African American Students: Creating Excellence

Discussions of achieving educational excellence for African American children commonly center around strategies for closing the achievement gap between African American children and children of other American ethnic groups. Some scholars, such as V. P. Franklin, assert that the goal in educating African American children should extend beyond their catching up with children of other ethnic groups. He maintains that African American children must be prepared for their leadership role among African peoples throughout the world in the 21st century. This entry describes the tensions and challenges between various approaches to achieving equity and excellence for African American children.

A discussion of achieving educational excellence for African American students must first highlight the philosophical contradictions that undergird racism and inequality. The first contradiction emanates from the fact that the United States is a capitalistic society, while a commitment to public education assumes a socialistic philosophical base. There is an inherent contradiction between the capitalistic ethos that views individual families as having the primary responsibility for obtaining a quality education for their children, in contrast to the socialistic ethos that emphasizes the state's responsibility to provide free and appropriate public education for all students. The shortcomings of the effort to educate the masses of African American children emanate from the conflict between these opposing ideologies.

One of the debates that rage among educators is the issue of how much blame should be assigned to parents for the failure of their children and how much blame should be assigned to the schools. The resolution of this debate holds the key for closing the achievement gap that affects African American children. Parents are legally required to send their children to school until they reach the dropout age, which varies from state to state and ranges from 16 to 18. However, parents are not legally required to teach their children, nor do they have the training, skills, or materials to do so. Schools are accredited. Teachers are certified. There is no accreditation for families. There is no certification for parents. Educational excellence will be achieved only when schools accept responsibility for achieving grade-level performance for each and every child. A central concern is that many students are not making satisfactory educational progress. For example, 47% of adults in Detroit, Michigan, are functionally illiterate. They cannot be held responsible for preparing their children to read in school. Most of the efforts to strengthen educational programs for African American children achieve moderate results with middle-class children but fail with the truly disadvantaged. Another sobering reality is that even when social class is held constant, the achievement of African American middle-class children falls below that of their White counterparts.

Most of the solutions that are offered for closing the achievement gap—teacher testing, student testing, student retention in grade, one-size-fits-all models of parent involvement—amount to the same old strategies, many of which are proposed by politicians and journalists rather than educators. Most school reform initiatives result in punishing the children because they have not been effectively taught by their schools. High school students who fail achievement tests required for receiving diplomas are often simply given certificates of completion or attendance, which merely certify that they stayed in school although they did not earn a [Page 46]high school diploma. Most schools in which the majority of students are African American teach to the test, spending a high percentage of instructional time coaching the children to pass standardized tests. Scholars have pointed out that most White children are taught the curriculum while most African American children are taught to take tests.

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