WASHINGTON – Entertainer Bill Cosby Wednesday stood by his criticism of poor blacks’ behavior while participating on a panel at the opening day of the 34th annual Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Legislative Conference.
“Parents should take responsibility for their children’s education,” Cosby told a standing room crowd of 400 people that included a representative from BlackAmericaWeb.com. “You can’t manage your children using a cell phone. No doubt, if a parent comes and sits in a classroom, the child’s game is gone. With all the systemic problems of racism, the solution is parenting.”
Maya Rockeymoore, moderator and vice president of the CBC Foundation, asked Cosby to defend his widely publicized mid-May statements that criticized anti-social behavior and poor learning skills of many poor blacks. Six weeks later in Chicago, Cosby told black activists, “Let me tell you something. Your dirty laundry gets out of school at 2:30 every day, it's cursing and calling each other [the N-word] as they're walking up and down the street. They think they're hip. They can't read. They can't write. They're laughing and giggling, and they're going nowhere.”
On Wednesday in a room at the Washington Convention Center, Cosby acknowledged the Washington, D.C. community then said, “Let’s take a walk through the neighborhood. Listen to the children. It’s a different world out there, and you hear anger, and no one’s listening.”
At least three times Cosby was interrupted with applause.
The forum, titled “Educational Apartheid in the U.S.: Tracking Policies and Resegregation in American Schools,” included Cosby, Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund; Jawanza Kunjufu, author and educational consultant with African American Images; Gary Orfield, professor of Education and Social Policy, Harvard University; Ron Ross, superintendent of the Roosevelt, N.Y. school district; Deborah Jewel-Sherman, superintendent of the Richmond, Va. public schools, and Perah Venzant, former CBC fellow and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois.
Said Edelman, “Every child should feel believed in. One of the problems we face in education is the lack of equitable financing. The ‘No Child Left Behind’ bill is not equally funded.” No Child Left Behind is the Bush administration education policy.
CBC Chairman Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat, said at the close of the 2-hour forum, “We’re very concerned about Al-Qaida and terrorism, but the greatest threat to national security is to fail to properly educate our children.”
Orfield said “Children come to the kindergarten with varying levels of preparation. A great majority are blacks. Segregation continues, not in terms of race, but in terms of quality of schools, quality of teachers and the resources that are provided.”
Orfield told the audience that employment, housing and health care gaps all contribute to the gap in achievement.
“Eighty three percent of elementary school teachers are white females, and 1 percent are African-American males,” said Kunjufu, author of “Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys.”
He said pedagogy -- the science of teaching -- must be challenged. Kunjufu also advocated for single-gender classrooms.
He said there is a higher success rate when boys and girls are separated. Boys’ attention spans are shorter, said Kunjufu, and boys are attentive if the classroom lessons involve more movement, because their attention spans are shorter than girls.
