Guest columnist Matthew D. Davis
African-American students suffer under duress in the New Metropolis. In fact, the education that they experience in the New Metropolis seems startlingly similar to schooling that existed in the New South a century ago.
In the Jim Crow South, African-American students, where schooling could be found, mainly encountered basic literacy and industrial education. As W.E.B. Du Bois commented, “The white supremacists … told black folk to ‘be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher culture for half-men.’”
These conditions seem little changed in the new century.
Several decades ago, the standards movement ushered into fruition a new educational era. This movement accompanied the conservative backlash to the Second Reconstruction and set in place a return to a dual system of schooling, what Jonathan Kozol recently labeled for contemporary times as “educational apartheid.”
At perhaps its apex, this movement has produced the No Child Left Behind Act. The harsh, racialized penalties meted out mainly by state educational authorities under this act are crippling African-American students in the New Metropolis. Simply, no public will can be garnered to teach “higher culture” to “black folk.”
Basic literacy chokes classroom curricula in predominantly African-American schools. As many researchers have chronicled, “drill and kill” routines have made moot any attempt to teach critical thinking skills or any of the other assorted, desired attributes of employees in the knowledge economy.
Teaching to the accountability test, a lowest common denominator, reigns in New Metropolis classrooms for both blacks and whites. This test, by whatever name, is racially biased. Thus, our states’ schools require black students to take a test on which they likely will score low. But the test seems less important than another fact. Black students ordinarily do not have the opportunity to learn the knowledge that is tested.
Algebra provides a good example of this problem. Basic literacy, for these students, means something altogether different than it does for their white counterparts. As civil rights legend Robert Moses has long pointed out, algebra is a subject denied to most African-American students until it’s too late.
White students, particularly those that are college-bound, are guided to algebra early in the middle-school years. Most black students, however, as Moses recounts in Radical Equations, are not even encouraged to take algebra until they are in high school – that is, if they haven’t been pushed out of school by then. Algebra is the ticket to higher levels of mathematics in high school. Algebra is so vital, Moses asserts, it should be the great citizenship fight for African Americans today, as much as voting was during both eras of Reconstruction.
Without passing this literacy test, as the citizenship hurdle was called in earlier times, African-American students mainly miss out on the great promises of the knowledge economy. Therefore, their limited education amounts to little more than a free pass to the service economy.
Still, progress over time passage can be gleaned. From the Old South to the New South to the New Metropolis, the work reality for many African Americans has changed from slavery to sharecropping to the service economy. However, out of these geographical and economic contexts has come African-American education that was squelched, then suppressed and is now squandered.
Schooling for servitude remains an ever-present condition for far too many African Americans.
Matthew D. Davis is assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.