The problem is familiar: Black students are not faring well in college.  The national dropout rate for African-Americans is nearly 70 percent, while for whites it's 40 percent.  And the diagnosis is familiar too.  Researchers have blamed everything from poverty and poor schools to a history of racism.  But these explanations have been of little help in breaking the frustrating cycle of failure.  Now there's a new idea, one that is shifting the intellectual discussion and offering some hope.  Claude Steele, a professor of social psychology at Stanford University, calls it "stereotype vulnerability,"  which in simple terms means that if you, by word or deed, tell  kids they're part of a group that can't succeed, they won't.  "Over time," Steele told Newsweek, "the pressure from 'stereotype vulnerability' can push black students to stop identifying with achievement in school."

     Steele argues that when blacks (or any other group) are confronted with a stereotype about their intellectual skills before they take tests, they tend to perform according to the stereotype.  Change the expectations, however, and Steele finds that blacks score as high as white students taking the same test.  Steele's famous, identical-twin brother, the conservative essayist Shelby Steele, is skeptical.  But Charles Murray, who claimed in his controversial book "The Bell Curve," that genetics may explain racial group differences in intellectual performance, is intrigued.  "It's interesting research," says Murray.  "We certainly need something to help explain why blacks under perform relative to the predictions we've made from their test scores."  Another black conservative, Boston University economist Glenn Loury, is more enthusiastic: "If I could invest in the idea of stereotype vulnerability, I would put some money on it.  It's got legs."
       Steele first detected stereotype vulnerability as a psychologist at the University of Michigan in 1987.   He was studying the school's high dropout rate for blacks.  "Black students know that the stereotypes about them raise questions about their intellectual ability.  Quite besides any actual discriminatory treatment, they can feel that their intelligence is constantly and everywhere on trial - and all this at a tender age and on difficult proving ground," says Steele.  Whether blacks believe the stereotype on not, the mere threat that they might be judged in terms of it - or fulfill it - can hurt their academic performance.

       After he moved to Stanford in 1991, Steele received a federal grant to conduct a series of experiments on undergraduates.  Groups of black and white students were given portions of the Graduate Record Exam.  In a section asking for personal information, half the tests asked the student's race.  The other half of the tests did not.  What followed, says Steele, was astounding: blacks asked to identify their race scored lower than whites asked the same question; blacks not asked about race scored about the same as their white counterparts.  In another experiment, when blacks were told that they were taking that would evaluate their intellectual skills, they scored below whites.  Blacks who were told that the test was a laboratory problem-solving task that was not diagnostic of ability scored about the same as whites.

       Blacks aren't the only group that can suffer academically because of stereotypes.  Steele and his colleagues found that the scores of female students dropped when they were told that men scored higher on a math test that they were about to take.  When not told about the gender differences, women scored about the same as men.  Steele's graduate students even saw similar preliminary results when white men were told that Asian-Americans generally performed very well on a given standardized test.  The scores of the white males subsequently dropped.

      Challenging programs: In the past, most colleges have tried to help blacks through remedial programs.  The reason such programs fail, says Steele, is that they immediately confront blacks with the stereotype about their abilities.  The solution: schools must change the environment on campus that black students face.  "Challenging students works better than dumbing down their education," says Steele.
       As proof, he cites a program he set up at Michigan in 1991.  For each of the last four years, a group of about 250 students - including whites and economically disadvantaged minority students - were randomly selected and housed in the same dorm as freshmen.  In demanding academic seminars and special study groups, all these students were told that they were being held to high standards - and all were capable of succeeding.  One result: the top two thirds of the black students scored as well as their white classmates.  Black members of a control group who took the familiar route of ethnic solidarity and consciousness- raising performed well below the average for all freshmen at the school.

       Victim-blaming: Steele's work is drawing favorable comment from many of his peers, with one notable exception: his brother, Shelby.  Shelby's best-selling book, "The Content of Our Character," discusses his own concept of "racial vulnerability."  In his view, blacks who perform poorly suffer from an "internalized" inferiority complex.  He thinks black students should work harder and not claim the status of "victims."  Claude will have none on that idea.  "It's the perfect victim-blaming theory, similar to the 'ethnic self-hatred' theories of the 1940s and '50s," he says.

       A recent article in The New York Times Magazine that compared the brothers' views resulted in an extraordinary exchange of letters between the two men, in which Shelby accused Claude of stealing his ideas.  (Claude denies that charge.) For this article, both brothers, who had refused to speak to each other for weeks, volunteered a joint interview.  Then Shelby backed out and Claude withdrew any further cooperation unless Newsweek promised not to mention their stormy relationship.

       But the brothers can't seem to stay out of each other's way.  They grew up outside of Chicago, the sons of an interracial couple.  Their African-American father, a truck driver, met their white mother, a social worker, when both were active in the civil-rights movement.  In the 1970s, Claude took his first teaching job at the University of Utah, where Shelby was studying for his Ph.D.  Today, both work on the Stanford campus, where Shelby is a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institute.

     In the end, Palo Alto will likely be big enough for both men of Steele.  What counts is whether Claude's basic insight - set high standards and encourage students to meet them - can be widely replicated.  If it can, the family feud can become a matter of concern just to the family.