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.
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[Find out The Truth about Black Students.]
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Although high-achieving lower-income schoolchildren can be counted in the millions, there should be many more. Specifically, we find that only 28 percent of top-quartile achievers in first grade come from families in America’s lower economic half, while 72 percent come from the top economic half. This finding suggests that disparities at the high end of achievement begin before children enter elementary school, a conclusion consistent with an emerging body of research on the effects that inferior early-childhood education has on school readiness of lower-income children.Joshus S. Wyner, John M. Bridgeland and John J. DiIulio, Jr., Achievement Trap: How America is Failing Millions of High-Achieving Students from Lower-Income Families, Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, 2007.
Evidence suggests that lower-income children have inadequate access to the high-quality preschool programs that can significantly increase academic ability, cognitive development, social adjustment, and professional achievement.
Barnett and Belfield point out that preschool programs raise academic skills on average, but do not appear to have notably different effects for different groups of children, and so do not strongly enhance social mobility. In such areas as crime, welfare, and teen parenting, however, preschool seems more able to break links between parental behaviors and child outcomes.Summary, W. Steven Barnett and Clive R. Belfield, “Early Childhood Development and Social Mobility,” The Future of Children, vol. 16, no. 2, Fall 2006, pp. 73-98.
Increased investment in preschool, conclude Barnett and Belfield, could raise social mobility. Program expansions targeted to disadvantaged children would help them move up the ladder, as would a more universal set of policies from which disadvantaged children gained disproportionately. Increasing the educational effectiveness of early childhood programs would provide for greater gains in social mobility than increasing participation rates alone.
High-quality pre-kindergarten is the closest thing to a social panacea there is. Not only does it lead to high educational outcomes, it reduces the likelihood of criminal behavior, teen pregnancy and increases the likelihood of college graduation. It does not, however, end anti-black discrimination in the labor market and elsewhere. We need social activism for that problem.
Head Start should not be confused with high-quality pre-kindergarten. Head Start is not high-quality. It is low quality. The Department of Health and Human Services which administers Head Start has admitted as much. The good news is that our elected officials have done the right thing and are increasing the teacher qualifications for Head Start.
Past research has shown that while Head Start is not high quality pre-kindergarten, the Head Start that black students receive is of particularly low quality. In the article cited above, Barnett and Belfield, show that black students receive fewer educational gains from Head Start than do white students (p. 84).
This issue with Head Start is really just a special case of the larger issue of teacher quality. Black students at all levels attend schools with lower teacher quality than white students. People concerned about black America need to continue to push to see that the quality of black education improves from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade.
In the 1950s and 1960s, black leaders targeted the inferior education that black students receive as a major civil rights issue. Current research still identifies blacks as receiving inferior education and still points to this inferior education as a major factor in black students’ lower educational outcomes. The current generation of black leaders, however, rather than condemn the fact that blacks still receive an inferior education increasingly spend their time condemning black students based on false racial stereotypes.
It’s time for some new black leaders.
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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.
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