Understanding the Black Jobs Crisis

Too few black teens are working this summer. Too few black men are working this year. Do our leaders really understand the problem? Does anyone have an adequate response?

The employment rate for black teens is abysmal. For teens overall, the employment rate last year was the lowest since World War II, according to research by the Center for Labor Market Studies [PDF]. That was the picture last year before the full onset of the economic downturn. Things are bad overall, but, as most people know, they are always worse for blacks. For whites, the teen employment rate last year was 38.3 percent. For blacks, it was 21.4 percent.

We can gain a full appreciation of the problem for black teens by looking at summer employment by class background. For the most part, teen employment rates increase with class background. Black teens from well-off families making $75,000 to $100,000 a year had a summer employment rate of 30 percent last year. This employment rate is significantly higher than the rate for black teens from impoverished families. Black teens from families earning less that $20,000 a year had an employment rate of 18 percent.

Although teens from middle-class black families are much better off than black teens from poor families, middle-class black teens are still worse off than white teens. Even white teens from impoverished families had a higher employment rate than middle-class black teens. Poor white teens had a summer employment rate of 37 percent, 7 points higher than the well-off black teens discussed above. These poor white teens had the lowest employment rates among whites, but they still beat the highest teen employment rates among blacks.

The situation for black men is bad also. Last year, the employment rate for black men in the prime working ages of 25 to 54 was 11 percentage points less than for white men in this age group. For blacks, that difference amounts to over 700,000 men without jobs.

Many argue that the key is to have more black men stay in school and earn college degrees. More education is a good idea for many reasons, but, unfortunately, it’s only a partial solution to the black employment crisis.

Education definitely helps. The employment rate for blacks who did not have a high school diploma was 54 percent. For blacks who had a four-year college degree it was 90 percent. Being better educated improves one’s job prospects.

The gap in the employment rate between black and white men, however, is not just about education. At every education level, whites are more likely to be employed than blacks. White male college graduates had a 4 percentage-point employment rate advantage over their black male peers. The white male advantage over black males for high school dropouts was a whopping 15 percentage points wide.

Surprisingly, the largest employment rate gap is among the least educated men. This finding is the opposite of what many people believe. Many people think that blacks are not finding work mainly because they are not receiving the necessary education for professional and high-tech jobs. But the larger problem is that, for some reason, black male high school dropouts can’t get the jobs that white male high school dropouts get.

I’ve looked at the education issue concretely by calculating the employment-rate gap for black and white men if black men had an educational profile identical to white men. Last year’s gap for prime-age men of 11 percentage points drops to 8 percentage points with this adjustment. Black men make progress but most of the employment-rate gap remains. Most of the gap, therefore, is due to what’s going on with employers in the labor market, not what black men lack in education.

For some reason black teens—even middle-class black teens—are having a much harder time finding work than even the poorest white teens. For some reason, white men who dropout of high school are much more employable than black men who dropout of high school. Why is this? We aren’t going to be able to answer this question as long as we are blinded by the rhetoric of “color-blindness.” It is the twenty-first century, but race still matters.

Black-White Test-Score Gap Narrows; Is NCLB Working?

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com
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The Center on Education Policy has conducted a detailed analysis of test-score trends since the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2002. The report finds reading and math scores up in most states. Further, the black-white test-score gap has narrowed in most of the states analyzed. Some commentators are taking these findings to mean that NCLB is succeeding. The truth is that we really don’t know if NCLB is working or not.

For black students, we have findings from only a little more that a dozen states. This is because it was only appropriate to conduct the black-white test-score gap analysis on states with sufficient data available and with a large enough population of black students to yield reliable statistics. The table below provides a summary of some of the report’s findings. For elementary, middle and high schools, in reading and in math, a large majority of the states analyzed showed narrowing achievement gaps between black and white students since 2002.



If test scores are up and racial gaps are narrowing, doesn’t this mean that NCLB is working? No, it doesn’t. As the authors of the report state on page 1: “it is not possible to directly relate changes in student achievement to NCLB.” Contrary to popular belief, test scores have risen often prior to NCLB, particularly in the lower grades. (See the long-term math trends.) So, rising scores alone do not tell us whether NCLB caused the increase or some other factor that has produced increases in test scores in the past. To complicate matters further, something completely new—that is not NCLB—could be causing an increase in test scores.

