Despite the occasional success in closing the achievement gap, America’s K-12 educational system does a wholly inadequate job of educating Black males, as evidenced in large disparities in the graduation rate between Black males and their White counterparts.
So says a new report being released today from the Cambridge, Mass.-based Schott Foundation for Public Education.
“The harsh reality is that systemically most states and too many districts don’t provide the necessary, targeted resources or supports for all students’ educational success,” Schott Foundation president John H. Jackson states in the report, titled Yes We Can: The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males. “We have too often settled for the sweet taste of minor success over stomaching the bitter taste of the reality that without systemic reform we are winning some battles, but largely still losing the war.”
The report singled out New Jersey as the only state with a significant Black male population with a higher than 65 percent high school graduation rate and attributed this to the greater per pupil spending and instructional time that came about as a result of the Abbot v. Burke lawsuit filed by the Education Law Center. The 1981 lawsuit claimed the state had failed to meet its constitutional obligation to provide a “thorough and efficient” education to students in poor, urban school districts.
The Schott report singled out six states—New York, Nebraska, Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana—as having the worst graduation outcomes based on a mathematical formula known as the Schott Education Inequity Index, which ranks states by subtracting the graduation rate among Black males from 100 percent, then adding that amount to the difference, or the “gap,” in graduation rates between Black males and White males.
The Schott report, including its remedies and overall framework, drew varying degrees of both criticism and praise from education experts and commentators familiar with the Schott approach.
Ellen Winn, director of the Education Equality Project, says she keeps the annually-released Schott report on Black males on her desk because of its value as a resource tool for those concerned with closing the achievement gap.
