Chapter III
Educational Achievement of Male Black Students
The building presents a pitted and discolored concrete wall to the street. There is a fence of vertical steel bars on top of the concrete wall and coils of concertina wire atop that. Ragged black wind-blown plastic trash bags have caught in the wire. If you are allowed through the gates blocking the stairs leading up from the street, you can go around the side of the building, where there is a steel door with a lock, but no handle. There is a metal detector just inside that door. Three-quarters of the fifteen hundred students attending this school are Black. The rest are Hispanic, except for 14 White and 17 Asian children. The playing fields, such as they are, are asphalt. The corridor walls were once, perhaps, beige. They are undecorated except for the occasional memorandum of warnings and prohibitions. The district does not supply funds for science laboratories or art supplies. A third of the teachers leave each year. And so forth. A few miles away, in a White, upper middle class suburb, the school … but you know what that school looks like, how well-equipped it is, how well-educated and dedicated its teachers are; its wide lawns and friendly trees.
Our contemporary inequities in education can be traced back to the very beginnings of public education in this country, particularly in the South. W. E. B. Du Bois found that before the Civil War, “In all Southern states (except a few of the Border states and the District of Columbia) it was forbidden to teach slaves how to read and write, and several states extended the prohibition to free Negroes.” He estimated that at the time of emancipation “illiteracy among the colored population was well over 95% … which meant that less than 150,000 of the four million slaves emancipated could read and write.” During Reconstruction there was a great flowering of education for African-Americans. Abolitionists, victorious, moved south, building and running schools. Former slaves who had become literate became literacy teachers. In the absence of public schools of any kind, “Between 1865 (June 1st) and September 1, 1870, the [Freedmen’s] Bureau spent on education a sum which represented about one-half of the expenses of the schools. The rest was met by benevolent associations and the freedmen themselves. For some years after 1865, the education of the Negro was well-nigh monopolized by the Freedmen’s Bureau, and the missions sustained by the Northern churches and organizations allied with tem. Schools of all grades, from kindergarten to the college, were established in each state.”
Curiously enough, for White children as well, the “public school systems, in most Southern states, began with the enfranchisement of the Negro.” In South Carolina, for example, the Reconstruction constitution of 1868 for the first time obligated the state government to establish a system of universal education. Similar provisions were incorporated into the Reconstruction-era constitutions of the other former Confederate states. For both White and Black students, “It is fair to say that the Negro carpetbag governments established the public schools of the South …” The history of education for African-Americans in the South after the Civil War went from individual schools under military or missionary sponsorship, to state systems put in place under the new constitutions, to — unfortunately, as it turned out — districts under local control. For Du Bois, “Local control meant the control of property and racial particularism. It stood for reaction and prejudice; and wherever there was retrogression, particularly in Negro schools, it can be traced to the increased power of the [White] county and district administrators.”
During the period of Jim Crow, paralleling the imposition of debt peonage, there was a systematic limitation of educational opportunities for African-Americans in the South. Once African-Americans were disenfranchised, laws were passed so as to ensure that schooling in the South for Black students was funded at much lower levels than that for White students, when not discouraged altogether. (Today, as we will see, similar inequities in funding are maintained in practice if not in law.) Myrdal commented on this point that “The interest of educating the Negroes to become faithful helots has been obvious, but the Southern whites have not even attempted to make it effective in practice. Instead, they have merely kept Negro education poor and bad.” (This is, perhaps, one of the few examples of irony in Myrdal’s massive report.) Myrdal shows that the control of education can be, has been, and by extension now is, maintained by White politicians, even when the operations of the system appear to be in the hands of African-American professionals:
In the main … the control over Negro education has been preserved by other whites representing the political power of the region. [Although the] salaried officers of the movement — the college presidents, the school principals, the professors, and the teachers — are now practically all Negroes … With this set-up, it is natural and, indeed, necessary that the Negro school adhere rather closely to the accommodating pattern … Negro teachers on all levels are dependent on the white community leaders . . .
Or as Du Bois put it: “The schools were separate but the colored schools were controlled by white officials who decided how much or rather how little should be spent upon them; who decided what could be taught and what textbooks used and the sort of subservient teachers they wanted.” He quotes a White official advising that when choosing between two teachers for a Black school, those (White officials) responsible should choose the less effective.
