It's time to get down to the of the matter.
(social justice & education)
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In 2010, the Grad Nation Campaign — led by General Colin Powell and his wife Alma — was launched to address the increasingly concerning national high school dropout rate, which then persistently hovered around 70 percent. The Grad Nation Campaign released an annual report called Building a Grad Nation. The final report was released in 2023.
From the final report: “While Black students have spurred gains nationally, their graduation rates continue to lag those of White students. In 2020, the graduation gap between Black and White students stood at 9.2 percentage points.
In 2020, Black students accounted for 15.3 percent of the graduating cohort, but were overrepresented among the nation’s non-graduates, at 21.4 percent. This disproportion is especially prevalent across southern states. Nine of the ten states with the highest rates of Black students failing to graduate on-time were in the South. In each of these nine states, more than 30 percent of non-graduating students were Black. In Mississippi and Louisiana more than half of the students not graduating on-time in 2020 were Black.”
The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — commonly referred to as The Nation’s Report Card — was released in October 2022. The results were, in the words of U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona “appalling and unacceptable.”
The report revealed that only 36 percent of 4th graders and 26 percent of 8th graders perform at or above the Proficient level in math, a level that represents “sold academic performance.” Only 33 percent of 4th graders and 31 percent of 8th graders perform at or above the Proficient level in reading.
Breaking the numbers down by race is absolutely devastating. In 4th grade math, there is a 33-point score gap between White and Black students (48 percent to 15 percent). In 8th grade math, there is a 26-point score gap between White and Black students (35 percent to 9 percent). In 4th grade reading, there is a 25-point score gap between White and Black students (42 percent to 17 percent). In 8th grade reading, there is a 22-point score gap between White and Black students (38 percent to 16 percent).
Although more than two-thirds of New York City’s students are Black and Latino, these two groups make-up only 10 percent of the offers made by the city’s eight highly selective, specialized public high schools. In 2023, only seven slots (out of 762) in the freshman class of Stuyvesant High School were offered to Black students. At Staten Island Technical High School, only two Black students were accepted out of 287 offers made.
The New York Times reports that “the share of Black freshmen at elite colleges is virtually unchanged since 1980. Black students are just 6 percent of freshmen but 15 percent of college-age Americans. Black students make up 9 percent of the freshmen at Ivy League schools but 15 percent of college-age Americans, roughly the same gap as in 1980.”
A report from the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit research group, found that "debt and default among Black college students is at crisis levels, and even a bachelor’s degree is no guarantee of security: Black BA graduates default at five times the rate of white BA graduates (21 versus 4 percent), and are more likely to default than White dropouts." Read more here.
This is especially concerning given that the American Council on Education says "Black undergraduates were more likely than others to receive federal grants and loans, but graduated with the greatest student loan debt of any group. The 86.4 percent of Black 2016 bachelor’s degree recipients who borrowed owed an average of $34,010 by graduation, compared with $29,669 for all bachelor’s degree recipients. The 67.2 percent of Black associate degree recipients who borrowed owed an average of $22,303, compared with $18,501 for students overall." Read the report here.
Researchers from Princeton University found that "the gap in high school completion rates between White and Black Americans has narrowed substantially over the last 40 years, but racial equity in higher education remains a distant goal. Rates of completion for college are much lower among people of color, who are also underrepresented in fields like mathematics and statistics, engineering, the physical sciences and education.
When comparing majority-White and majority-Black neighborhoods, the median share of people with at least a bachelor’s degree is much different. In some cities, the number is two to three times higher in majority-White neighborhoods than in majority-Black neighborhoods. In San Francisco, for example, almost 7 in 10 people living in White neighborhoods have at least a bachelor’s degree. The same is true for only one-fifth of residents of Black communities in that city." See cool charts here.