Black Students in California: Asking the Big Questions

Many years of substitute teaching in two states, all grade levels, and more subjects than I can easily remember have left me with two dominant impressions. The first is of the difficulties black students face in the educational system. The second is of just how difficult it is to discuss their difficulties.  So when the California Board of Education created an “African American Advisory Committee” to tackle the question of why black students are not performing as well as others, I was pleased to see it take on perhaps the most vexing topic in education today, although not overly optimistic as to the progress it might make.

The new committee’s problems started before it even came into being, as an outside critic decried the implicit suggestion that this was a “black problem” and a Board member, former University of California regent Ward Connerly, criticized a “segregated approach to educating black kids” that was “goofy to be doing this at this point in American history.”  But still, even that noted affirmative action opponent felt obliged to concede that “we do have a problem” and support the motion which ultimately passed unanimously.

One obvious ground for pessimism about the committee’s prospects is the relative failure of past efforts. The ink wasn’t dry on the paperwork before people were talking about an infamous past attempt to grapple with the issue – the Oakland school district’s 1996 plan to garner the same assistance for its black students already available to foreign language-speaking students by declaring that African-Americans also spoke a separate language, which it called “Ebonics.”  While that fiasco is not likely to be repeated, a San Francisco Examiner story published shortly after the committee’s establishment serves as a reminder of other potential blind alleys still out there.

The Examiner reported that while blacks constituted but 12.5 percent of students in San Francisco’s public schools, “half the students who face disciplinary action belong to this ethnic group,” a phenomenon some School Board members attributed to “cultural incompetence” and “racial discrimination” on the part of school staff.  This issue has a history in the city.  In the past, some have called for school disciplinary measures to be applied equally across racial lines; in other words, the percentage of suspensions or expulsions should be the same for each racial/ethnic group.  No such drastic proposals emerged this time, though.  Instead one organizer suggested the “need to make their curriculum more engaging for students whose out-of-school reality involves poverty, violence and family crises” and a consultant to the superintendent reportedly thought “students simply need a challenge” and spoke of schools failing to give “them academic rigor.”

While you can hardly fault anyone for opposing racism or supporting academic rigor, these comments from individuals who probably have not spent much time in classrooms in recent years displayed book learning but little understanding of the nature of the difficulties today’s African-American students actually encounter.  Certainly San Francisco’s teachers’ union president Dennis Kelly was having none of it, arguing  that “to the degree that it’s racism, I think it’s subconscious racism.”  And given that 84 percent of the city’s voters recently supported an African-American for president and the city’s teachers are probably as liberal as the electorate as a whole, this seems a reasonable assertion.

But Kelly went further, suggesting that in actuality “some teachers avoid disciplining black or Hispanic students for fear that they would be accused of prejudice.”  And while these remarks would surely be deemed impolitic in some circles, statistics readily at hand suggest that not only does the reported discipline inequality in San Francisco’s schools reflect something larger going outside of school walls, but in fact it’s actually significantly worse out there: while blacks make up but 7 percent of the city’s total population, the Examiner reported that “60 percent of San Francisco Juvenile Hall inmates were black, according to the Juvenile Probation Department.”  (Nor is this a local problem.  While a remarkably high – by world standards – ratio of one of every 31 adult Americans is in prison, or on parole or probation, for African-Americans, the ratio is one in 11.)

Given the extreme sensitivity of the topic, let me make myself as clear as possible.  My point in raising these statistics is not to suggest that today’s black students have brought their problems on themselves but to suggest that they run much deeper than proposed solutions like greater “cultural competence” or a more “engaging curriculum” can reach.  Nor do I mean to imply that the history of racism in America is irrelevant.  Not only is it relevant, so is the history of American slavery, even though no one living today has ever experienced it.  But as Robert  Moses, a leader of the southern voting rights struggle of the 1960’s, put it in his 2001 book, Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights, “what young people are up against today is less clear than the raw racism of segregation laws and the Ku Klux Klan.”  And the solutions are correspondingly more difficult to formulate and enact.

And as far as being out of touch with the realities of today’s schools, there’s no disgrace in that; it can happen to anyone.  Civil rights veteran Charles E. Cobb confessed that when Moses approached him to co-author Radical Equations with him, “I had not been involved with public schools for years and while visiting them … it seemed as if I had traveled to another world,” as he watched a mother attack a Chicago teacher in a hallway, and talked to one kid as “another kid walked up behind him and hit him in the head with a brick or something.”  But useful proposals are not likely to come from people who are out of touch.  If we were to mandate that the same percentage of “A”s and “F”s be given to each racial group, we obviously would have done nothing to eliminate any actual educational gaps, but some of the solutions floating around these days have about that much depth.

