Minorities and Education in America

Abstract

This article describes the history of racial and language minorities in K–12 education in the United States. From almost the time they arrived in the United States, people of color, such as African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians, have gone to extraordinary lengths in their efforts to seize a piece of the American Dream—some enslaved people, for example, risked their lives to attend illegal schools. Later free African Americans from the north gave their time to educate emancipated slaves. Each minority group has had a unique set of challenges: African Americans had to overcome the bitter taste of slavery to succeed, and Hispanics and Asians faced language barriers and a sometimes subtle, sometimes overt form of racism to rise to become leaders in their communities. However, since the second half of the twentieth century, many students of color have found themselves in underperforming or even failing schools, as defined by the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act. Parents, community leaders, and government officials have sought ways to enhance the education of these groups, with some parents choosing public charter schools, private schools, and even homeschooling as ways to rediscover the quality of schooling of the past. Indeed, decades of research have shown that socioeconomic factors are less important predictors of academic success than dedicated communities, challenging curricula, dedicated principals and teachers, and involved parents.

Overview

One of the abiding myths in America is that it is a melting pot, a great cauldron where racial and ethnic heritage blends with freedom and opportunity and creates a new American persona. The United States has always been a nation of immigrants, and millions of new opportunity-seekers continue to arrive every year. In the twenty-first century, the United States is becoming more multicultural than ever before, and these trends are being reflected in the enrollment of students of color.

In 2007–2008, minorities constituted 42 percent of public school students in kindergarten through twelfth grade, of which 16 percent were African American (National Center for Education Statistics, 2009). Between 1993–1994 and 2005–2006, the percentage of African American students in public schools increased from 16.5 to 17.2 percent while the percentage of Hispanic students increased from 12.7 percent to 19.8 percent of public school enrollment (Fry, 2007). By the fall of 2018, African American students represented 15 percent of the total enrollment at public schools, while Hispanic students represented 27 percent (National Center for Education Statistics, 2021). In 2023, the National Center for Education Statistics summed up this decade by reporting that from 2010-2021, the percentage of Hispanic public school students increased from 23 to 28 percent. White public school students had reduced from 52 to 45 percent, and African Americans had decreased from 16 to 15 percent.

Government research indicates that while all these minority groups made educational gains in the past few decades, the rate of improvement was less than that enjoyed by White students. The end result is that while there are many individual exceptions to the rule, students of color in the aggregate are falling further behind in terms of academic achievement. Those students who are showing the greatest academic progress appear largely to be those attending charter schools, private schools, and home schools.

African Americans in the Schools. Perhaps the most regrettable development in American history was the importation of Africans beginning in the early seventeenth century. According to the 1860 census, the last conducted before the emancipation of enslaved people following the Civil War, there were nearly 4 million enslaved people in the United States, most of them of African ancestry (Historical Census Browser, 2004).

The institution of slavery was the opponent of education. Laws were passed in the South that made it against the law to teach an enslaved person how to read. According to Erickson (1997), South Carolina adopted the first compulsory ignorance law in 1740. It was illegal for anyone to teach an enslaved person to write, and a fine of one hundred pounds would be levied to anyone caught doing so.

"Eventually each [slave-owning] state had similar laws, nevertheless, some Blacks did achieve an education. That great Black orator and writer, Frederick Douglass, was taught to read and write by his Southern mistress. Some large Southern cities had "secret schools," and instances are known in which slaves and free Blacks attended school together, a highly dangerous practice" (Erickson, 1997).

One well-known enslaved person, Henry Bibb, put it succinctly in 1850, "Slaves were not allowed books, pen, ink, nor paper, to improve their minds" (Bibb, 2006 [1850], p. 15). Even so, enslaved people in many major Southern cities, such as Charleston and Columbia, learned to read—those on large, isolated plantations in the Deep South were the most isolated and stood the least chance of being educated. In the North, institutions such as the African Free School, founded in New York in 1787, produced leaders such as James McCune Smith, the first African American to earn a medical degree.

