There are two ways to shrink the achievement gap between black and white students: Increase the intelligence level of black students, or lower white students’ performance.
The latter approach seems to be the direction we’re heading, especially in Oregon.
It’s not surprising the state will likely apply for one of President Obama’s waivers to No Child Left Behind.
The problem with NCLB is that it makes demands on schools that it doesn’t make on parents or the community. And parents and the community – especially leaders in minority communities – have enormous influence on what children learn.
In the early years after No Child Left Behind became law in 2002, waivers were seldom granted (only eight the first two years). As the 2014 deadline has approached – when all high school graduates must meet reading and math requirements – the number has jumped (315 in 2009).
Now Obama (whose bright, young daughters attend private school) has decided to waive No Child Left Behind for states as long as they develop their own plans to improve students’ performance.
When schools complain of not being able to meet the requirements of No Child Left Behind what they are often saying is they are having trouble getting minority test scores up, especially black students. (If you think that’s a racist statement, you’re part of the problem.)
“On almost every measure of academic performance, be it the SAT, ACT or state-mandated examinations, African-American student performance trails, by large margins, that of their white peers. The average African-American public school twelfth grader’s performance on academic measures approximates that of the average white eighth grader.”
That’s from “The Black-White Achievement Gap” by black educators Rod Paige and Elaine Witty, who are also brother and sister. This is a thought-provoking book. The problems facing black students are staring right at poor whites, a growing demographic.
Paige is the former U.S. Secretary of Education under George W. Bush, who enacted No Child Left Behind, and Witty is a former elementary, middle school and high school teacher, as well as Dean of Education at Norfolk State University. They make a convincing case for why closing the gap is the “greatest civil rights issue of our time.”
The black-white intelligence gap was first noted almost a century ago when the military tested recruits and found that whites outscored blacks. Paige and Witty, citing the National Assessment of Educational Progress, said the gap started to close in the 1970s and 1980s but stopped in the early 1990s.
“So why did the air go out of the balloon during the early 1990s, and how do we recapture it for contemporary students …?” they ask.
Being educators, they give a long, well-researched answer that covers several chapters. Being black educators, they don’t want to arouse the kind of ire that Bill Cosby did in a 2004 speech when he criticized black parents for not caring about their children’s schoolwork or style of speech and dress, and for buying $500 sneakers “when they wouldn’t spend $200 on ‘Hooked on Phonics.’”
In careful language, Paige and Witty detail how African Americans, especially black leaders, have continued to blame racial prejudice and discrimination for the barriers they encounter. Those WERE the primary barriers – until the 1960s and 1970s, the authors write.
You wouldn’t know that by the way things evolved.
For example, in the 1990s when I was a newspaper reporter in Southern California and covered schools, I encountered a certain type of parent, usually a mother (often black, sometimes white, never Asian). These parents loved their children, but they believed – even demanded – that everybody else love their kids as much as they did. These kids ended up the least lovable and the most likely to invoke kids’ rights. (They may not have known their multiplication tables, but they had their rights memorized.)
With some black mothers there was an added dimension: a suspicion that teachers and principals were handing white students a magic pill that was making them smarter, and it was just a matter of giving that same magic pill to black children.
Not literally, of course. But there was a belief that teachers and principals could, all by themselves, make a child smart; if they refused, they were racist.
“Schools alone cannot close the achievement gap on their own. …. There is now considerable research supporting this position,” write Paige and Witty.
The same factors that have eroded black students’ school performance are affecting white students as well. Factors such as lack of parental involvement, poverty, community environment, lack of student interest.
Speaking as educators and administrators, they believe a strong school has the power to overcome non-school factors, and it doesn’t require more money. Among their proposals: African-American leaders must embrace the view that “home and family, community environment and school quality are all important determinants of children’s educational possibilities. …. We need to put away excuses and believe – honestly and deeply – that all children can learn, no matter their socioeconomic status or ZIP code.”
Black leaders “must understand that this is OUR problem, and it is not going to be solved until we ourselves solve it.”
Paige and Witty point out that the No Child Left Behind law was championed by President Bush, with the assistance of Congress, especially Reps. John Boehner and George Miller, and Sens. Edward Kennedy, and Judd Gregg – all of whom are white.
Where were black leaders? Conspicuously absent, the authors note, was the NAACP, the National Urban League and the Congressional Black Caucus.
These organizations prefer to obsess about things like the South Carolina Flag Flap, in which the state legislature moved a Confederate flag from above the Capitol to a soldier’s monument. The NAACP fought for years to bring the flag down but objected to the new location, also, and continued a boycott of the state.
The authors call this “majoring in the minors,” expending major efforts on matters that have only minor impact. Paige and Witty ask: When the flag is finally put away, will blacks be significantly better off? Will the black-white achievement gap be narrower? Will the black high school dropout rate be reduced? Will black neighborhoods be any safer? Will the teenage pregnancy rate or black-on-black crime decline?
“There are some big problems out there facing today’s African Americans, and the Confederate flag is not one of them. The black-white achievement gap is.”
By comparison, No Child Left Behind is not mere symbolism. It requires tangible results of everyone. It challenges the belief of some blacks that school learning is acting white and dispels the notion of some whites that acting black doesn’t include scholarly endeavor.
“In a world where whole nations have in effect raised their IQs by 20 points in one generation,” write Paige and Witty, “it is time for black ‘leaders’ and white ‘friends’ to stop trying to discredit the tests and get on with the job of improving the skills that the tests measure.”
Teachers aren’t the only ones who should be evaluated.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
Nicely done.
I have been following the education blogs like those in the Washington Post. Generally, when “race” is used – it means blacks. It is as if skin color saps intelligence.
And, there is too a fallacious undercurrent that black people can’t learn. When you start with that premise – it becomes self-fulfilling.
I’ve read some of those blogs. Some educators who mean well, and I have some in my family, don’t realize it but they are being condescending. Like you say, they act as if blacks can’t learn like whites. They act like because blacks have a history of slavery, they will never be able to keep up and are forever inferior.
What’s tragic is so many blacks have come to believe this.
[…] So why has the state done a better job of incarceration than education? Because the public – through the initiative process – forced changes that politicians and bureaucrats wouldn’t make on their own. No one (certainly not the Oregon Education Association) has attempted to make the substantive changes that would lead to improvements in education. (See “More Kids Left Behind.”) […]