During the 60s here in Brooklyn, there was the Ocean Hill Brownsville demonstrations and school boycots.
It was a massive grassroots parent active movement to protest the still present real estate tax value / school funding sysytem that guaranteed more funds to "the well to do" neighborhoods and practicaly squat, to the inner city.
The result was the bussing of the children from Brownsville into mostly Jewish schools in Flatbush and Mill Basin, to ensure them a better education, from the gov. side.
From the communities side Uhuru Sasa Schule an Afrocentric private school was created, and the "East" a renowned Afrocentric cultural and education center, cuased a domino effect tidal wave of similar but small community based centers all over the Black community.
Jitu Weusi(then Les Campbell) implemented and created the Afro American teachers organization, as an alternaive to the Jewsish controled UFT, alhough there were numerous socialist Jews that boyocotted as teachers, and volunteered to work in what were termed as Freedom schools were we went as an alternative to the government schools during the boycott .
Around that time however what schools were achieving not just high grades but a majority of IGC students in fact practical all of the students from first grade through junior high, was the Nation of Islam.
This is something to look at beucause it appears that they knew a methodology, that any Black group could replicate, regardless of religion or deist A new generation of parents came up in the late90s, stopped going to PTAs, stopped going to parent teacher meets, and open school week, and refused to get involved with or even vote for the scholl board elections,
the result being after so many years of neglect that by the years after 9/11 the community board system was abolished,
parent involvement in the schools order of business was banned and a corporatism type attitude took over the schools with Bloomberg, closing 110 Livingston street the administrative building for the Board of Education, firing every one and selling the building to his daughter as a co-op,
even changed the name to New York City Schools
To this date we have no national collective nothing, regrding the education of our children
and this article is a heavy indicator that the time is now,
to start amassing ideas and agendas from across the nation from the best Black educators, who are not regionalists
November 9, 2010
Proficiency of Black Students Is Found to Be Far Lower Than Expected
By TRIP GABRIEL
An achievement gap separating black from white students has long been documented — a social divide extremely vexing to policy makers and the target of one blast of school reform after another.
But a new report focusing on black males suggests that the picture is even bleaker than generally known.
Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys.
Poverty alone does not seem to explain the differences: poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches.
The data was distilled from highly respected national math and reading tests, known as the National Assessment for Educational Progress, which are given to students in fourth and eighth grades, most recently in 2009. The report, “A Call for Change,” is to be released Tuesday by the Council of the Great City Schools, an advocacy group for urban public schools.
Although the outlines of the problem and many specifics have been previously reported, the group hopes that including so much of what it calls “jaw-dropping data” in one place will spark a new sense of national urgency.
“What this clearly shows is that black males who are not eligible for free and reduced-price lunch are doing no better than white males who are poor,” said Michael Casserly, executive director of the council.
The report shows that black boys on average fall behind from their earliest years. Black mothers have a higher infant mortality rate and black children are twice as likely as whites to live in a home where no parent has a job. In high school, African-American boys drop out at nearly twice the rate of white boys, and their SAT scores are on average 104 points lower. In college, black men represented just 5 percent of students in 2008.
The analysis of results on the national tests found that math scores in 2009 for black boys were not much different than those for black girls in Grades 4 and 8, but black boys lagged behind Hispanics of both sexes, and they fell behind white boys by at least 30 points, a gap sometimes interpreted as three academic grades.
The search for explanations has recently looked at causes besides poverty, and this report may further spur those efforts.
“There’s accumulating evidence that there are racial differences in what kids experience before the first day of kindergarten,” said Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard. “They have to do with a lot of sociological and historical forces. In order to address those, we have to be able to have conversations that people are unwilling to have.”
Those include “conversations about early childhood parenting practices,” Dr. Ferguson said. “The activities that parents conduct with their 2-, 3- and 4-year-olds. How much we talk to them, the ways we talk to them, the ways we enforce discipline, the ways we encourage them to think and develop a sense of autonomy.”
The report urges convening a White House conference, encouraging Congress to appropriate more money for schools and establishing networks of black mentors.
What it does not discuss are policy responses identified with a robust school reform movement that emphasizes closing failing schools, offering charter schools as alternatives and raising the quality of teachers.
The report did not go down this road because “there’s not a lot of research to indicate that many of those strategies produce better results,” Mr. Casserly said.
Other have a different response. The key to narrowing the achievement gap, said Dr. Ferguson, is “really good teaching.”
One large urban school district that has made progress is Baltimore’s, where the dropout rate for African-American boys declined to 4.9 percent during the last academic year, down from 11.9 percent three years earlier. Graduation rates for black boys were also up: 57 percent in 2009-10, compared with 51 percent three years earlier.
www.nytimes.com
It was a massive grassroots parent active movement to protest the still present real estate tax value / school funding sysytem that guaranteed more funds to "the well to do" neighborhoods and practicaly squat, to the inner city.
