The statistics are mind-numbingly depressing:
- Only about one-half of African-American students graduate from high school in four years;
- African-American students who do graduate have test scores that, on average, are about the same as the test scores of white students just finishing the 8th grade.
We are witnessing a crisis in the education of black students. In a time when education is the clearest, and in many cases the only, path to the income, wealth and social mobility this country’s economy offers, our failure to educate black students successfully condemns them to a life of limited opportunity as surely as the Jim Crow laws did a half-century ago.
Two reports issued earlier this month offer clear and contrasting points of view about how to address this crisis. One focuses on social and economic factors outside of schools that affect students’ performance in the classroom. The other insists that the school and the classroom themselves must be the places where the battle is fought. Each report is endorsed by a sterling group of educators and academics. Yet only one of them would provide immediate help to today’s students.
The first report is by the Economic Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank. Arguing that school improvement strategies alone cannot close the academic achievement gap, the Institute’s report says “policies aimed directly at education-related social and economic disadvantages can improve school performance and student achievement.”
The EPI report does not ignore efforts to improve schools. But it advocates a “broader, bolder approach” that puts more emphasis on three other factors:
- Investment in early-childhood, pre-school and kindergarten education;
- Investment in health services for children and their families;
- Investments in longer school days, after-school and summer programs, and school-to-work programs.
The EPI report was co-chaired by three academic stars, Helen Ladd of Duke University, Pedro Noguera of New York University, and Tom Payzant of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Its supporters include the school superintendents of Miami-Dade County, Chicago, and Atlanta.
The second report comes from the Education Equality Project, a group of elected officials, civil rights leaders, and education reformers that wants to help ensure equity in an educational system that, it says, continues to fail America’s highest needs students. Its study stresses “changing the system so that it better meets the needs of students.”
Those changes, it insists, must begin in the classroom. Key recommendations include:
- Paying educators more money, to ensure there is an effective teacher in every classroom and an effective principal in every school;
- Creating accountability for educational success (which includes carrots such as increased pay, and sticks such as the loss of a job) among teachers, principals and central office administrators;
- Making every decision about who is employed, how money is spent, and where resources are deployed with a single-minded focus on what’s best for students.
The Education Equality Project’s report was co-chaired by Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City public schools, and the Rev. Al Sharpton. Its supporters include the heads of the Washington, D. C., Baltimore and Chicago schools, and the mayor of Newark, NJ.
Both reports include reasonable arguments. Any serious examination of inner-city schools leads inevitably to the Education Equality Project’s conclusion that the system that undergirds them is broken, and needs to be fixed.
And it is incontrovertible that, as the EPI report argues, conditions outside the schoolhouse walls impact student performance.
No person of good will can oppose the EPI’s recommendations. The next president should adopt them, and pursue them aggressively. But even under the best of circumstances, it will be years before they have any real impact on real students. And we owe it to the students sitting in inner-city schools today to seek more immediate solutions.
What the EPI report ignores is that even in the face of racism, poverty and the other social and economic factors it cites, low-income black children in inner-city classrooms can, and do, succeed. In this space over the next few months, we will look at classrooms and schools where success is happening.
We know, as a society, what it takes to produce outstanding academic outcomes in the most disadvantaged schools in our cities. It takes strong leadership from principals with the power to hire effective teachers and fire ineffective ones. It takes dedicated teachers who live out their unshakeable belief that every student can learn. It takes high expectations, strict discipline, long school days, and active involvement from parents. We have the model for success; what we do not have is the political will to implement it.
That political will is what the Education Equality Project report calls for. While the next president is pursuing the longer-term solutions of the EPI report, he must simultaneously work with local and state education agencies to summon the willpower to implement the report’s recommendations and provide immediate solutions that will offer hope to today’s students.
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