Cleveland, a city of 400,000 people, is the center of a metropolitan area with a population of two million. The city has a world-class orchestra and an equally fine and renowned art museum. Case Western Reserve University is one of the highest-ranking research universities in the United States. The medical research and treatment facilities in Cleveland bring the international wealthy and famous there for treatment. None of this alleviates the situation of the more than half the residents of the city who are the descendants of enslaved Africans.
The Cleveland Metropolitan School District enrolled 42,500 students in 2011, 68% of whom were African American, 15% White, non-Hispanic, and 14% Hispanic. The average salary of teachers then was $69,000. Perhaps because of this, the student to teacher ratio was a quite high 17:1. All those comparatively well-paid teachers met state licensing and certification requirements and hardly any were in their first or second year of teaching. On the other hand, a remarkable three-quarters of the district’s teachers were absent more than 10 days of the school year. All of these data in regard to the teaching staff are most unusual, the salaries higher, the proportion of new teachers lower, the student to teacher ratio and teacher absenteeism unusually high.
Cleveland is one of the urban districts analyzed by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Grade 8 reading, a key factor, has varied since 2003 for White students in the district from 14% scoring at or above grade level (Proficient and above) in 2003 to 26% in 2007, and then back down to 19% in 2013. Results for the district’s Black students have been less variable, 8% at grade level in 2003 and 9% in 2013: 12% for Black girls and just 6% for Black boys. Or, to put this another way, the district fails to teach 94% of its male Black students to read at grade level by grade 8. For Ohio as a whole, 16% of Black students read at grade level in grade 8, as do 43% of White students. In Ohio’s suburban districts, 19% of Black students read at grade level, as do 47% of White students.
In Cleveland, as elsewhere, Black students can at least double their opportunity of learning basic skills by moving to the suburbs.
We can look at this another way by calculating the numbers of students reading at grade level (Proficient and above) with parents at various educational attainment levels by aligning NAEP and Census data. Twenty-three percent of White and 25% of Black adult Cleveland residents over 25 years of age reported to the Census that they had less than a high school diploma, equivalent to NAEP’s “Did not finish high school.” Thirty-five percent of Whites and 36% of African Americans said that they were high school graduates with a diploma or GED, equivalent to NAEP’s “Graduated high school.” Twenty-four percent of Whites and 31% of African Americans reported some college or associate’s degree, equivalent to “Some education after high school” and 17% of Whites and 8% of African Americans reported attaining a bachelor’s degree or higher: “Graduated College.”
None of the 2,100 grade 8 Black students who reported no parent with a diploma read at grade level or above. Thirty Black students report that one of their parents completed high school while they themselves read at grade level. 131 Black students read at grade level in grade 8 and have at least one parent who had some college. And 15 of Black students at grade 8 read at grade level and report that at least one of their parents has a college degree. (The number of Black students in grade 8 reading at grade level who are the children of college graduates is lower than that of those whose parents have “some college” because there are few adult Black college graduates in Cleveland.) Whichever way you calculate it, fewer than 10% of grade 8 Black students in Cleveland have been taught to read at or above grade level.
But the Cleveland school district has a Plan for Transforming Schools. It has as its goal “to ensure that every child in Cleveland attends a high-quality school and that every neighborhood has a multitude of great schools from which families can choose.
To reach this goal, Cleveland must transition from a traditional, single-source school district to a new system of district and charter schools that are held to the highest standards and work in partnership to create dramatic student achievement gains for every child.
Charter schools in Ohio, according to NAEP, bring 17% of students at or above Proficient in reading at grade 8. Non-charter schools bring 40% at or above proficient. For Black students, state-wide, those in charter schools scored at or above proficient in 2013 10% of the time; those not in charter schools reached grade level 19% of the time. If results for charter schools in Cleveland are similar to those for the state as a whole, creating a “system of district and charter schools” will likely dilute the efficacy, such as it is, of the district schools.
High school graduation rates for Cleveland students in 2011-2012 were 42% for both Black students, that is, nearly 60% of those students enrolled in grade 9 in 2008-09 did not graduate at the end of the 2011-12 school year. Given that 90% of Black students in grade 8 cannot read at grade level, it is remarkable that the district manages to graduate as many students as it does. Perhaps we should look at this more closely: How well-prepared are those graduates?
Cuyahoga Community College is the area’s postsecondary institution of first resort, as it were. In a recent year it admitted 2,100 first-time students. 90 of these received Associate’s degrees. 780 of those admitted were Black, 316 of whom were men. Eleven of those Black students, 4 of whom were men, received Associate’s degrees in the standard 150% of normal time. Those 11 of 780 Black students were not necessarily all from Cleveland, nor were all 4 of the Black males who benefitted in this way.
Other students attend Cleveland State University, hoping to obtain a Bachelor’s degree, which is increasingly vital for employment, middle class incomes and, for Black men, avoidance of incarceration. Cleveland State University’s first-time degree-seeking undergraduates in fall 2006 totaled nearly a thousand, 241 of whom were Black; 73 of those were men. 318 of that cohort, 39 of whom were Black, 7 of whom were Black males, received Bachelor’s degrees. Not all those 32 Black women and 7 Black men who grasped the brass ring of a four-year degree from Cleveland State University were necessarily from Cleveland. Some of those successful Black undergraduates probably came from elsewhere in Cuyahoga County, elsewhere in Ohio, or further afield. Finally, to round out the sample, Case Western Reserve, a national research university, admitted 1,015 first time undergraduate students in fall 2006, 66 of whom were Black and 22 of whom were Black males. Nearly 800 of that group received Bachelor’s degrees. Fewer than 50 of those were Black, just 14 were Black males. Not all of these, as well, would necessarily have been graduates of the Cleveland public schools.
Given the nature of these results, exact percentages hardly matter. We have something like 3,000 Black students going into the district’s high schools, 1,600 graduating, 11 receiving Associate’s degrees and 89 Bachelor’s degrees within six years. It is clear that the district almost totally fails to prepare its Black students, and, in particular, its male Black students, for college or careers likely to produce an income sufficient to support a family, or provide them with the type of background necessary to fully appreciate the remarkable holdings of the Cleveland Museum of Art or the offerings available during the season in Severance Hall.
It does, however, “prepare” many of its male Black students for incarceration.