Two discouraging reports on educational progress, or the lack
thereof, emerged in the last couple of weeks. The first was Miles To Go
from the Southern Education Foundation (see cover story, “The Long,
Winding, And Neglected Road”), which documents the continuing effects
of segregation and the new effects of the anti-affirmative action
backlash on African Americans in the South. The second was the latest
report from the College Board of the latest SAT scores (see story, page
24), which showed a drop in average scores for African Americans.
Both reports come complete with numbers, graphs, and charts galore,
lending an air of official certainty. But what gets lost is how
amorphous and slippery those reports really are.
For example, in Miles To Go, one of the most discouraging pieces of
information reported is that the number of African American first-time
freshmen in Mississippi’s four-year public colleges has dropped rather
precipitously. But the report does not examine what seems to be
contradictory news, which is that overall enrollment of African
Americans in those Mississippi schools — both the historically Black
schools and the traditionally White ones — has gone up, as have
enrollments at community colleges.
One explanation for this is that African Americans may in fact be
using the community colleges in exactly the way they are intended to be
used — as a way to make up for the shortcomings of their secondary
education and as a funnel to four-year degrees.
In other words, African Americans in Mississippi may be finding
individual and institutional ways around the many obstacles that remain
in their state.
Is that something to be celebrated? Well, possibly, if we knew it
for a fact. It would have been nice if the SEF had explored this
possibility. Instead, it dismisses as virtually unimportant the fact
that African Americans in the South are earning record numbers of
bachelor’s degrees. But this is not an unimportant fact, and deserves
to be examined to see how it has happened and what the implications
are, both educationally and politically.
Without that kind of examination, we are in danger of the nation
becoming weary and saying, “Well, we’ve tried everything. If nothing
works, we might as well give up.”