This is the background against which the lack of educational achievement by male Black students since the end of legal segregation must be considered. That comparative lack of achievement has often been attributed to the structure of the Black family. This theory is, in itself, a way to maintain the status quo. If Black students do not do well in school and they live in a family at the head of which is what the Census calls a “female householder without husband present,” particularly if this “householder” has an income below the poverty level, as they often do, why inquire further? But if we do inquire further, we can rule out the family structure argument easily enough, for example by a comparison of educational outcomes for Black and Hispanic students. Most of the socio-cultural variables, except poverty itself, have different values in the Black and Hispanic communities. The Moynihan Black family consists of a woman supporting one or two children without a husband. The “typical” Hispanic household consists of a married couple with two or three children. On the other hand, Black and Hispanic families have incomes at similar points in the economic distribution and, crucially, often live in the same or neighboring communities. Their children attend the same or similar schools. It is instructive, then, to look at high school graduation rates for Black and Hispanic students, by state. The trends are remarkably similar. States with relatively high graduation rates for Hispanic students, such as New Jersey, also tend to have relatively high graduation rates for Black students; those with relatively low graduation rates for Hispanic students, such as New York, also have relatively low graduation rates for Black students. The structures of the Black and Hispanic families are unlikely to differ from one side of the Hudson River to the other, from Harlem to Newark. The similar educational outcomes for Black and Hispanic students point to something other than cultural factors in the Black family and community as the primary engine for the failure of schools to properly educate many male Black students. They point to the schools.
Three-quarters of a century ago Oliver C. Cox pointed out that after Reconstruction “… the training advocated for … the children of the poor, was intended to keep them within the occupational level of their parents; and intellectual pursuits were ruled out.” The schools Black children are allowed to attend today are similarly limited and, by and large, similarly segregated, which facilitates inequities in resource allocation. You only need walk through a school, such as that described at the beginning of this chapter to realize that its intellectual and cultural poverty parallels the economic poverty of the neighborhood: no student art on the walls, no laboratory benches in the science rooms, few books in the library, few — if any — computers anywhere; no music, no challenging classes. No opportunity to learn.
Researchers at The Civil Rights Project at UCLA have documented that most Black children attend schools segregated both by race/ethnicity and income. While the degree of segregation declined from the 1960s (the end of de jure segregation in the South) to the 1980s, it has increased since then. In the 1980s, 63% of Black students attended schools with enrollments that were half or more minority, in the 2009-10 school year that percentage had risen to 74%. By 2009-10 there were six million Black students in schools that were half or more minority; three million in schools 90% to 100% minority and 1.2 million in schools that were 99-100% minority. If the last of these groupings were a single school district, it would edge out New York City’s as the largest in the country.
As a matter of fact, much of New York City’s public school district already looks as if it were that segregated system. The Civil Right Project has disaggregated segregation data for each state by the intensity of segregation in each. It is striking that across all such measures, the states of New York and Illinois are among the most segregated: ranking first and second, for example, among states where the typical Black student is least likely to be in a school with White students and also for schools with more than 90% minority enrollments. These data reflect the intensity of segregation in New York City and Chicago, the nation’s two largest school districts. It is not an accident or happenstance that New York produces the smallest percentage of male Black high school graduates of any state. What other result could be expected from the way in which its school systems are structured? Not only are they segregated both by race and income, but their schools are funded inequitably: those schools serving low poverty neighborhoods are given more resources than those serving high poverty neighborhoods. This is the well-known Reverse Robin Hood policy of many districts and states.
The segregation of Black students would not necessarily lead to a lack of educational achievement. Many middle class African Americans of a certain age can point to elite segregated high schools that emphasized and produced high achieving students: the Talented Tenth. But today segregation is strongly linked to the lack of student achievement. Reading is the essential skill for education and by grade 8 schools and school systems have had time to provide that basic skill to their students. Grade 8 reading proficiency is, therefore, a good indicator of school and school system quality. Data from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP — “The Nation’s Report Card”) shows that as the percentage of White students in a school falls, the percentage of male Black students scoring at or above Proficient on the indicator Grade 8 Reading test falls as well: from 17% for male Black students in schools with few Black students to less than half that — 8% — for male Black students in schools that are 49% or less White. We can estimate that in 2009-2010 three-quarters of the nation’s eight million Black students were in those school districts where just 8% of the Black male students scored at or above Proficient (that is, at grade level) in Grade 8 Reading. Given that the achievement levels of White students in these schools runs in parallel with that for Black students, it seems that the variable driving these effects is not the race or the home life of the students, but the quality of segregated schools: the more segregated (i.e., the fewer White students), the more inadequate, the more inadequately resourced, the school.
