By Dr. Vernard Gant, Director of ACSI Urban School Services
News sometimes falls into two categories—good news and bad news. Oftentimes, recipients of news, when given the choice, opt to hear the bad news first. Perhaps it is the human tendency to get the painful part over with and save the “dessert” for last. The recent news from the National Center for Education Statistics on the academic performance of students in the nation’s urban districts demands a third category—the ugly.
For the first time the National Assessment for Education Progress (NAEP; oftentimes referred to as the nation’s report card) assessed fourth and eighth graders in six large-city school districts in the areas of reading and writing. The school districts chosen were New York City, Los Angeles Unified, Chicago, Houston Independent, Atlanta, and Washington, DC. This is the most comprehensive study to date on the academic performance of students in a single district (Plisko 2003).
The Ugly
Starting with the news that goes beyond bad all the way to ugly, note the table below, which is a summary of the report citing the reading performance of African American and Latino fourth graders in the districts (Plisko 2003).
The report reveals the alarming reality that, on average, two out of three black and brown children in urban centers throughout the nation read below the basic level. This is a glorified way of saying that these ten-yearolds are functionally illiterate. If we add these percentages to the percentages of those who are reading at the basic level (which means that they read just enough to get by), the staggering result is more than 90 percent. Such news leaves one’s head spinning. In essence, this translates to an ugly urban nightmare in which less than 10 percent of children living in these central cities are receiving an education that will equip them for college or give them the tools to pursue any kind of meaningful employment opportunities, thus greatly limiting their chances of being productive citizens.
President Bush accurately summed up the situation stating, “We have a genuine national crisis. More and more we are divided into two nations: one that reads, and one that doesn’t; one that dreams, and one that doesn’t.”
The Bad
Now for the related bad news: the failure to adequately educate so many children in the nation’s urban centers represents catastrophic failure that will have calamitous consequences in the near future. We are already witnessing the results of a failed education system as evidenced by the burgeoning prison population. Robert Carter served on the legal council that successfully persuaded the Supreme Court justices to dismantle legalized school segregation in Brown v. Topeka Kansas Board of Education because the system was detrimental to the academic health of black children. Twenty-five years after the landmark decision was rendered on May 17, 1954, Carter lamented the lack of progress in the education of black children, stating: “I am certain that a racially integrated America is best for all of us; but I also know that quality education is essential to the survival of hundreds of thousands of black children who now seem destined for the dunghill in our society”(Carter 1980, 27–28). Needless to say, Carter’s words were eerily prophetic. When he made that statement in 1980, there were 143,000 black men incarcerated in the nation’s jails and prisons (Dyson 2002/2003, 51). Today, those same jails and prisons, along with the new ones that have been built, house nearly 820,000 African American men (Harrison and Karberg 2003, 11)—dunghills to say the least. Moreover, according to the Justice Department, nearly 75 percent of the black prison inmates have not completed high school. It seems apparent that when society fails to educate, then it must be prepared to incarcerate.
Another participant in the Brown decision made a similar observation more than 35 years ago. Kenneth B. Clark was the author of a 1950 report on racial discrimination that was cited as expert testimony in the 1954 Brown v. Board decision. In a paper presented in 1967, 13 years after the Brown decision, Clark (1968, 100–101) made the following observations:
It is now clear that American public education is organized and functions along social and economic class lines....
The class and social organization of American public schools is consistently associated with a lower level of educational efficiency in the less privileged schools. This lower efficiency is expressed in terms of the fact that schools attended by Negro and poor children have less adequate educational facilities than those attended by more privileged children. Teachers tend to resist assignments in Negro and other underprivileged schools and generally function less adequately in these schools. Their morale is generally lower; they are not adequately supervised; they tend to see their students as less capable of learning. The parents of the children in these schools are usually unable to bring about any positive changes in the conditions of these schools.
The pervasive and persistent educational inefficiency which characterizes these schools results in:
- marked and cumulative academic retardation in a disproportionately high percentage of these children…;
- a high percentage of dropouts in the junior and senior high schools of students unequipped academically and occupationally for a constructive role in society;
- a pattern of rejection and despair and hopelessness resulting in massive human wastage.
Later in this report Clark connects the dots between failed education and aberrant social behavior:
The relationship between long-standing urban problems of poverty, crime and delinquency, broken homes—the total cycle of pathology, powerlessness, and personal and social destructiveness which haunts our urban ghettoes—and the breakdown in the efficiency of our public schools is now unavoidably clear. (Clark 1968, 109)
Professor’s Clark’s report has an eerie resemblance to what we are witnessing today. His article, dated November 1967, could easily be mistaken for an article that could have been written in November 2003, with one exception: the educational statistics and social pathologies are worse today than they were 35 years ago.