After the Civil War, when the Thirteenth Amendment gave enslaved people their freedom, African American leaders in the South realized that the millions of newly emancipated enslaved people would not be able to take full advantage of their newfound freedom without educational opportunities. Within a context of political and economic oppression in the post-war South, African American educators made the best of an extremely difficult situation by creating a parallel universe of African American schools (Anderson, 1988). With help from philanthropists like Sears, Roebuck and Company President Julius Rosenwald, Union generals, and others, historically African American colleges and universities were created in the still-segregated South. African American educator Booker T. Washington, who was born in slavery, was pivotal in the movement that established over 5,000 primarily African American elementary and high schools across the South.

By the twenty-first century, African American primary and secondary schools were turning out national and community leaders. In Washington, DC, Dunbar High School was one of many shining lights. Nonetheless, at the national level, these problems persist. In 2020, the Government Accounting Office (GAO) noted racial inequalities in public schools. It noted discrepancies among racial groups in terms of school discipline. For example, the GAO cited that African American students, boys, and students with disabilities were disciplined at higher levels than other groups. While African American students composed 15% of the nation’s public school population, they formed 39% of those who were suspended. The GAO also highlighted that students living in poverty during their time in high school had fewer opportunities to take college-prep courses and also to be offered math and science classes.

African American Educators. From 1865 to 1954, during the time of legally segregated schools, there were many superb African American educators such as Alice Dunbar-Nelson, a high school teacher at the all-African American Howard High School in Wilmington, Delaware, who used her Master's degree from Cornell to instruct her high school English students in Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare and Coleridge (Gibson, 1997). The quality of African American teachers in this period was nothing short of amazing, and they produced some of the most well-known leaders in US history. Apart from Dunbar and Howard high schools, Booker T. Washington High School in racially-divided Atlanta produced Martin Luther King Jr., and Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore produced Thurgood Marshall, the first African American justice of the US Supreme Court.

Achievement at Elementary Level. At the elementary school level, there was not the achievement gap between African American and White students that exists today. Indeed, some African American schools outperformed their White counterparts. For example, as African American economist Walter Williams notes:

[African-American historian and economist Thomas Sowell compared] test scores for sixth-graders in Harlem schools with those in the predominantly white Lower East Side for April 1941 and December 1941. In paragraph and word meaning, Harlem students, compared to Lower East Side students, scored equally or higher. In 1947 and 1951, Harlem third-graders in paragraph and word meaning and arithmetic reasoning and computation scored about the same—in some cases slightly higher and in others slightly lower—than their Lower East Side counterparts (Williams, 2003).

"Separate But Equal" Educational System. Still, while African American high schools like Dunbar were sending graduates to Harvard by the 1920s, in the century between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the beginning of the civil rights movement in the 1950s, African Americans were part of a system of "separate but equal schools"—Whites would attend certain schools, and Blacks would attend others. Most Black schools achieved what they did despite overcrowding and inadequate resources—Dunbar itself had no school cafeteria for the first forty years of its existence. The 1896 US Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson declared this "separate but equal" educational system to be constitutional, but that ruling was overturned in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision (Thurgood Marshall won the case on behalf of the NAACP), a ruling that set off more than a half-century of attempts at school desegregation that continue today.

Future of African American Educators & Students. Since Brown, the fortunes of African American students and teachers have turned somewhat sour. Since the 1960s and 1970s there has been a steady exodus of White and middle-class African American families from urban centers, and now a full one-third of African Americans are middle-class suburbanites. This drain of students and resources left the poorest students—traditionally African American and now also Hispanic—behind in urban schools that have become pockmarked with violence, crime, and drug use. Making matters worse, local African American leaders have lost operational control of their community public schools to government education officials. Some former African American public school teachers, such as fourteen-year Chicago public schools veteran Marva Collins, left the public school system to found inner-city private schools that would give African American students the opportunity for an education on par with that given to White students.

Given the sobering developments within public schools in urban areas, where African Americans still predominate, the achievement gap between African American and White students has widened considerably since the middle of the twentieth century. By almost any objective measure, African American students perform at average levels lower than those of any racial group. Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT) scores for college–bound African Americans rose an average of 6 points for Verbal (though the number has returned to the 1986 level) and 16 points for Math from 1986 to 2006, but the scores are still below those of Whites, Hispanics, and Asians (National Center for Education Statistics, 2011). There are some positive trends, however: Between 2000 and 2010, high school graduation rates for African Americans rose 13 percent to 62 percent (Strauss, 2013). In the 2018–19 school year, that number had increased to 80 percent (Adams, 2014).

