The history of African Americans does not begin with slavery.
However, that’s what African American students are likely to believe while matriculating through many of this nation’s public schools. Their miseducation instills in them the view that they are an inferior people whose historical heritage starts in slavery. Their miseducation proliferates while at the same time planting within them the seeds of white supremacy.
Many African American students are suited to assimilate to this poisonous program and press on to graduate anyhow. However, without focused intervention many of them -even with degrees – are rendered useless to the uplift of their community. Other students are blessed along their academic journey with African American teachers in the system who understand the fundamental flaws of the European-American education system and attempt to shield and/or support African American students who are marching like sheep to the slaughter. The majority of African American students, however, in public schools across the country struggle tremendously and many of them drop out and don’t make it to graduation day.
Baltimore City’s Public School System (BCPSS) has had its share of negative spotlight on its inability to inspire all of its students to personal and academic excellence. According to the BCPSS website, last year nearly 40% of seniors did not graduate! Last year’s high non-graduation rate is not an anomaly. This has been the average (if not higher) of non-graduates from Baltimore City Public Schools for the past ten years easily! Add to that percentage the more than 9,000 students who have dropped out of school since 2006 and you get a pretty good picture of the state of emergency that our community is in.
Where do thousands of high school drop outs and non-graduates go every year? They don’t just disappear. Where do you think they end up? And who benefits from this arrangement?
Some of them go to work and without a high school degree, they likely end up in low-paying, dead-end jobs. Some engage in self and community-destructive behaviors like the underground economy of Baltimore – the drug trade. Some of them end up caught up in the school-to-prison pipeline which our city and state government keeps well-oiled. Incarcerating African American youth is big business in Baltimore and a failing school system helps to ensure that business is booming. It’s booming so much that Governor Martin O’Malley is pushing a plan to build a new $100 million dollar youth jail in East Baltimore slated to begin construction this Fall.
It is criminal that the youth of Baltimore are getting the unrequested gift of a new prison from “their” Governor (in cooperation with Mayor Rawlings-Blake and other city legislators) in a time when the city hasn’t seen a new school built in nearly 30 years or more!
Our community is in a state of emergency! If anywhere near half of city students don’t graduate every school year for a decade or more, you have a recipe for the rapid destruction of our community. I say “our” community – speaking of the African American community because our children make up the majority of the school system.
Nearly 90% of students enrolled in Baltimore City Public Schools are African American children. Despite this fact, African Americans do not control the school system. Some might ask why does control matter? Well, I believe that all children are capable of learning and achieving. African American students are no different. They are born with the God-given ability to learn and grow like all other children. If they were born with the raw potential and its not nurtured in the classroom, I don’t blame the students. (though that’s pretty popular with some scapegoating, cowardly, adults). THE CHILDREN ARE NOT THE PROBLEM!
Does the home have some responsibility? Sure it does, but don’t stop there. Do teachers share some responsibility? According to this MD State Dept. of Education Report which speaks of cultural disconnects, sure they do, but don’t stop there. Does Administration have responsibility? Sure it does, but keep going.
Once you move past all of the people involved, I believe that the fundamental issue regarding the underachievement of our students in Baltimore, centers on a school system that was never designed to foster the holistic development of African American children.
People, in the grand scheme of things, are temporary actors on the stage of life. We move relatively quickly from the womb to the tomb. The systems of our world, however, have a longer lifespan and built-in resistance to substantive reform.
As far back as the mid-1960′s, African American students in the Baltimore City Public System have been hampered by a system philosophy which believes that education is a generic and universal package that fits every student regardless of their particular makeup. So since the years following the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision which was the precursor to the integration of public schools in this country; African American students have been filing into European-American school systems with contentious results at best. In fact, a report by Dr. Orlando F. Furno, research director of the Baltimore City Public School System at the time, revealed that in the immediate years following racial integration in Baltimore’s public schools, the IQ scores of Black students was found to be declining while the IQ scores of White students was increasing. [The report was referenced on the BCPS website, but after initial publication of this article, it mysteriously disappeared. You can find a reference to this report on page 73 at this link.]
