Education professionals have for years documented and tried to eliminate the huge achievement gaps between white and black students, particularly those in reading and math between young black and white boys. To the chagrin of educators, and despite a clutch of reform initiatives going back several decades, the achievement gap persists.
A new report confirms that. Indeed, its authors urge the White House to convene a new conference on the issue, and have called on Congress to direct increased funding for needy schools and establishment of networks of black mentors.
In the current economic climate it's hard to imagine that Washington will be persuaded to create and fund a new education initiative aimed at minority students. Even at the state level, some Tennessee's lawmakers continue to express skepticism about continuing funding for prekindergarten education programs aimed at minority youth.
If the new report is a realistic indicator, the yawning lethargy in officialdom is counterproductive. The evidence of a social catastrophe already in motion and worsening steadily is too great to ignore.
The report, "A Call for Change" -- issued by the Council of the Great City Schools and based on data from national math and reading tests taken from the National Assessment for Educational Progress -- is too disheartening to ignore. It shows that just 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading tests, versus 38 percent of white boys who are proficient in reading by that age. Just 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys, moreover, are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys.
Poverty is not the sole excuse for these discrepancies. Using the measure of whether they qualify for free or reduced school lunches, the researchers found that poor white boys perform as well as black boys who are not impoverished.
The report notably found that black boys generally begin falling behind white boys in their earliest years. That suggests that social factors are a key link in the puzzle of poor academic performance. Black children who perform least well are three times more likely than white children to live in single-parent homes, and they typically live in homes whose mothers have a higher rate of infant mortality. Black children are also twice as likely as white children to live in homes where neither parent has a job.
In high school, black males drop out at nearly double the rate of white males. The average college SAT entrance exam scores for those who remain are nearly 104 points below those of their white counterparts.
These statistics are jaw-dropping, but not surprising. Other studies have shown that more than 70 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers, and that a majority of males who drop out of high school without a diploma end up serving time in prison by the time they are in their mid-30s.
Assessments of the No Child Left Behind law in 2009 also showed that the NCLB law had largely failed to close the achievement gap of blacks and Hispanics versus white students. Moreover, the overall scores of all participants were no better than they had been in the 1970s -- largely because the poorer-achieving minority population who were taking the reading tests, for example, had increased in that period from 13 percent of test-takers to 40 percent.
Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard, told a New York Times reporter that researchers had to look beyond poverty to get at the roots of such findings, and have "conversations about early childhood parenting practices" that have been avoided.
He cited "the activities that parents conduct with their 2-, 3- and 4-year-olds: How much we talk to them, the ways we talk to them, the ways we enforce discipline, the ways we encourage them to think and develop a sense of autonomy." That suggests the obvious but often unaddressed models of parenting and family life that can -- and should -- help and inspire children to become life-long learners.
Common-sense would suggest that's at the crux of early learning skills, and life-long achievement. The frequent talk about failing schools, however, typically overlooks this obvious early learning dynamic, and the value of pre-k programs for children whose parents don't know how to provide it. For all the social cost and heartbreak it could avert, it's a problem this nation ignores at our peril.