Since the 1990s, many African American parents have become vocal supporters of school vouchers, government-funded payment coupons that can be used to pay most or all of the cost to send their children to public charter schools or private schools, both of which tend to be safer than non-charter public schools and are widely believed to deliver a higher quality of education.

Hispanics in the Schools. Hispanics are now the largest minority in the United States, having surpassed African Americans in 2002. They are also the fastest-growing minority group in public school, rising from 6 percent of students in 1972 to 17 percent in 2000, 20 percent in 2008, and 27 percent in 2018 (Hoffman, Llargas & Snyder, 2003, p. 26; National Center for Education Statistics 2009; 2021).

Many Hispanics speak either Spanish or Portuguese, with English as their second language, though more than half speak mainly English only at home (Llagas & Snyder, 2003, p. xi). This language barrier has presented unique educational challenges to Hispanic students that African American students generally did not face. English as a Second Language (ESL) classes and bilingual education have attempted to ease the process of assimilation for new immigrants. During the 2013–14 school year, 4.5 million students, mostly Hispanic, were enrolled in ESL classes (National Center for Education Statistics, 2016).

A 2011 report by the President's Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans summarized the challenges facing Hispanic students: "Latino students face persistent obstacles to educational attainment. Less than half of Latino children are enrolled in any early learning program. Only about half of all Latino students earn their high school diploma on time; those who do complete high school are only half as likely as their peers to be prepared for college. Just 13 percent of Latinos have a bachelor’s degree, and only 4 percent have completed graduate or professional degree programs" (President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanics, 2011).

Education experts and Hispanic community leaders are seeking ways to build on the educational progress being made by Hispanic students while seeking ways to increase early childhood program attendance and reduce the high school dropout rate. More research is also being done on the differences between foreign-born and native-born Hispanics, as well as the differences among immigrants from different Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries.

According to data from the 2020 United States Census, Hispanic students have made notable improvements in education. In 2021, 88.5% of Hispanics aged 25-29, had achieved a high-school education. This was a significant climb compared to 1996 when the same percentage stood at 58.2%. This is notable as Hispanics continue to form a greater portion of the overall United States population. In 2021 this stood at 18.7%, up from 6.2% in 1980.

Asians in the Schools. The literature shows that Asian students, on average, do well in school. US Department of Education data shows that Asians scored the highest of all racial/ethnic groups, including Whites, in average Math SAT scores in 2013–14, and they scored second only to Whites on the Critical Reading (or Verbal) part of the exam (National Center for Education Statistics, 2016).

Several studies compiled by Zhang and Carrasquillo (1995) reveal that there are some cultural reasons why Asian students have succeeded. Asian families "expect their children to do well academically, to obey authority figures, and to be aware of the sacrifices their parents have made for them and the need to fulfill obligations (Carrasquillo & London, 1993; Mordkowitz & Ginsburg, 1986). Mordkowitz and Ginsburg (1986) presented narrative support for a cultural explanation containing family socialization for high achievements. The students reported that their families underscored educational accomplishments, held high expectations for achievements, controlled the behavior of the students, and considered schooling very important (Sue & Okazaki, 1990)" (Zhang & Carrasquillo, 1995). Research also indicates that Asian students, among all racial groups, set the greatest expectations for themselves. Goyette & Xie (1999) write that all Asian groups have higher educational expectations than Whites:

58.3% of white students expected to graduate from college, while all Asian groups reported higher percentages, ranging from 67.9% of Southeast Asians, to 84.8% for Japanese and Koreans, up to 95.7% of South Asian students who expected to graduate from college (Goyette & Xie, 1999).

Still, problems persist for Asian students:

Statistics about Asian American success in school, such as the percentage of Asian American students enrolled in college or scoring high on the SAT, are misleading and mask those Asian American students who are not doing well. In fact, although it seldom makes news headlines, there is a serious problem of Asian American school failures (Siu, 1996, p. 1).

The challenge for Asian leaders will be convincing political leaders that Asian students do face some of the same challenges faced by other racial and language groups.

Further Insights

The Decline in Teachers of Color. There has been an appreciable decline in the number of public school teachers of color over the past several decades. This is happening even as the percentage of students of color attending public schools continues to set records. The trends are unmistakable:

According to the National Institute of Education Statistics (2021), more than 50 percent of students in today's public schools are students of color, and that number is predicted to increase. Meanwhile, nearly 80 percent of teachers in public schools were White in the 2017–18 school year (National Center for Education Statistics, 2021).