The Good
The good news is that despite how bad the bad news is and how ugly the ugly news is, there is hope. Recent studies demonstrate that when low-income African American children are given and afforded the opportunity to attend faith-based schools, they excel both academically and in other ways. Independent studies conducted by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and the Program on Education Policy and Governance of Harvard University on the effects of vouchers indicate the following: African American students who were the recipients of privately funded vouchers that enabled them to attend the schools of their choice posted considerable academic gains over their public school peers who applied for but were not chosen for the vouchers.
After two years of the study, the findings were so compelling as to lead one group of researchers to conclude:
If the trend line observed over the first two years continues in subsequent years, the black-white test gap could be eliminated in subsequent years of education for black students who use a voucher to switch from public to private school. (Howell et al. 2000, 2)
Needless to say, the trend has continued. According to a report released in June 2003,
For African Americans, substantial differences were observed in all three years. African Americans in private schools who were re-tested after one, two, and three years scored, on average, 6.1, 4.2, and then fully 8.4 National Percentile Rank (NPR) points higher on the combined reading and math portions of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills than their peers in public schools....(Peterson and Howell 2003, 5)
Peterson and Howell (2003, 22) then conclude (or conclude again) that
The weight of the evidence from the evaluation of the New York voucher intervention lends further support to the finding—found repeatedly in both experimental and observational studies—that poor African American students living in urban environments benefit from private schooling. (emphasis added)
Moreover, according to a follow-up study by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) on the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, lowincome children who attend private schools are nearly four times more likely to complete college than their public school peers (see the chart on page 5). The vast majority of children in private schools attend religious or faith-based schools. This is especially true for low-income families because the normal cost of attending a Christian school is considerably less than the price of private school tuition. According to the NCES, 85 percent of private school students attend faith-based schools. What these schools are demonstrating and what the research shows is that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the children. The same children who have been basically written off as uneducable, undereducated, learning challenged, and learning disabled in public schools are achieving and excelling academically in the private school setting. They are behaving, they are going to college, they are graduating, and they are becoming productive citizens in society (U.S. Department of Education 2002).
Good Company
The authors of the study were unable to draw any kind of conclusion explaining why only African American students posted gains. They could only ponder the results and speculate as to the cause. I think I know the answer. I call it “good company.” In 1 Corinthians 15:33, Paul reminds the Corinthians that “bad company corrupts good character.” I have often wondered in response to this statement that if bad company could have such a corrosive effect on good character, then can good company have an equally positive effect on bad character? My conclusion has always been that to the contrary, good company ought to be even more potent and have a more powerful impact than bad company. I believe that what the faith-based schools are demonstrating is that when urban children are exposed to and immersed in the good company of Christ-centered schools and educators, it has a profound effect on their character—both academically and otherwise. The good is able to overcome the bad (Romans 12:21).
References
Carter, Robert L. 1980. A reassessment of Brown v. Board. In Shades of brown, edited by Derrick Bell, 20–28. New York: Teachers College Press.
Clark, Kenneth B. 1968. Alternative public school systems. Harvard Educational Review 38 (1):100–113.
Dyson, Michael Eric. 2002/2003. Penn or the pen? SavoyMag.com 2 (10):51. (No longer available.)
Harrison, Paige M., and Jennifer C. Karberg. 2003. Prison and jail inmates at midyear 2002. Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs. NCJ 198877 (April). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Howell, William G., Patrick J. Wolf, Paul E. Peterson, and David E. Campbell. 2000. Test-score effects of school voucher in Dayton, Ohio, New York City, and Washington, DC: Evidence from randomized field trials, Harvard-MIT Data Center.
Peterson, Paul E. and William G. Howell. 2003. Efficiency, bias, and classification schemes: Estimating private-school impacts on test scores in the New York City voucher experiment, Harvard-MIT Data Center. (See link above.)
Plisko, Valena W. 2003. The release of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) the nation’s report card trial urban district assessment, reading 2002 and writing 2002.
U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. 2002. The condition of education 2002, NCES 2002-025. In Private schools: A brief portrait, by Martha Naomi Alt and Katharin Peter. Almanac of Policy Issue.
The Meantime Volume 3 Number 1