A sobering article on Miami.Com notes that young black men who want to go to college aren't likely to ever get there; black men earn only 3% of all bachelors degrees nationwide:
By the time they reach high school, Census statistics show that 42 percent of all African-American boys have failed an entire grade at least once. Just 18 percent of black men ages 20-21 are enrolled in college, according to the Census. And, the U.S. Department of Education reports that only 34 percent of the black students who earn bachelor's degrees are male. Across the nation, struggling black male students...face a series of hurdles in school. They aren't taking courses that prepare them for college. Their teachers aren't prepared, emotionally or professionally, to work with them. They aren't challenged. Jobs and rap music are more appealing to them than education.
Black females are clearing most of those hurdles. The credit for any statistical data reporting improvements goes to them. The overwhelming majority of black teen-age boys trip, fall and give up. Black women enroll in college and earn bachelor's and master's degrees two times more often than black men.
This isn't news to anyone who works in my field. Black women take post-graduate exams at twice the rate of black men, which is something that vexes AA proponents; any graduate programs using race-based quotas are likely to admit black men who are underqualified, simply because so few of them make it that far.
The article goes on to describe a magnet program at DeRenne Middle School in Savannah, GA. Only 45 of the school's 302 black males are enrolled in the magnet program, but it isn't just low test scores keeping them out. There are black male students in the school who qualify for the program but turn it down because they don't want to be "nerds," which is one of the saddest things I've heard in a while:
But there are black kids with the academic qualifications who aren't enrolled, according to Assistant Principal Betty Burnette, because they don't feel welcome by the whites inside of the program. And, they are often ridiculed by the blacks on the outside.
"They're teased and called nerds," Burnette said. "And their parents let them out of the program."
With all the problems facing young black men today, I'd think their parents would be teaching them that being a "nerd" isn't so bad. The recruitment of black males into magnet programs that can help them reach their full potential won't fix the problem - schools need to do what they can to combat the racist notion that being smart/academic/nerdy is "acting white."
It's hard to determine which came first, low teacher expectations or students' refusal to do work. But according to the research of University of California Berkeley professor John Ogbu, each feeds the other...
In his research on minority education, Berkeley's Ogbu found that many black students, particularly males, allow extra curricular activities and work to take priority over class...Although some students use their income to help support their families, Ogbu found that many black males work solely to accumulate things.
I've written about Dr. Ogbu before; he's the researcher who noted that even black kids from affluent, professional families can still be sidetracked by negative societal role models.
This is a great article, but I disagree with the summary sentence:
"It's such a travesty in our schools, and it can easily be changed." [said by Mary Catherine Swanson, founder of the Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program]
It is a travesty, and I think the solutions are clear, but they're not easy.
Posted by kswygert at April 12, 2004 05:03 PM