Education and African Americans

Significance: Since the emancipation of the slaves in 1863, the debate has raged over the role of education and educational institutions in the African American community in the United States. After the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the importance of an equal education and performance on standardized testing led the educational community to reevaluate the impact of education and its significance for African American students.

The Civil War (1861-1865), Reconstruction (1863-1877), and the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) ended slavery. Although free African Americans had attended schools in some northern states long before the Civil War, southern states had prohibited the teaching of either slave or free African American children. Emancipation in 1863 brought with it the challenge of providing educational opportunities for the freed men and women and their children, particularly in the former Confederate states.

In 1865, Congress created the Freedmen’s Bureau to help former slaves adjust to freedom. The bureau continued to function until 1872 and, under the leadership of General O. O. Howard, established schools throughout the South. At their peak in 1869, these schools had about 114,000 students enrolled. The schools taught reading, writing, grammar, geography, arithmetic, and music through a curriculum based on the New England school model. A small number of African American teachers were trained in these schools, but the schools were usually staffed by northern schoolteachers, who brought with them their values, their educational ideas, and their methods. These white educators from northern states promoted the stereotypical idea of the kind of education African Americans should receive. Samuel C. Armstrong and many like-minded educators stressed industrial training and social control over self-determination. Many believe this philosophy was designed to keep African Americans in a subordinate position.

Washington to Du Bois

Booker T. Washington was the leading educational spokesperson for African Americans after the Civil War. Washington, who was born a slave, experienced the hectic years of Reconstruction and, in a speech delivered at the Atlanta Exposition in 1895, painfully articulated the outlines of a compromise with the white power structure, a policy later known as accommodationism. A student of Armstrong, Washington believed that industrial education was an important force in building character and economic competence for African Americans. He believed in moral “uplift” through hard work. At the Tuskegee Institute, which he helped establish in 1881, Washington shaped his ideas into a curriculum that focused on basic academic, agricultural, and occupational skills and emphasized the values of hard work and the dignity of labor. He encouraged his students to become elementary schoolteachers, farmers, and artisans, emphasizing these occupations over the professions of medicine, law, and politics.

Although revered initially, Washington has become an increasingly controversial figure. Some people say he made the best of a bad situation and that, although he compromised on racial issues, he can be viewed as a leader who preserved and slowly advanced the educational opportunities of African Americans. Critics of Washington see him as an opportunist whose compromises restricted African American progress.

W. E. B. Du Bois was a sociological and educational pioneer who challenged the established system of education. Du Bois, an opponent of Washington’s educational philosophies, believed the African American community needed more determined and activist leadership. He helped organize the Niagara Movement in 1905, which led to the founding in 1909 of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Du Bois was a strong opponent of racial segregation in the schools. Unlike Washington, Du Bois did not believe in slow, evolutionary change; he instead demanded immediate change. Du Bois supported the NAACP position that all American children, including African American children, should be granted an equal educational opportunity. It was through the efforts of the NAACP that the monumental US Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (1954) outlawed segregation in US public schools. Du Bois believed in educated leadership for the African American community and developed the concept of the Talented Tenth, the notion that 10 percent of the African American population would receive a traditional college education in preparation for leadership.

Post-Civil Rights Era

Du Bois’s educational and political philosophies had a significant influence on the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Out of the effects of public school desegregation during the 1950s and 1960s and the Black Power movement of the 1970s grew a new perspective on the education of African Americans. Inspired by historians such as Cheikh Anta Diop and Basil Davidson, educational philosophers such as Molefi Kete Asante formed the Afrocentric school of education. Asante and his followers maintain that a curriculum centered on the perspective of African Americans is more effective in reaching African American youth than the Eurocentric curriculum to which most students are exposed. Low test scores and historically poor academic records could be the result, according to Afrocentrists, of a curriculum that does not apply to African American students.