Prior researchers have attempted to evaluate NCLB by comparing the growth in test scores before and after NCLB. The logic is that if student scores are increasing at, lets say, on average, three points a year before NCLB and then they increase at five points a year after NCLB, this looks like NCLB is responsible for the additional two points a year growth. Earlier research that I have seen with this methodology has found no significant positive effect after NCLB. (See the Civil Rights Project report using this method.)

This type of research is suggestive, but not conclusive. It’s not a slam dunk. If NCLB is a super, great program one would expect it to have big effects that would be clearly visible. But it could still work and not show much effect. If student test scores go from three points a year before NCLB to one point a year after NCLB, NCLB could still be effective. In this situation, it could be that were it not for NCLB student scores would have been declining by three points a year. NCLB could be preventing negative growth that is due to something else.

Just as we could not assume that declining test scores were the result of NCLB, we can’t assume that increasing test scores are the result of NCLB either. Scores are going up, but we’re seen big jumps in test scores in the past for reasons other than NCLB. In the past, however, few people in the media paid any attention.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.

Video: Race, Ethnicity and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

Researchers studying the housing market believe that the foreclosure crisis is just beginning. Some of them say that it will continue into 2010. Black communities are expected to experience a historic loss of wealth and suffer further from the negative ripple effects of communities with vacant homes and declining tax bases. To gain some perspective on this crisis watch the Economic Policy Institute event: Race, Ethnicity and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis. Scroll to the bottom of this page for the full-length video, in three parts.

American Health Care: Very Expensive, Very Low-Quality

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com

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[re-post]

Source: Karen Davis et al., Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: An International Update on the Comparative Performance of American Health Care, The Commonwealth Fund, May 2007, p. viii.

The U.S, spends more than twice as much per capita on health care as the United Kingdom, yet a recent report ranked the U.K.’s health system first and the U.S.’s last among six nations. We pay the most to get the least.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: An International Update on the Comparative Performance of American Health Care by Karen Davis et al. compares the health care systems in Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. The researchers compare the countries on the quality of care, access, efficiency, equity, and the promotion of healthy living. The U.S. scored last on access, efficiency, equity, and the promotion of healthy living. On quality of care the U.S. was second to last.

The report states:

The most notable way the U.S. differs from other countries is the absence of universal health insurance coverage. Other nations ensure the accessibility of care through universal health insurance systems and through better ties between patients and the physician practices that serve as their long-term “medical home.” It is not surprising, therefore, that the U.S. substantially underperforms other countries on measures of access to care and equity in health care between populations with above-average and below-average incomes.

With the inclusion of physician survey data in the analysis, it is also apparent that the U.S. is lagging in adoption of information technology and national policies that promote quality improvement. The U.S. can learn from what physicians and patients have to say about practices that can lead to better management of chronic conditions and better coordination of care. Information systems in countries like Germany, New Zealand, and the U.K. enhance the ability of physicians to monitor chronic conditions and medication use. These countries also routinely employ non-physician clinicians such as nurses to assist with managing patients with chronic diseases.

For decades, nations in the developed world have provided high-quality, inexpensive health care to all of their citizens. The U.S. stands alone with an expensive, low-quality health care system than covers fewer and fewer of its citizens each year.

Share this article with a friend. Use the email icon below.

--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.

The Greatest Story Never Told

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com

[On the Need for Comprehensive Criminal Justice Reform.]
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. . . Well, At Least, in the Last 10 Years

For a recent presentation, I needed to quickly illustrate some of the major facts about black America that none of the leading black public intellectuals have paid attention to. I came up with the figure below. The figure allows us to compare the direction and percent change in the poverty rate, the violent crime victimization race, the share of bachelors degrees earned and the teenage birth rate for blacks from 1990 to 2000. The poverty rate was cut by nearly 30 percent, the violent crime rate by nearly 50 percent, the share of bachelor’s degrees increased by 50 percent and the teen birth rate was cut by nearly a third. Somehow black public intellectuals missed these positive developments and claimed that conditions in black America were worse than ever.





Share this article with a friend. Use the email icon below.

--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.