With the passing of slavery, equality of education was one of the rights formerly held back that was now for Black people to take advantage of. With this equal starting ground, social integration would be a realizable dream. Yet after over 120 years, equality of education had been denied to Black children, thus preventing them from the amount of financial success White children have in life after school. Through "benign neglect" and the goal of some to find a genetic link to race and intelligence, Black students have been railroaded into low end jobs and inescapable poverty.
As Bowles and Gintis have stated, the purpose of education is to preserve the existing class structure. Since the abolition of slavery, racist whites have used the educational system to keep their thrones and to keep blacks poor. Ideas of minority inferiority are spread, and the misinformed fall into the trap of believing that race determines intelligence, using skewed test data to help support their ideas.
Social status attainment models assume social mobility in an open contest, based on merit as measured by years of schooling and technical ability. This open contest assumes an equal basic education. After the Supreme Court ruled that "separate but equal" schools were unconstitutional, those who would prevent integration had to find new was to deny this basic education. If the schools themselves could not be segregated, then why not the classrooms? If Blacks and Whites must attend the same school, then by sorting them into different classrooms it would be possible to deny an equal education to all students. Thus the system of ability grouping, or tracking, was born. From a recent report of the NEA on tracking,
With 45% of all black children living on poverty, being prevented from learning from higher achieving peers virtually locks them in their social state. The NEA report further claims that although many black students are enthusiastic learners in lower elementary schools, they lose that enthusiasm in upper elementary, and by high school black seniors are overrepresented in remedial English and math courses. But while advocates of tracking say that it lets high achievers move rapidly and gives low achievers more help and easier goals, it is unfair to low achievers because it provides poor peer models, teachers have low expectations, minorities are conveniently concentrated in lower tracks, and low achievers are locked into the lower tracks because of a slow instructional pace that doesn't begin to keep up with other tracks. Tracking also increases the likelihood of failure for low achievers where the least is expected. The amount of racial isolation has increased over the last several years, as minority students are systematically placed into lower tracks, and schools where minorities represent the majority of the student body receive less state money. This placement is based usually on a standardized test given at an early point in the student's education. Survey data shows that the more teachers know about tests and testing, the more likely they are to accept the idea of tracking according to presumably innate abilities on the basis of these test results. This misuse of test results is one of the most blatant examples of entrenched racism currently alive and well in America. In 1982, black students were 34% more likely to be in a vocational track than white students, and they were 12% less likely to be in an academic track than white students, as the following data shows.
| 1982 | Black Students | White Students |
|---|---|---|
| Academic | 36% | 41% |
| General | 25% | 30% |
| Vocational | 39% | 29% |
| |
Top Class | 2nd Class | 3rd Class |
|---|---|---|---|
| Science / Math | |||
| black | 23.6 | 47.0 | 24.0 |
| white | 32.3 | 52.1 | 11.9 |
| English / Language | |||
| black | 15.4 | 46.5 | 28.5 |
| white | 24.8 | 51.5 | 18.1 |
| Social Studies | |||
| black | 22.3 | 50.0 | 22.7 |
| white | 30.3 | 49.2 | 16.3 |
From the above statistics, black students are underrepresented in the upper track for every subject, and overrepresented in the lower tracks for every subject. Also, they are more likely to be in a vocational track than an academic track when compared to white students. If black students aren't motivated, and that is what is causing black students overall to perform at a lower academic level than white students, part of the reason is that black students receive more mixed messages and negative feedback than white students. There is also an absence of materials which are of black content or provide black role models. Initial differences are exaggerated instead of accommodated, and school officials accept the achievement of a few at the expense of the majority.
To counter the argument of minority inferiority, I bring for examination a junior high school which is 99.9% black and is the second highest achieving seventh graders in Pittsburgh in 1976. This was a "bad" public school, outperforming the "good" private school in that area. After replacing the superintendent, the rest of the schools in Pittsburgh rose above 50% the national average in math and reading. Minority students can achieve at high levels, and schools do make a difference. This implies that it was not the students "inferiority" that was holding them behind, but the motivation of the teachers and the students that made the difference. Schools are not low achieving only because of students, but because of students, teachers, and administrators. Teachers who take part in selecting which students fall into which groups may be influenced by resentment toward high achieving minority students because they conflict with the teacher's biases.
These reports show the outright racism that black students must overcome to succeed in American society where basic education is assumed to be an open contest. If there is to be this open contest, poor and minority students need access to the same opportunities rich students do, and not suffer from less instruction, fewer trained teachers, and a lack of teachers who believe they can learn.
So what can be done to create this open contest? First I say we need to educate teachers on the cultures of the children they will teach, and to break down old stereotypes and biases. Teachers need to believe that all students can learn in order to make a difference; student motivation isn't the only factor. Tracking needs to be reworked into something that takes advantage of its strengths, such as offering a faster pace for those who can handle it, but doesn't limit those who fall into lower tracks. Most important is that schools need to mix students of different races and abilities. By mixing races in classrooms, the schools will help educate students about each other's cultures and reduce racial tension in society, and by mixing students of different abilities lower tracks will keep up with upper tracks. Black students have been held behind for too long, and this is what needs to be done to let them back into the open contest.