Statistics

According to The African American Education Data Book (published in 1997 by the Research Institute of the College Fund/United Negro College Fund), in 1994, approximately 43.5 million students were enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools, and nearly 5 million students were enrolled in private elementary and secondary schools. African Americans represented 16.5 percent of all public school enrollments. African Americans were underrepresented at private elementary and secondary schools, where they constituted only 9.3 percent of all enrollments. The number of African Americans enrolled in public schools declined as grade level increased, a finding that supports the evidence that African Americans leave school at higher rates than children of the same age in other racial groups. African Americans represented only 12.5 percent of those who received regular high school diplomas in 1994.

In schools made up primarily of African American students and located mainly in economically depressed urban centers, nearly a quarter of all students participated in remedial reading programs, and 22 percent participated in remedial math. By comparison, schools with less than 50 percent African American students had 14.8 percent of students enrolled in remedial reading and 12 percent enrolled in remedial math. Furthermore, only 87 percent of African American high school seniors graduate on time compared with 93 percent of non-African American seniors.

Test Scores

African American students have historically scored far below whites in geography, writing, reading, and math. The National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 reported that the average seventeen-year-old African American student had a reading score only slightly higher than that of the average white thirteen-year-old. Compared with whites, African American Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) takers had lower high school grade-point averages, fewer years of academic study, and fewer honors courses. Data collected by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, however, reveal that African Americans had registered gains in reading, math, and other subjects between the 1970s and the 1990s. Despite these gains, African Americans are underrepresented among high school seniors applying for college and represented only 9 percent of the college population in the 1990s (a decrease from 10 percent in the 1970s).

It is not surprising that many African Americans see no value in postsecondary education. Regardless of socioeconomic status or whether they had received a high school diploma, a higher percentage of African Americans who were eighth-graders in 1988 were unemployed and not in college than their white counterparts in 1993, a year after their scheduled high school graduation. Despite affirmative action legislation, African Americans still are less likely to be hired for a job when competing against equally qualified white applicants.

Socioeconomic Status

In both 1980 and 1990, African American high school sophomores were concentrated in the lowest two socioeconomic status quartiles. The proportion of African Americans in the lowest socioeconomic status quartile declined from 48 percent in 1980 to 39 percent in 1990. In both 1980 and 1990, African Americans were underrepresented in the upper two socioeconomic status quartiles. In addition, African Americans often attend schools with fewer resources in poorer neighborhoods of large, urban areas. Fifteen percent of schools that have primarily African American students have no magnet or honors programming, as opposed to only 1.6 percent of schools with a majority of white students. Also, a higher percentage of schools with a majority of African American students participated in the National School Lunch Program. The poverty level in the African American community is one of the factors believed to be responsible for consistently low scores on standardized testing. Along with poverty, the African American community has also experienced a greater amount of violence and delinquency among high-school-age youths. The homicide rate among African American men increased by more than two-thirds in the late 1980s, according to a study by Joe Schwartz and Thomas Exter (1990).

Parental Attitudes

Although much of the effort of public policymakers goes into integrating schools and creating more diversity in inner-city schools, African American parents have been more interested in developing a stronger academic program in their children’s schools. A survey taken in 1998 by Public Agenda, a nonpartisan public-opinion research firm, showed that 80 percent of African American parents favored raising academic standards and achievement levels in primarily African American schools over emphasizing integration. Eleven percent of the parents polled said they would like to see the schools both integrated and improved. Of the white parents polled, 60 percent expressed a fear that discipline and safety problems, low reading scores, and social problems would result if African American students were transferred to a mostly white school. The Public Agenda survey demonstrates the differences in opinions on education based on racial background. For example, nearly 50 percent of African American parents felt that teachers demanded too little of their children because of the children’s race. Despite the difference in opinion on these public issues, both African American and white parents expressed a great interest in their children’s school success and the quality of their children’s education.

Bibliography

Du Bois, W. E. B. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. New York: Harcourt, 1940. Print.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1899. Print.

Gill, Walter. Issues in African American Education. Nashville: One Horn, 1991. Print.

Jones-Wilson, Faustine C., ed. The Encyclopedia of African American Education. Westport: Greenwood, 1996. Print.

Patterson, Frederick D., Michael T. Nettles, and Laura W. Perna. The African American Education Data Book. Fairfax: Research Inst. of the College Fund, 1997. Print.

Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. New York: Doubleday, 1938. Print.