The result was the bussing of the children from Brownsville into mostly Jewish schools in Flatbush and Mill Basin, to ensure them a better education, from the gov. side.
From the communities side Uhuru Sasa Schule an Afrocentric private school was created, and the "East" a renowned Afrocentric cultural and education center, cuased a domino effect tidal wave of similar but small community based centers all over the Black community.
Jitu Weusi(then Les Campbell) implemented and created the Afro American teachers organization, as an alternaive to the Jewsish controled UFT, alhough there were numerous socialist Jews that boyocotted as teachers, and volunteered to work in what were termed as Freedom schools were we went as an alternative to the government schools during the boycott .
Around that time however what schools were achieving not just high grades but a majority of IGC students in fact practical all of the students from first grade through junior high, was the Nation of Islam.
This is something to look at beucause it appears that they knew a methodology, that any Black group could replicate, regardless of religion or deist A new generation of parents came up in the late90s, stopped going to PTAs, stopped going to parent teacher meets, and open school week, and refused to get involved with or even vote for the scholl board elections,
the result being after so many years of neglect that by the years after 9/11 the community board system was abolished,
parent involvement in the schools order of business was banned and a corporatism type attitude took over the schools with Bloomberg, closing 110 Livingston street the administrative building for the Board of Education, firing every one and selling the building to his daughter as a co-op,
even changed the name to New York City Schools
To this date we have no national collective nothing, regrding the education of our children
and this article is a heavy indicator that the time is now,
to start amassing ideas and agendas from across the nation from the best Black educators, who are not regionalists
November 9, 2010
Proficiency of Black Students Is Found to Be Far Lower Than Expected
By TRIP GABRIEL
An achievement gap separating black from white students has long been documented — a social divide extremely vexing to policy makers and the target of one blast of school reform after another.
But a new report focusing on black males suggests that the picture is even bleaker than generally known.
Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys.
Poverty alone does not seem to explain the differences: poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches.
The data was distilled from highly respected national math and reading tests, known as the National Assessment for Educational Progress, which are given to students in fourth and eighth grades, most recently in 2009. The report, “A Call for Change,” is to be released Tuesday by the Council of the Great City Schools, an advocacy group for urban public schools.
Although the outlines of the problem and many specifics have been previously reported, the group hopes that including so much of what it calls “jaw-dropping data” in one place will spark a new sense of national urgency.
“What this clearly shows is that black males who are not eligible for free and reduced-price lunch are doing no better than white males who are poor,” said Michael Casserly, executive director of the council.
The report shows that black boys on average fall behind from their earliest years. Black mothers have a higher infant mortality rate and black children are twice as likely as whites to live in a home where no parent has a job. In high school, African-American boys drop out at nearly twice the rate of white boys, and their SAT scores are on average 104 points lower. In college, black men represented just 5 percent of students in 2008.
The analysis of results on the national tests found that math scores in 2009 for black boys were not much different than those for black girls in Grades 4 and 8, but black boys lagged behind Hispanics of both sexes, and they fell behind white boys by at least 30 points, a gap sometimes interpreted as three academic grades.
The search for explanations has recently looked at causes besides poverty, and this report may further spur those efforts.
“There’s accumulating evidence that there are racial differences in what kids experience before the first day of kindergarten,” said Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard. “They have to do with a lot of sociological and historical forces. In order to address those, we have to be able to have conversations that people are unwilling to have.”
Those include “conversations about early childhood parenting practices,” Dr. Ferguson said. “The activities that parents conduct with their 2-, 3- and 4-year-olds. How much we talk to them, the ways we talk to them, the ways we enforce discipline, the ways we encourage them to think and develop a sense of autonomy.”
The report urges convening a White House conference, encouraging Congress to appropriate more money for schools and establishing networks of black mentors.
What it does not discuss are policy responses identified with a robust school reform movement that emphasizes closing failing schools, offering charter schools as alternatives and raising the quality of teachers.
The report did not go down this road because “there’s not a lot of research to indicate that many of those strategies produce better results,” Mr. Casserly said.
Other have a different response. The key to narrowing the achievement gap, said Dr. Ferguson, is “really good teaching.”
One large urban school district that has made progress is Baltimore’s, where the dropout rate for African-American boys declined to 4.9 percent during the last academic year, down from 11.9 percent three years earlier. Graduation rates for black boys were also up: 57 percent in 2009-10, compared with 51 percent three years earlier.
www.nytimes.com