So if we’re serious about finding a solution to the problem, we probably shouldn’t just nod along when someone raises the racism of the teaching staff or the cultural irrelevance of the curriculum as prime barriers to Black students education in 2009, any more than we would if someone advanced the idea that if they’d just stop listening to gangsta rap they’d be on their way to academic success.  Anyone who’s seen the television series The Wire and considered its portrayal remotely realistic surely has a visual take on the statistics.  And if you want one in print, there’s Los Angeles Times reporter Miles Corwin’s And Still We Rise: The Trials and Triumphs of Twelve Gifted Inner-City High School Students.  The 2001 book provides a memorable and chilling view of the extraordinary challenges confronting black students even in one of the few all-minority “gifted” public high school programs in the country.  The best friend of one of the book’s students was killed in 9th grade.  Another, who discovered the body of her murdered brother when she was nine, drops out after having a baby.  A third left home at 13 after her mother cracked a broom handle across her back. A fourth has been sexually abused by her step-father.  And there’s more – and these are the kids who succeeded!

And even for many of those whose parents manage to get them into suburban schools, the problems will not necessarily end at the city line.  The late John Ogbu, a Nigerian-born U.C. Berkeley Anthropology Professor, wrote his 2003 Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement as a result of a request to assess the reasons that the Grade Point Average of black public high school students in Shaker Heights, a relatively affluent Cleveland suburb with a school system considered one of the best in Ohio, lagged more than a full point (out of a possible four) behind that of white students.

Ogbu recognized that Shaker Heights blacks, whose wealth and income was higher than the average Ohio black family, was still was significantly lower than that of their white neighbors, but he felt that while this could explain a great deal of the grade gap, it did not explain it all.  So he turned to social characteristics, or “community forces,” as he describes them — “the ways minorities interpret and respond to schooling” to look for explanations, while making “no assumption that community forces are the only cause of, or play the most important role in, the academic gap.”  In taking that approach, not even his African birth would immunize him from criticisms of blaming the victim.

Over the course of thirty five years studying the public school education of minorities in the US, Ogbu had become persuaded of the importance of the distinction between “voluntary” and “involuntary” minorities within American society.  Voluntary minorities are immigrants who arrive in this country in search of a better life.  Involuntary minorities include Blacks brought here as slaves, Native Americans whose continent was taken from them, and Mexicans living in areas subsumed by the United States.  When the nineteenth century European ancestors of some Americans were arriving to seek the American Dream, the ancestors of today’s African-Americans were living the American nightmare of slavery and their descendants would live through another century of segregation.

Ogbu was not surprised, then, to discover a fundamental ambiguity in the attitudes of the parents he was studying who often struggled to get their kids into the school system, yet fundamentally still did not trust it.  He frequently found their belief in the value of education only “abstract,” because “many generations of a lack of connection between school success and success in adult life probably resulted in skepticism about the real value of schooling.”  As a student put it, “there were laws simply to oppress Black people” so “Black people came to believe that it was always good, you know, if you could find some way, just somethin’ small, you know, just to annoy society.”  Kids would tell him that doing well in school would be “acting white,” a phenomenon Ogbu had previously encountered in studies of sectors of the British working class.

And, of course, education theory being a field with a higher quotient of hooey than most any other, he ran up against notions like one scholar’s critique of the “protocols of attentiveness found in Eurocentric teaching styles,” leading him to mutter about theoreticians of a black culture in which “students are not expected to pay attention during class!”

Although critics who ought to know better have characterized him as conservative, Ogbu’s theories are actually considerably more radical and thoroughgoing than those who claim to treat the educational and social situation of African-Americans as a social phenomenon yet tend to look for individual culprits close at hand, such as teachers with low expectations or racist administrators.  After all, what does Ogbu’s concept of “involuntary minorities” lead us to when considering the case of contemporary black students’ difficulties but a recognition of the continuing importance of the manner in which their forbears arrived in this country, in other words the ongoing relevance of nineteenth century slavery to daily life in twenty-first century America.

Obviously, the California Board of Education’s new committee has its work cut out for it.  From personal experience I know all too well that the mere mention of some of the topics I’ve discussed here can set some people’s eyes to rolling, as can proposals of the level of effort needed to properly deal with the problem.  For instance, if I suggest that I’ve been in first and second grade classes where a five or six-to-one adult-to-student ratio is probably needed to keep all of the kids in the action, the immediate response is likely to be that something like that is not within the realm of possibility, so it’s simply not to the point to talk about it.   (And, by the way, I’m not talking teacher-to-student ratio; the adults might also be student teachers, aides, or even parents or other volunteers.)   Yet my contention is no more or less true whether or not there’s any likelihood of such a ratio being effected.  And the fact that a full employment economy and true universal health care may not appear to be on the horizon does not change the fact that policies of this magnitude are what are needed to adequately improve the life situations of many black students whose academic travails are under consideration.  They do, after all, spend most of their lives outside the classroom dependent upon the fortunes of the adults around them.  And the size of the problem cannot be whittled down simply to match the size of the cure deemed politically possible.

And, since this committee is convening in California, let’s note that as recently as Sept. 2000, Governor Gray Davis signed the UC Slavery Colloquium Bill, which promotes research and publicity on University of California campuses on the topic of reparations for slavery.  So while they may be about as remote a possibility as a program for a true full employment economy, the consideration of a program to direct adequate additional educational resources toward all of slavery’s descendants would hardly be off the point.  Because, although it may be all that we’re likely to get, a couple of more sensitivity training courses sure aren’t going to do the trick.