the study -- as if this combination of high standards and assurance was like water on parched land, a much-needed but seldom-received balm."

Sadly, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make 'em think. To the casual observer, this would seem to obviously lead to stance opposing programs which present lowered standards for minorites. Instead, astoundingly (emphasis mine):

Steele does not recommend that. Quite the opposite: he actually recommends discounting the test results for blacks, thus re-inforcing the notion (or confirming the stereotype) that they do not do as well. In fact, he submitted expert testimony supporting the University of Michigan's argument that standards have to be lowered for blacks.

We've come to the point where we carefully assemble the two, and the other two, add them together, and then must add a fudge factor to make sure we report the result as twenty-three, which has been accepted idealogically, rather than the four we can plainly count. I'm amazed any meaningful research comes out of an environment this idealogically charged. Whatever happened to the disinterested researcher?

Many thanks to the Abode of Amritas.