Crisis in Education

I just watched a documentary about the Little Rock 9 on HBO. The purpose of the documentary was to highlight Little Rock Central High Scool 50 years after the school was required to integrate. The documentary talked volumes about the current school population, and how the classes are still overwhelmingly segregated, although the school has been integrated for 50 years. The overall rationale given on why the school is in its current state was placed on the Black students.
I don’t know how many times they referred to the Black students as lazy, and referred to the white students as ambitious. The documentary laid 90% of the so called underachievement by the Black students on their will to succeed. The documentary did not discuss any political analyses explaining why this phenomenon exists in Little Rock. If one watched the documentary it would be easy to come to the conclusion that the Black students aren’t trying hard enough.
While I was watching I was literally sadden by the information that was coming out of my television. HBO did a horrible job summing up the conditions of Arkansas. They did show the poor AKA Black side of town and the rich AKA white side of town, and drew a slight connection between the clear correlation between poverty and school achievement. Instead of deepening that understanding, they blamed the parents of the students for living in that neighborhood. The parents must have not worked hard enough, consequently, reflecting in their children, who in turn pass that along to their children. The complete blame for the condition of Arkansas was blamed on the Black community.
The following blog is something I wrote for a friend of mine that lives in Milwaukee. She was concerned about education gap in Milwaukee that is no different than any other city in America. I believe the explanation given here gives a better analyzes of the achievement gap in Little Rock than just the students being lazy, or have children to early, or parents are drug addicts. There is a clear underlying problem that hopefully will become clear after you read the info.

Crisis in Education

The solution to the problem in education is simple, yet many refuse to recognize it because of the power structure that exists in this country. In the US, one out of every five children under the age of 18, live below the poverty level. Another mind blowing statistic is that Black and Hispanic children were more than twice as likely as white children to live in poverty. 42% of Black children and 39% of Hispanic children live below the poverty line. The poverty line in American for a family of four is $23,000. The high school drop out rate for both Black and Hispanic students, in a city like Chicago, is 50%. The statistics are crippling if not put into proper perspective.
Current economic and public trends are creating a society that is split in two; those who have money and those who don’t. Instead of recognizing the correlation between economic attainment and school achievement, they play up the belief that we are just lazy resulting in the disproportion of school achievement. This may be true, but it ignores the fact that many schools in urban areas are broken, and the economic structure in many states, in regard to Black and Brown folks, is inept. In short, the critics ignore the fact that the living in poverty seriously restrict a student’s ability to learn. This is not just my opinion this is fact according to tons of research on the topic. Fix the poverty situation, and watch the scores begin to improve. It has been my experience that America has no want or need to fix the poverty situation in these neighborhoods that were caused by the government itself.
Milwaukee has a serious shortage of jobs especially showing itself in the Black community. Detroit (the poorest concentration of people in America), Baltimore, St Louis, Little Rock and tons of other cities face this same problem. You can ask any sociologist about the link between poverty and violence, school achievement, or family structure and they will tell you that it has an adverse affect. This reality is reflected at any point in history. The so called European Enlightenment came as a consequence of the general population getting an economic boost, primarily based in the start of the slave trade. Without the start of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade, Europeans may very well be still living on fiefs where they were serfs and paying absorbent taxes to the “Sheriff of Nottingham”. Look at the Clinton years in this country, the economy was better consequently reflecting itself in school achievement. Not that I’m praising Clinton in the least bit, my point is to highlight economic improvement not the administration.
The gap between Black and white was still present, but it wasn’t growing at the rate that it is now. When the economy is doing well, people have the time to write books, paint, make music, write plays or movies, people can make these things happen when finances aren’t a huge concern. The fact is established firmly by the so called level of achievement. Unless you believe that white students just have superior intelligence, then there has to be an empirical explanation of the conditions.
Family responsibilities and individual love for learning are all factors that contribute to successful school tenure. I would be an idiot to deny the reality that my folk’s stress of education wasn’t a factor in finishing high school and college, then moving on to pursue a graduate degree and doctorate. But, one cannot also deny the fact that the two major contributors to school achievement are socio- economic status and previous school achievement. How do we expect a 15 year old to succeed in school if he is reading on a third grade level? The fact that the student made it all the way to high school reading at the third grade level reflects a problem with the system not the student.
This leads me to conclude that in order to catch the black males up, and all other under achieving groups is to hook them on the importance of education early, and fix the poverty that exist in their neighborhood. That doesn’t mean pump the school full of money, because some people make that argument. The reality of Little Rock Central High School (discussed in HBO special) is evidence that big money in a school isn’t the complete answer. I’m saying to pump those millions of dollars into the community via jobs and economic development and the problem will begin to correct itself. The US government spends 10 billion dollars a day, 500,000 dollar a minute in Iraq and wonder why the school system is falling apart, for both Black and white students.
I am not an idealist believing that the government is all of a sudden going to grow a heart and help out the Black community. We generate enough money in this country, to make this happen independent of the government. It is crazy that before integration the percentage of Black males students where better in many areas. We have to recapture that spirit and channel it today. We might not be able to jump right into out own school system, but we can start at Saturday schools, that teach our children how to be successful. There are African centered curriculums that can be put o the ground now if they received the proper exposure, we have to get the information out to our people that WE are changing our future now. The Sankofa Project in New York and Target Hope in Chicago are two great examples of this change happening NOW. I can remember getting up early on Saturday morning taking the train down town in order to go to Saturday schools. I’m no genius, but my community built me up to believe that I was one though, and that spirit carries me to this day. We know what the white power structure is doing to us. We have to combat that by harnessing our own POWER. Controlling our own educational prowess is an area where we need to concentrate.

The following are few links that display these things already happening all around the US.

http://cuip.uchicago.edu/schools/woodlawn/7_curriculum.html

http://www.nbufront.org/html/ProjectsIssues/edu.html

http://www.bronzevilleonline.com/newsarchive/afrischools.htm

The following link is a 20/20 special that I found very interesting.


http://youtube.com/watch?v=pfRUMmTs0ZA .