The St. Louis American got it right. As we honor educators who work hard every day, we must nevertheless acknowledge the brutal facts: “The preliminary data show the public school districts that educate the majority of African-American students in this area are largely slipping in academic achievement and graduation rates.”
Years ago, the St. Louis Public School District lost its accreditation. Despite heroic efforts by many, the district remains unaccredited. Wellston School District has been shut down. Riverview Gardens is under receivership of sorts. Ferguson-Florissant, a district celebrated for high graduation rates, is struggling. Jennings School District is provisionally accredited. District 189 in East St. Louis is on the critical list, despite serious efforts by men and women with good intentions … and the list goes on.
Virtually all the charter schools in St. Louis did not make Adequate Yearly Progress in 2009. The hopes of many parents who abandoned regular public schools for charter schools have been dashed. The silence of many advocates of charter schools on this issue is deafening.
In school districts with majority non-African American populations, the crisis manifests as a sub set of the larger problem: the achievement gaps between white and black students in these school districts persist. With the exception of two school districts making measurable efforts to close the gap, sustainability of what works has become the Achilles heel of many school districts.
The results are tragic. Almost 45 percent of African-American children in the region drop out of high school. Fifty-five percent of African-American high school graduates who attend community colleges are not academically ready. They spend their first year taking non-credit remedial classes in mathematics and communication arts – wasting money and time to acquire academic competencies that should have been acquired freely K-12.
The achievement gap drags economies and communities down. Last year, a McKinsey and Company study quantified the adverse economic impact of the achievement gap at between $3 billion and $5 billion dollars a day – an impact similar to that of an economy in a perpetual state of recession.
The inconvenient truth is this: Our response as a community would be different if the thousands of underperforming children were overwhelmingly white. Our schools of education and research institutions would engage in massive efforts to disentangle the complex set of circumstances that hinder children’s ability to learn. Our business, civic, and religious leaders, black and white, would stop at nothing to find sustainable solutions. Instead there is mostly silence or tepid and fragmented attempts at solutions.
Lest we forget, as in many other parts of the nation, we have a problem of epic proportions and it’s not the children. All children come into this world with the ability to learn, adapt and excel or fail based on how well they have learned and adapted.
We have an adult problem. We need more consistently caring, culturally competent and innovative adults – educators, parents, business, religious, and civic leaders, blacks, whites and Hispanics – who can resist substituting descriptions of problems for real solutions.
It’s time to reexamine the false and pervasive perceptions about African-American and Hispanic children. It’s time to work together on a massive scale, create new synergies, innovate, identify and multiply what works, and find out why, despite the abundance of good intentions, sustainability of what works remains the Achilles heel.
To effectively grow community capital and successfully compete globally, we must reform virtually all school districts. We must grow the academic abilities of all children, increase the number of college ready students, increase attendance and graduation rates, and sustainably close the academic achievement gaps.
A beginning point is the upcoming conference on Closing the Academic Achievement Gap at Washington University on October 20-21, 2010. For more information on the conference, please visit www.CTAAG.org.
Need help paying for the conference? Call 314-581-4149 or 314-361-3902.
Amusa is president and CEO of ADE Consulting Services, Inc.