At the time of Myrdal’s study, in both the South and the North, segregation was a crucial factor in determining the quality of education on offer to African-American children. According to Myrdal: “In the North the official opinion among whites is that segregation is not compatible with equality, but … much segregation is actually in effect as a consequence of residential segregation and of gerrymandering districts and granting permits to transfer … In the South … [s]egregation is usually not motivated by financial reasons but as a precaution against social equality.” Interestingly, according to Du Bois, during Reconstruction and immediately after:
In nearly every state, the question of mixed and separate schools was a matter of much debate and strong feeling. There was no doubt that the Negroes in general wanted mixed schools. They wanted the advantages of contact with white children, and they wanted to have this evidence and proof of their equality.
They wanted, they want, equal educational opportunity and the most direct route to this goal appears to be through integrated schools, as the prospects for schools attended exclusively by Black students receiving the resources necessary for an equal opportunity to learn seemed — seem — slight.
The national reluctance to achieve racially integrated schools has focused attention on the alternative of the economic integration of schools. However, income segregation, like racial segregation, affects basic skills proficiency. Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965) and its successors direct supplementary federal funding to schools and school districts in which at least 40% of the students are from low-income families. The Civil Rights Project calculates that while 64% of Black students are in schools with students from low-income families—usually themselves or other Black students, only about one-third of White, non-Hispanic, students are in schools with low-income students. The results are predictable: As the percentage of students from families with low-incomes in these schools increases, the percentage of Black students scoring below grade level also increases. Less than a quarter of the Black students in low poverty schools score below Basic; half those in high poverty schools score below Basic on the Grade 8 Reading assessment.
Is this primarily a matter of neighborhood incomes or of individual family incomes? It is increasingly argued that we must first overcome poverty before improving educational outcomes: an argument sometimes meant to present the situation as insolvable. Others making that argument, as, for example, David Berliner, do so out of a sincere desire to change the situation. Surely it is better for children if their family income is above the poverty level: better for their health, emotional well-being, nutrition and educational opportunities. But the association of the last of these, educational opportunity, with family income, is not independent of other factors. Indeed, perhaps counter-intuitively, it often has little to do directly with family income.
The predominate influence of neighborhood economic status, as opposed to an individual family’s economic status, can be shown by calculating the percentage of students below Basic on NAEP's Grade 8 Reading assessment by whether or not they are eligible for the National Lunch Program themselves, on the one hand, and on the other hand by the percentage of such students enrolled in the school. The first measures the effect of family economic status; the second that of neighborhood economic status and hence, all too often, the resources provided to the school. As the percentage of students living in poverty attending a school increases from 1-5% to 100%, so the percentage of students both eligible (i.e., poor) and ineligible (higher income) who score below Basic also increases. It is telling that the percentages for low-income and higher income students converge: beginning at 18% and 6%, respectively in very low poverty schools and ending at 47% and 39% in very high poverty schools. The percentage of children living in poverty attending very low poverty schools scoring below Basic is the same as or higher than that of children from higher income families attending high poverty schools, schools where a majority of the children in the school are eligible for the National Lunch Program. The average economic status of students in a school is more important than the economic status of a particular student’s family. Schools in which most of the students are from families with low-incomes, and especially those in which most of the students are Black and are also from families with low-incomes, do not educate any children well. And most Black children, being from families with low-incomes, are consigned to such schools.
As a consequence of dual racial and economic segregation and the effect of these for educational opportunities, just ten percent of male Black students score at or above “proficient” (that is, at or above grade level) on the NAEP Grade 8 Reading assessment. In other words, 90% of male Black students are not proficient readers by grade 8. But that is a national average. It is significant that Black educational achievement varies by state. When analyzed on a state-by-state basis, in general, the percentage of male Black students reaching proficiency in the states parallels that for male White, non-Hispanic, students. That is, the higher the proficiency rate for male White, non-Hispanic students, the higher that for male Black students (or, perhaps, visa versa). It could be inferred from this, again, that a key variable is the overall quality of a state’s school systems (not, to reiterate, some mysterious function of “the” Black family). For male Black students the range among states is from 4% Proficient or Above in California with its barely functioning urban and rural school systems to 19% in Connecticut; that is, from less than half the national average to nearly twice the national average. If all the Black students in the country attended schools where they did as well as all Black students do in Connecticut, the national achievement level for Black students would be five times what it is at present.
On the other hand, the range for male White, non-Hispanic, students is from 19% in West Virginia to 48% in Connecticut. In other words, male White, non-Hispanic, students in the lowest scoring state are taught to read as well as male Black students in the highest scoring state. Connecticut can educate its male Black students as well as West Virginia can educate its male White, non-Hispanic, students, but educates less than half the proportion of its male Black students as well as it educates its male White, non-Hispanic, students.
Why?