Dietrich Bonheoffer, the great German theologian pointed out in the middle of the 20th century that the test of the morality of a society is how it treats its children. A statement of American abolitionist Frederick Douglas from more than century and a half ago sheds light on the critical importance of properly educating today’s urban young. Douglas intimated that “literacy unfits a child for slavery.” Similarly, today education unfits children for poverty, addiction and incarceration.
It is important to give constructive attention to the education of children in urban areas because – as Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund points out - urban children face the higher likelihood of being abused and neglected, born into poverty, born without health insurance, killed by a firearm, or born to a teenage mother. These figures are exacerbated for black and brown children in urban settings.[i]
The 2005 “Equality Index,” published by the National Urban League sheds light on the challenges of urban education today. It points to significant disparities among urban and suburban educational systems in several areas, including the quality of education (including teacher quality and credentialing), as well as educational attainment/achievement.[ii]
According
to statistics compiled by the national “No Child Left Behind” initiative, the
percentage of teachers who are “highly qualified” in their specialty areas is
typically higher in the wealthiest school jurisdictions. For instance, in the Baltimore-Washington Standard
Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA) in three of the wealthiest/best performing
school districts: Fairfax County, VA, Montgomery Co., MD and Howard Co., MD
over 90% of teachers are reported to be highly qualified. By comparison, in three of the poorest/worst
performing school districts: the District of Columbia, Prince George’s Co., MD
and Baltimore City, less than 55 percent of teachers are reported to be highly
qualified.[iii]
Several
studies point out that differences in academic achievement among Black,
Hispanic and White children appear early in the elementary-school years and
persist throughout the elementary and secondary-school years. Dr. Freeman Hrabowski - president of the
University of Maryland, Baltimore County - and his collaborators in the book, Beating the Odds: Raising Academically
Successful African American Males - point out that a report on the
performance of elementary school children in Montgomery County, Maryland shows
that the percentage of Hispanic and Black children that fell behind their White
peers in mathematics increased markedly between the first and sixth
grades. At the second grade, more than
15% of Black and Hispanic children and approximately 5% of the White children
were performing below grade level. By
the sixth grade, the performance of 20 % of White children, while the
performance of over 40% of the Hispanic and 50% of the Black children, was
below grade level.[iv]
Many
Black and Hispanic children live in urban settings where school systems
typically receive far less funding per student than their suburban
counterparts. The difference in funding,
for example, for students in the city of Baltimore and Montgomery County, one
of the wealthiest counties in the country, is almost $2,000 per student per
year.[v]
The
development of constructive, collaborative approaches to addressing the issues
surrounding educational disparities between urban and other settings present
some of the most critical opportunities for turning the tide on the blight now
evident in many of our communities.
Entrepreneurial
educational initiatives such as Teach for America (www.teachforamerica.org), The Algebra
Project (www.algebra.org), The Northwood Appold
Community Academy, Baltimore (www.nacacad.org),
and Room to Read (www.roomtoread.org) offer four diverse approaches to addressing
educational disparities, and warrant further investigation in developing a
comprehensive model to enhance educational achievement among underserved
populations in urban settings.
[i]
Robert Franklin, Crisis in the Village: Restoring Hope in African American Communities (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2007), 20.
[ii]
National Urban League, The State of Black
America-2006: The Opportunity Compact (New York: National Urban League,
2006), p. 133 f.
[iii]
See The Washington Post, January 13,
2007.
[iv]
Freeman Hrabowski, IIII, et. al., Beating
the Odds: Raising Academically Successful African American Males (Oxford,
UK: Oxford University Press, 1998).
[v]
The Washington Post, January 13, 2007.
No comments:
Post a Comment