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I was a star in high school. My grades were so high that it never mattered if I occasionally decided to skip classes. Catching up required no effort on my part. The principal paraded my peers and me around the school like trophies. Everyone recognized us as the school’s intelligentsia and assured us that we were destined for great things.
I was accepted at a prominent university, and I set out to embrace my bright future with the ink still wet on my glowing high school transcripts. Why, then, did I crash and burn in my first semester? The first few weeks of college turned out to be the most humbling weeks of my life.
I arrived at my very first class filled with enthusiasm, confident in my knowledge and abilities. It did not take long to recognize that I was having trouble following the lecture. The teacher talked for an hour and only wrote two words on the white board. My notes from that first class consisted of just those two words. By the end of the day, I felt overwhelmed. After the first round of exams, I knew I was in trouble. I was not alone. My closest friends were reporting similar distresses. We were failing for the first time in our lives, and we did not understand why. Inadequate public school education turned out to be the reason.
It was an answer I could accept. As I said, school was never a challenge for me. What concerned me, however, was that the university accepted thousands of other students who were also the products of the public school system. However, for the most part, the students who struggled and/or collapsed under the new pressure to perform were students of color educated under the inner city system. Those students who attended public schools in more affluent communities made the transition from high school to college with barely a ripple.
This is not new information. The statistics are available for the entire world to see. Children of poor families are six times more likely to drop out compared to their wealthy counterparts. In 2004, the graduation rate among Black Americans was 53.4% compared to 76.2% of whites. Black male high school students are twice as likely to drop out, as they are to graduate. This has been happening for so long now that it is widely accepted as the normal, unalterable course of events. There has always been a small resistance movement of educators determined to make a difference, but faced with the challenges and little wider social or political support its members quickly give in to feelings of helplessness. They burn out. They abandon the fight. They curse themselves as fools for trying. It is, after all, a fight they cannot win.
Part of the problem is that there is no concrete curriculum that teachers must follow even as schools are largely required to teach to the annual Regents Exams. What this means is instead of offering students a quality education that will prepare them to participate in the sciences, arts and industry, students are simply prepared to pass a series of exams intended to prove that the public school system has taught them the bare minimum. But bare minimum as defined by the Board of Education is quite obviously not the minimum one needs to thrive and contribute in America. Since the effectiveness of a school is largely determined by the statistics associated with these tests, students are subjected to a no frills education designed to prevent anything (including advanced learning) from interfering with a teacher’s obligation to teach to the exam and get the highest pass rate possible for the school.
The inclusion of student subsets keeps numbers from being entirely straightforward. Each school is required to have a predetermined number of Black, Latino, and other pupils who receive pass grades on each exam. If this does not happen, teachers are pressured to take corrective action. As a rule, this requires “dumbing down” the curriculum to meet all of the subset quotas. The end result is that the statistics appear pleasing, but it is purely coincidental if any students actually become educated under these conditions.
When a school does discover a student thriving within this system, that individual is celebrated and held up as a shining star while countless others fall through systematic cracks that have grown as wide as canyons to accommodate the devastating losses.
Throughout this dance, teachers are compelled to find creative ways to push ill-equipped students along to graduation. But graduating to what? As it stands, the system is incapable of preparing even the most talented inner city students to face the rigors of college. Furthermore, with absenteeism being a constant problem, it seems unlikely that a graduate keep any job when he or she could not manage to attend high school on a regular basis.
The celebrated superstars of inner city high schools enter college to discover that they must fight desperately to earn lacklustre grades when competing against the average students of more affluent public schools. They quickly go from being straight A students to struggling to maintain a very shaky C-average. The shock of reality is not just humiliating it is heartbreaking for most. The drop-out rate climbs among Black and Latino students as the disillusioned abandon hopes for higher education to pursue instead low-paying blue-collar jobs that offer little hope for wage or professional growth.
Drifting away from the extremes for a moment, there is a marked danger for middle of the road students. Colleges report that the average inner city pupil often enters institutions of higher education with skills so low that they have to be addressed before educators are free to move into the actual subject matter. Global competition requires that colleges and universities raise their standards for student acceptance and education. That this action is necessary is undeniable, but this will effectively close the door on urban public school graduates trapped in a system that is incapable of giving them the skills they need to participate in the professional word.
But why are the differences so extreme between inner city schools and schools in more affluent communities? Why are the wealthy the sole recipients of resources so desperately needed in economically deprived areas? One easy answer is population.
Once a school does well (i.e., makes all of its subset quotas) it is held up as a model, and then, the dynamic shifts. The school suddenly has increased access to educational resources, and the institution improves to meet its new reputation. Then, to borrow a line from the film, ‘Field of Dreams,’ “If you build it, they will come.” The school is flooded with new student s. Class sizes swell. Teachers strain under intense new pressures, which in turn, causes subset quota to go unmet. Now resources are pulled, as the school’s collective grade point average plummets, and the cycle begins again.
A byproduct of the sudden population increase is the overwhelming intellectual diversity found in inner city schools. Students are simply lumped in together with little regard given to their abilities or level of development. With insufficient numbers schools offering Advanced Placement courses, it is not uncommon to find a bored genius seated next to a student who struggles with educational disadvantages. Affluent schools have more latitude to identify uniquely talented students. They also possess better resources to provide for the effective education of those amongst them with special needs.
History suggests that there was never any intention to educate Black children formally. The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling spelled it out – separate but equal. That decision, although overturned nearly 60 years later when it was decided that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” (Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka), had already institutionalized inequality that would last for years to come. Now in the twenty-first century, Black, Latino and other ethnic communities continue to wait for an equal share of America’s educational resources.
Is the solution for these communities to assume complete responsibility for educating their own in a similar way to the Jewish community? Such a response would require considered cooperation and a dedicated approach to the long-term end result. Can the spirit that created Morehouse, Spellman and other historically Black colleges or universities be revived long enough to prevent the imminent threat of implosion? Are there any other options?
Year after year, the public school system churns out armies of under-educated young people who will never have any hope of competing, or even contributing, in the national or global arena. This is a problem that touches every aspect of community development. The Institute for Research on Poverty suggests that low levels of societal investment in the education and development of disadvantaged children translate into poorer outcomes with all the concomitant risks to family health and well-being. Similarly, The Schott Foundation for Public Education’s web-based 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males (pictured) provides alarming data on the devastating reality of education for Black males across all 50 states.
Magnet schools have seen some small successes, but they are only useful to the small percentage of children who manage to win the lottery. How long shall we let our children’s educational futures be determined by a skewed system or a roll of the dice?
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