In addition, those teachers of color who do enter the profession are overwhelmingly female—male teachers are now only 24 percent of the profession (National Center for Education Statistics, 2021). MacPherson (2003) quotes then National Education Association President Reg Weaver's concerns that many young people come from fatherless homes, and that "when they're able to have access to a male teacher as a father figure, it certainly bodes well for them, and the same thing with minorities" (MacPherson, 2003).

Statistics show a precipitous decline in the percentage of African American teachers in public schools. While 12.5 percent of public school teachers in 1974 were African American (Webb, 1986), that number fell to 6 percent in 2003 (MacPherson, 2003). The NEA adds that another 4 percent of public school teachers are other racial minorities. In New York City in 2006–2007, 71 percent of public school students were African American or Hispanic, while 60 percent of their teachers were White (Chung, 2006). In the 2017–18 school year, 7 percent of teachers at public schools were African American and 9 percent of public school teachers were Hispanic (National Center for Education Statistics, 2021).

Minorities in Private & Home Schools. In the 2017–18 school year, 6 percent of K–12 students attending private schools were African American, 11 percent were Asian, and 4 percent were Hispanic.

According to the latest figures from the US Department of Education, private school students receive a superior academic education:

Students at grades 4, 8, and 12 in all categories of private schools had higher average scores in reading, mathematics, science, and writing than their counterparts in public schools. In addition, higher percentages of students in private schools performed at or above Proficient compared to those in public schools (Perie, Vanneman & Goldstein, 2005).

While data for homeschooling students is not as ample, the data that is available shows that homeschooling students of color perform on par with their White counterparts. According to a 1997 survey by the Home School Legal Defense Association, math and reading scores for minority home schooled children are virtually the same when compared to whites. In reading, both White and students of color who are home schooled score at the 87th percentile. In math, they score in the 82nd percentile versus the 77th percentile (HSLDA, 1997).

Viewpoints: Bilingual Education. Bilingual education in the United States involves teaching English language learners (ELLs) in both English and in the student's native language. Title VII of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1968—commonly known as the Bilingual Education Act—required bilingual education in public schools, and the US Supreme Court upheld the principle in Lau v. Nichols. However, the Bilingual Education Act was superseded by the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which mandated yearly English-language tests for ELLs. In 2015, the Every Student Succeeds Act replaced No Child Left Behind; the new legislation increased funding for ELL students and required schools to demonstrate progress in English language proficiency among ELLs.

Bilingual education has caused controversy in the United States because of concerns that it undermines the role of English as the primary language in society and drives a socio-cultural wedge between English speakers and all others. Opponents of bilingual education prefer that non-native English-speaking students be placed instead in English language immersion programs to accelerate their learning (del Mazo, 2006). Supporters of bilingual education argue that students who first have a mastery of their native tongue will have a much easier time mastering English as a second language and thereafter learning in English (Krashen, 1999).

Terms & Concepts

Bilingual Education: The practice of educating non-English learners in their native tongue and in English.

Charter Schools: Public schools that retain local administrative control over matters such as teacher hiring and firing, salaries and curriculum.

Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA): Legislation signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2015 that aimed to improve public education in the United States, replacing the NCLB.

Failing Schools: Public schools that have shown over a period of years that they cannot enable the "proficiency of students in the basic four subjects of reading, writing, math, and science" (Anderson & Cotton, 2001).

No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB): Legislation signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2001 that aimed to improve public education in the United States. It was aimed especially at improving achievement for poor and minority children.

Public Schools: Publicly funded K-12 schools that retain a higher degree of state and federal oversight over hiring and other school policies and procedures.

Racism: An umbrella term from actions, words and attitudes that convey to a member of one race that they are considered inferior in talents and intellect.

Slavery: A practice of forcible servitude dating back to the earliest human civilizations. In the United States, enslaved people consisted mostly of those taken by slave traders from Africa and their descendants.

Under-Performing Schools: Public schools that have a mediocre, though not totally failing, track record in providing for the "proficiency of students in the basic four subjects of reading, writing, math, and science" (Anderson & Cotton, 2001).

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