Prometheus 6

America Has Lost a Generation of Black Boys

Drumbeats from Phillip Jackson (The Black Star Project) brought us the essay below. Villagers, as you read it ... ask yourself what you can do in your space ... in your home ... in your neighborhood ... to ensure that we turn this situation around in 2008.

I'm going to comment on the essay...if I could find it at The Black Star Project's web site I'd have linked that so as to avoid the perception of jacking Villager, who is good people.

"There is no longer a need for dire predictions, hand-wringing, or apprehension about losing a generation of Black boys. It is too late. In education, employment, economics, incarceration, health, housing, and parenting, we have lost a generation of young Black men....Most young Black men in the United States don't graduate from high school. Only 35% of Black male students graduated from high school in Chicago and only 26% in New York City, according to a 2006 report by the Schott Foundation for Public Education.

Bullshit. This is what the Schott report actually says.

According to estimates based on the most recent data from the National Center of Education statistics, in 2003/2004 55% of African-American males did not receive diplomas with their cohort. Nevada and Florida graduated less than a third of their Black male students on schedule. Eight others—Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New York, South Carolina and Wisconsin—graduated fewer with their peer group than the national average.

"With their peer group" means within four years.

What Does It Mean to Graduate?

There is more than one path to high school completion. Most students receive a regular high school diploma after completing the required secondary school course work. Some students, however, complete high school by means of an equivalency test and receive an alternative credential such as a General Educational Development (GED) certificate. Still others receive a certificate of completion issued by the state in recognition of achieving requirements other than those of the regular curriculum, such as attending school regularly for 12 years or passing a test specified by the state. The requirements for such certificates vary from state to state.

Strictly speaking, a high school graduation rate is based solely on students receiving "regular" high school diplomas. High school completion rates, however, usually count both those students who receive regular diplomas and those who complete high school by means of an equivalency test, such as the GED. (McMillen et.al, 1994.)

And let's look another analysis of high school graduation rates.

Among other things, our results suggest that, though it has significant biases, the Current Population Survey (CPS) provides a reasonable snapshot of educational attainment in the country and can be adjusted to provide trends in high school completion across different years. We find no reason to presume that the biases in the CPS are serious enough to render CPS data less accurate than administrative data. On the other hand, there have been few efforts by education policy analysts who rely on administrative data to investigate whether these data are themselves sufficiently accurate to support reliable conclusions about high school completion. We have also examined data from one state and two large cities that allow us to compare graduation rates based on student longitudinal data to the graduation rates used in this new wave of research: these analyses indicate that these new measures can be significantly inaccurate.

Our research finds that the conventional measures of high school completion computed from the school enrollment and diploma data are much lower than that of all of the other data and far below that of the very best data, i.e., the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS). We also concluded that high school completion has grown significantly over the last 40 years and the black-white gap has shrunk significantly. Over the last 10 years, however, there has been little improvement, except among Hispanics. In particular, this study finds:

• The overall high school graduation rate with a regular diploma is between 80% and 83%, with the best data (NELS) showing an 82% rate. All of the household and longitudinal data sources show a higher graduation rate than the two-thirds rate computed using the schoolbased enrollment/diploma data.
• Estimates of the black rate of graduation from high school with a regular diploma range between 69% and 75%, with the NELS showing a 74% graduation rate. This is substantially higher than the frequently alleged 50% rate for blacks, reported from the school-based enrollment/diploma data. Moreover, the NELS data suggest that the alleged 50% dropout rate is double the actual dropout rate for blacks. In fact, the dropout rate for blacks is closer to 25% and roughly half of those obtain a GED, which allows entry into post-secondary education, the military, and other second-chance systems.

You want to help, fine. Start with the truth. When you write this

Black men in prison in America have become as American as apple pie. There are more Black men in prisons and jails in the United States (about 1.1 million) than there are Black men incarcerated in the rest of the world combined. This criminalization process now starts in elementary schools with Black male children as young as six and seven years old being arrested in staggering numbers according to a 2005 report, Education on Lockdown by the Advancement Project.

...how can you even imply that this

Young Black male students have the worst grades, the lowest test scores, and the highest dropout rates of all students in the country. When these young Black men don't succeed in school, they are much more likely to succeed in the nation's criminal justice and penitentiary system. And it was discovered recently that even when a young Black man graduates from a U.S. college, there is a good chance that he is from Africa, the Caribbean or Europe, and not the United States.

is the result of Black people's reaction to all that?

Worst of all is the passivity, neglect and disengagement of the Black community concerning the future of our Black boys....In a strange and perverse way, the Black community, itself, has started to wage a kind of war against young Black men and has become part of this destructive process.

This is a lie and an insult.

Don't we have the biggest Black middle class in history? Do you think the middle class grows as a result of the upper class staying where they are? No. Just as the nation's job engine isn't static small businesses but instead is small businesses in the process of growing, the increase in the Black middle class is due to the upward mobility of the lower economic class.

And the part of the quote I excised?

We do little while the future lives of Black boys are being destroyed in record numbers. The schools that Black boys attend prepare them with skills that will make them obsolete before, and if, they graduate.

That goes back to a problem Mr. Jackson has acknowledged

This criminalization process now starts in elementary schools with Black male children as young as six and seven years old being arrested in staggering numbers according to a 2005 report, Education on Lockdown by the Advancement Project.

And again

It seems that government is willing to pay billions of dollars to lock up young Black men, rather than the millions it would take to prepare them to become viable contributors and valued members of our society."

You want to know what our failure was? We believed Americans were serious about believing the Constitution. And that's only a failure if we don't learn from the error.