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Endangering the Dream: The soft bigotry of low expectations (Part two of a three-part series)

By: Mr. Jim Waters

Kentucky employers must have been furiously nodding in agreement at comedian Bill Cosby’s recent comments commemorating the historic Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation decision.

In his now-famous speech at Howard University, Cosby challenged conventional wisdom, especially the notion that poverty is the main contributor to the widening achievement gap between blacks and whites. Instead, he pointed to low expectations, misplaced priorities and a lack of responsibility in black families – especially low-income ones.

Parents should get involved before “their son is standing there in an orange suit,” Cosby said.

Some black community leaders gasped; others cheered. Nevertheless, employers and college admissions officials, who see the toll the achievement gap is taking on our state’s economic and social future, could surely confirm the comedian-turned philosopher’s analysis.

It’s difficult to hire or admit high school graduates who have, on average, the equivalent of an eighth-grade education.

Research shows that the black-white gap that appears early among Kentucky students continues to widen throughout their lives. Only 9 percent of our state’s black fourth-graders were deemed proficient in math compared to 28 percent of whites on the 2002 Kentucky Core Content Test. To make matters worse, Kentucky’s white fourth-graders already ranked last in the nation in math among their peers!

This wide chasm is being virtually ignored by members of the state’s education establishment, who, instead, gush rosy sweet-nothings about the near-paradise condition of Kentucky’s public school system.

The Kentucky Commission on Human Rights offers a much different description. In a September 2003 report, the commission warned that the “existence of alarming gaps in the achievement levels … is an indication of the failure of our system.”

At a recent Louisville Forum, Jefferson County Public Schools Superintendent Stephen Daeschner insisted that the district’s huge achievement gap exists because a single parent or grandparents are raising 82 percent of his system’s black students.

While single-parent homes, poverty and run-down neighborhoods are not the ideal arrangement for children, these are not the root causes of the gap. After all, 54 percent of all Jefferson County students live in single-parent homes. Many are white students, who are not from pristine neighborhoods, yet  outperform their black peers.

More American students than ever can testify that the wall of poverty is not impenetrable.

Recent test scores shows that 66 percent of the students at the Knowledge is Power Program Academy in Bronx, New York – all of whom are black or Hispanic and live in some of the nation’s worst neighborhoods – boast math scores above state standards. Only 9 percent of the district’s regular public school students, including white pupils, can claim similar feats.

Ideally, all children would live in homes with sufficient incomes and two educated parents. But Abigail Thernstrom, a respected member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and author of “No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning”, says eliminating the stereotypical economic and racial issues “cuts the black-white gap by only about one-third.” The U.S. Census Bureau reports that more than one-third of black Americans lived in a suburb and had household incomes of at least $50,000 or more during 2000.

One of those communities is the Cleveland, Ohio suburb of Shaker Heights, where two-thirds of the school district’s 12th-graders failed one or more of the state’s tests during the 1999-2000 school year. This occurs despite the fact that a third of the community’s residents are black college graduates who live well above the poverty level.

Elizabethtown resident Willie Neal, one of the few blacks to graduate from the University of Kentucky law school, is not surprised.

“Poverty, social standing – all those things are nothing but excuses,” said Neal, raised by a single mother after his parents divorced when he was a young child.

“It’s about expectations,” he said. “My mother worked three jobs, so she didn’t make it to the PTA meetings. But she saw to it that we all graduated from high school. I didn’t get a grade below an A-minus because she expected me to do better.” Neal, whose two daughters are college graduates, says the achievement gap will shrink when black parents expect more from their children and from Kentucky public education.

“The system will only be fixed when we, as responsible citizens, start demanding better results,” he said. Neal’s approach is similar to that of most clear-thinking Kentuckians: Higher expectations and better schools are more likely than poverty and single-parent homes in determining how many young blacks put on pinstripes versus how many dress in orange.

-- Jim Waters is Director of Policy and Communications for the Bluegrass Institute.

The Bluegrass Institute is an independent research and educational institution offering free-market solutions to Kentucky's most pressing problems.

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