Furno suggested that the decline in Black IQ’s was a result of the inferior schools that the Black students came from. However, I suspect a causality that points in the opposite direction.
The season of social and educational reform in Baltimore surrounding the 50′s and 60′s was based on the assumption that just putting African American students in the same classroom with European-American students would produce the same result – an educated student properly prepared for the next stages of her or his life and equipped with a sound sense of self. This assumption willfully ignored the reality that while the students – both Black and White – were (and are) physiologically very similar; they come from two distinct cultural realities. In the years following the 50′s in Baltimore and many other cities, “White flight” began which saw European-Americans heading for the suburbs leaving the city and the school system behind. By 1960, the Baltimore City Public School System’s student population was for the first time ever, majority African American.
But remember what I said about systems. Unlike people, systems tend to persevere. And though the European-Americans left the schools in Baltimore creating a de facto segregation environment that persists to this day, the educational system that they created initially for the holistic development of their children was left behind and was now filled with Black Children.
What do you get when you take the children of one cultural group and place them in an educational environment that was not designed for them – and in fact was constructed by the mentality, philosophies, historical perspective, and world view of their community’s oppressors?
That’s what I’ll begin to discuss in Part 2 of this series.
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Though I never went to public school. I did go to private elementary/middle schools that were ran by African-Americans. Those schools gave me a model of how I should conduct myself as a Black man. The teachers nurtured every part of us. When we learned history we saw ourselves in the stories it was not just slavery we went as far back as the Bible and who was Black in the Bible to MLK, Malcolm X., Shirley Chisholm to Oprah; black inventors etc. I would have to say it was a great experience and helped me to fully know myself. By the time I entered an all White high school I was self-assured in myself, my identity as a Black man and my own history which was lacking from the history books.
As I said on your facebook page. The school system in Baltimore is outdated and it's not set up to fully nurture and teach the students of any race, especially children of color. Look at the models of the Harlem School Zone, which shows a prental to college approach which caters to the whole person approach/ whole community approach and their graduation rates are through the roof.
Hi Charles – it sounds like you had an educational experience that was appropriate to who God created you to be. For that I give thanks. The foundational years of one's educational sojourn are utterly important which is why I believe that African youth must at the very least must have an Afrikan-centered education through 8th grade. Once in high school and equipped with the tools to discernment; they can go anywhere – to any school and not lose their righteous minds to "his"story.
It starts and stops at home. End of story. That's why you find some students in our black schools doing things like graduating and going to ivy league schools and some dropping out. I wasn't a good student AT ALL. I remember thinking school was just something to do. If I didn't have my parents (both of them) staying on my ass, I would have wound up a loser and just another kid pushed through the system. And I didn't live in Baltimore. I lived in a middle class suburb in Orlando with 85% of the population White.
So it's not the school system's job to "Take care" of your children. It's the school's job to present YOUR kids with information. And hopefully when they bring it home you take an interest. End of story. Even to this day I myself am not all that good at it. My wife and I have three kids who go to an elite Private school and she's the one who does all the homework and school projects etc. So I'm not talking TO anyone or ABOUT anyone. I'm talking about myself as well.
My mom is a teacher and trust me, trying to care for and educate 300 kids isn't fair. TO educate yes. To take care of…no.
I am not so sure I agree with the headline but I agree with your point of view. As a white student that went through Maryland Public Schools on the 90s it is accurate that the heritage of the Africans is barely touched if at all – the only real mention is centered on Egypt. That being said you have a very valid point and I learned much more when I got my degree in history about many diverse cultures that make up our own today. In my humble opinion things like this don't get resolved because the Black Community lines up 90% behind the Democratic party. If they have your votes at 90% why should they care about your issues when you are a lock vote and why should the Republicans care to address it if you are only 10% of their support. Neither party is right on all the issues. My best friend is black and he rightly said that when his community becomes more independent i when he sees these things will be fixed – until then you have two sets of policy makers that are not listenig and have no reason to take action to do what is right.