“Education Matters” is the third of BlackAmericaWeb’s seven-part State of Black America series. Coming Tuesday: “Health as Wealth.” On its final day, State of Black America will focus on solutions.
Click here to read Part One, “Whither Black People?”
Click here to read Part Two, “Our Financial Insecurity.”
In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education.
Chief Justice Earl Warren, Brown vs. Board of Education (1954)
To get a clear understanding of the current state of education in black America, it would be most prudent to review it from a historical perspective.
African slaves’ first encounter with the public education system in America was non-existent upon their arrival to the New World. Negro slaves were not permitted to read, write or attend government-sponsored schools; the mere thought of providing them with any form of education would be met with swift punishment and possible charges of criminal activity. Historically, the facts are clear: the longer the slaves remained uneducated, uninformed and illiterate, they made for better slaves -- a more cooperative source of free labor.
During this time, the slave masters, along with the majority of white citizens, understood that if the Negro, free or enslaved, were to ever be taught the historic greatness of their African ancestry, were to fully understand the inhumanity and ungodliness of their physical bondage and grasp the possibilities of what freedom and education had to offer, this subservient human being would become a major threat to the privileged white society -- not in the sense that whites were afraid of physical harm, but they certainly feared what an informed and well-educated black African could do to the very profitable slave economy, not to mention the competition for opportunities that this educated servant would create.
After the Emancipation Proclamation, when freed blacks were able to attend public schools, although these schools were separate, unequal and ill-equipped, the black collective still placed great value on the need to gain a quality education. The descendents of the slaves fully understood that this single act of mastering the ability to read and write could greatly increase one’s position in life, heighten the ability to gain one’s independence and potentially help offset some of white America’s racist policies and inhumane practices.
In 1954, when the United States Supreme Court, in the Brown v. Board of Education case, reversed the 1896 Plessey v. Ferguson decision and set in motion the plan for integration and desegregation, there was also a shift in the black value system -- a value system that once stressed pride in one’s self and a commitment to education.
This leads us to the current state of education in black America. The value system that was encouraged during the days of involuntary servitude and the days when a formal education was forbidden for African slaves is clearly not in place today. The importance of gaining an education was of much more value to us when it was illegal and forbidden than now, when it is free and available to all citizens and non-citizens.
When you look throughout America’s public school system, when compared to every other ethnic group, black public school students in primary and secondary schools are underachieving, registering lower standardized test scores, earning lower grade point averages and being outperformed on the SAT and ACT college entrance exams. In many school districts across the country, many first-generation Hispanic and Latino students, who speak English as a second language, are outperforming black students in many of the academic areas that are included in the national standards.
The Human and Civil Rights Department of the National Education Association examined the disparities in its 2004-2005 Focus On series, which addressed the needs of six specific groups, including women and girls, blacks and American Indians. According to the NEA report, “the average scores of black 17-year-olds in high school on the nation’s report card (science, math and reading) are comparable to white 13-year-olds in middle school. In the year 2000, for example, 20 percent of white fourth graders scored ‘below basic’ on the national math test, while 61 percent of black fourth graders scored ‘below basic.’” The data is particularly “disturbing,” the report says, “when one realizes that these gaps in achievement exist across class and gender lines as well as in rural, urban and suburban school districts.”
“Education does matter to the black community,” opines Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), when asked to comment on the current educational climate, “and until we are able to bridge the achievement and opportunity gaps, our children will continue to struggle to be competitive in modern society. Public awareness of this disparity must be a top priority.”
Whether or not quality education is indeed a priority in our communities largely depends on your viewpoint – the classic “is the glass half-full or half-empty?” scenario. Jackson Lee belongs to the former group.
“I have visited these overcrowded schools with crumbling walls and aging books,” she told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “Instead of seeing what some would call a calamitous situation, I see the souls of children, wanting to learn and lead in the world. We must step up to this challenge and work within our communities to create that positive academic environment. If we pave the way for our children to learn and lead, it is my promise that they and their success will follow.”
Since 1954, as young blacks began their journeys through the integrated halls of public education, the public school system in America has consistently failed to provide the same quality of education for black students as it does for their white counterparts. This horrific trend leads one to ask the question: Why is it that the longer black children remain in the public school system, they fall further and further behind their white, Asian, and Hispanic classmates?
"African-Americans have made great strides in education in recent decades, but the evidence shows that too much of this progress has been hollow,” Washington, D.C. delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “Taken together, social promotion, huge disparities between funding for blacks and whites in the same states, increases in poverty and family distress could undermine black progress in education and in American life. The challenge is to tackle them now and all at once."
In a nation with over 10 million black public school students in underfunded, understaffed schools, resisting an education that was valued more when it was almost impossible to obtain -- what does the future hold, particularly for a generation that may be unable to take advantage of the many opportunities that the 21st Century has to offer?
Accountability from their parents, in some instances. School systems across the country haven begun adopting policies that penalize parents for their children’s behavioral shortcomings, including repeated truancy and habitual tardiness. Patricia Payne, director of the Center for Multicultural Education for the Indianapolis Public Schools, says it is the responsibility of those parents whose children populate the nation’s public schools to ensure the success of their children, academic and otherwise.
“Parents are the critical element in the entire process of education; they have the young people first,” Payne told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “The educators must work in conjunction with the parents in order to ensure success in the classroom. I’m not talking about being there to make popcorn or being a part of a candy sale. I mean sending the child to school prepared to learn. Being sure they are well-rested, well-fed, with proper school supplies and completed homework assignments.
“I no longer make excuses for those parents who may be too busy to participate in their child’s education,” Payne said. “They can find time and transportation to the school just like they do anywhere else they want to go. Parents must make their presence known in the schools, as this changes the dynamics of the education environment. Educators tend to work and teach differently when the parents of the children they are teaching are active in the learning environment.”
As Affirmative Action programs that once provided opportunities for blacks are struggling to fight for existence, entry into the halls of higher learning institutions is becoming more difficult to obtain. And, as discontent and disinterest grows on the primary and secondary public school levels, we are grooming an illiterate generation of young people who have almost completely turned their backs on education -- a generation of a village where we, the elders, have neglected to maintain and promote the concept of valuing knowledge, fostering curiosity, knowing freedom.
If the education of black children is not passionately addressed, our future will undoubtedly become a repeat of our past, as we will soon began to dominate the positions of indentured servants and again be relegated to that of a second class citizen – this time in the country of our birth. In the language of the America’s racist founding fathers, blacks in these United States will again be counted as we once were – three-fifths of a human being.
