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Endangering the Dream:
Kentucky's racial divide
(Part one in a
three-part series)
By: Mr. Jim Waters
The widening achievement gap in America’s public schools may be the single
greatest obstacle standing in the way of fulfilling the hopes kindled by our
nation’s civil rights movement.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once expressed his dream of equality between “little
black boys and girls and little white boys and girls.” Only part of his dream
has been realized.
While great progress has been made in achieving equality in many areas of law
and public policy, such parity cannot be found in most public schools across the
nation. Sadly, when it comes to closing this gap, the results from Kentucky
indicate we are moving solidly in the wrong direction.
“The gap in education achievement that we see today is actually worse than it
was fifteen years ago,” said Abigail Thernstrom, a respected member of the U.S.
Civil Rights Commission, in her new book, No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap
in Learning.
According to the research of Susan Perkins Weston, at the Kentucky Association
of School Councils, only 19 percent of Kentucky’s black fourth graders are able
to read at their grade level, compared to 41 percent of white students at that
same grade level. Why is this gap in reading proficiency so large?
Conventional thinking would lead us to believe that a lack of funding is the
main contributor to this learning divide. However, despite the implementation of
massive amounts of new state funding mandated by the Kentucky Education Reform
Act (KERA) in 1990, the gaps in both math and reading test scores between white
and black students widened by 2000.
Lawmakers have approved funding increases for public education nearly every year
since KERA passed. Still, the gap widens.
Others blame cultural differences and/or societal disadvantages that prevent
blacks from producing outstanding academic work.
One won’t find these evident at the Amistad Academy in New Haven, Connecticut,
where 99 percent of the students are black or Latino and hail from
less-than-desirable cultural surroundings. The school’s eighth-graders scored 74
percent on a recent state “index score,” compared to a 44 percent scored by
blacks statewide.
While the exception, Amistad’s results prove that a poor environment can be
overcome – especially when black students and their families understand that
solid educational results provide an escape route from what President Bush
calls, “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
How can Kentucky’s black students be scoring so poorly?
According to Weston’s report, the state’s achievement gap in math scores widens
as students progress from grade to grade. When viewing the results from the 2003
Commonwealth Accountability Testing System (CATS), one finds half of Kentucky’s
black fifth-grade students scoring at the “novice,” or lowest level, versus 29
percent of white students. Among high school juniors, the gap expands to a full
60 percent of black students scoring in the “novice” category versus 32 percent
of whites.
At Hazelwood Elementary, another Louisville school, 96 percent of African
American fifth-graders failed to reach proficiency in math. These results make
us wonder: Is the dream dying?
In Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights, published in 2001, Robert
Moses, a Civil Rights leader in the 1960s, suggests that: “… the absence of math
literacy in urban and rural communities throughout this country is an issue as
urgent as the lack of registered Black voters in Mississippi was in 1961.”
In other words, poor educational achievement by today’s black students prepares
them for a lifetime of failure. The black students who struggle to read their
textbooks today will be tomorrow’s black adults, who, while no longer denied a
seat at the lunch counter, won’t be able to read the menu, much less find a
prosperous job!
Recent data indicates that 80 percent of the new jobs created in the next two
decades will require a postsecondary education. Yet only 34 percent of blacks
who entered Kentucky colleges as freshmen in 1995 earned a degree within six
years, compared to 55 percent of white students and 78 percent of Asians.
Expanding achievement gaps perpetuate the racial disparities in income, status
and opportunity – areas in which the civil rights movement has yet to gain
traction. These are areas where the movement could see its greatest progress
ever.
“The racial gap in academic achievement is an educational crisis, but it is also
the main source of racial inequity,” Thernstrom writes. “And racial inequity is
America’s great unfinished business, the wound that remains unhealed.”
Dr. King would agree.
Jim Waters is the Director of Policy and Communications at the Bluegrass
Institute for Public Policy Solutions.
Categories: Civil Rights;
Education
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