Failing Schools

In many of our major urban centers today, students of color — African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, Caribbean and Pacific Islanders, and many more — are now the majority in public schools. This demography coincides with a Reading Report Card of the National Center for Educational Statistics which indicated that over 50 percent of Black and Latino children score below fourth grade reading levels, and 47 percent of Black and 46 percent of Latino children score below eighth grade reading levels. Discrepancies in math scores are similarly stark.

That is to say, we do not have a general education crisis in the nation. We have a crisis for poor Black, Latino, Asian and White kids. Extensive analyses of test scores nationwide reveal that — surprise — schools with high concentrations of poor students have very low academic performance rankings. In The Manufactured Crisis, Berliner and Biddle show how schools for middle class children fundamentally fulfill their purposes while schools for poor children fail. And though this failure affects all poor children, it disproportionately impacts the children of African-Americans and Latinos. Fully half of their children are failing in school.

The problem is not race, since there is no intellectually defensible evidence of differences in learning abilities by race. It is differences in income and poverty levels that result from our economic and social systems that cause school failure. Lack of employment in one generation leads directly to poverty and school crisis in the next generation. Low quality education and job segregation in prior generations led to a high concentration of African-American and Latino workers in low skilled industrial jobs. Today, in the new economy, these jobs have been transferred to other countries or non-union suburbs, leaving increased poverty in inner city neighborhoods.

The teachers in poor schools are another factor. Despite dramatic demographic shifts, over 78 percent of teachers remain white. In addition, studies show that the greatest number of non-credentialed teachers are in our lowest performing schools. We also have teachers with degrees in social studies and art teaching math, and in some urban areas, teaching out of field approaches 40 percent of the total. And while we would not dream of allowing a doctor or nurse to practice without a license, we regularly send poor children to study with teachers who have not met the minimum preparation requirements.

Raising standards, holding teachers accountable, and other measures pushed by politicians to avoid having to increase school funding have done little to improve schools. We have significant evidence from school districts in New York City, Los Angeles, Houston, and many other cities that such superficial changes do little to improve student test scores. The Black civil rights leadership, along with labor, has historically been at the forefront of the struggle to demand that the public schools provide an equal opportunity to the sons and daughters of working people. So we must fight for similar investment in urban schools, smaller class sizes, eliminate dependence on local property tax financing, and the recruitment of a well-prepared teaching force that reflects student populations in these schools.

Affluent suburbanites, in their semi-private social democracies, are not calling for school vouchers or demanding charter schools in their mostly adequately funded districts.

We must insist on equal opportunity to learn, no compromise. When we do these things, we will begin to protect what W.E.B. DuBois called “the Freedom to Learn” for our children and our grandchildren, and to build a more just and democratic society.

Professor Forrest Davis, Professor of Bilingual/Multicultural Education at California State University in Sacramento. He is a Chair of DSA’s African American Commission.