A coalition of African-Americans educators say the nation’s public school system is giving up on black male students and setting them up to fail. According to “Yes We Can: The 2010 Schott 50 State Report on Black Males in Public Education: “Without targeted investments to provide the core, research-proven resources to help black male students succeed in public education,” the report concludes, “they are being set up to fail.”
According to “Yes We Can: The 2010 Schott 50 State Report on Black Males in Public Education,” the overall 2007-2008 graduation rate for black males in the U.S. was only 47 percent, and half of the states have graduation rates for black male students below the national average.
The report highlights concerns that New York’s graduation rate for its Regents diploma is only 25 percent for black male students.
New York City, the district with the nation’s highest enrollment of black students, only graduates 28 percent of its black males with Regents diplomas on time. Overall, each year, more than 100,000 black male students in New York City do not graduate from high school.
The fourth report released by the Schott Foundation for Public Education provides state-by-state data that shows which U.S. school districts and states are failing to provide the resources black male students need for the opportunity to learn.
“Taken together, the numbers in the Schott Foundation for Public Education’s report form a nightmarish picture ? one that is all the more frightening for being both true and long-standing,” Geoffrey Canada, president and CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone, said in a statement.
“These boys are failing, but I believe that it is the responsibility of the adults around them to turn these trajectories around,” Canada said. “All of us must ensure that we level the playing field for the hundreds of thousands of children who are at risk of continuing the cycle of generational poverty. The key to success is education.”
Some civil rights activists, like comedian Bill Cosby, have publicly blamed black parents for not preparing their sons to be productive citizens, and they’ve criticized black mothers and fathers for allowing school systems to raise their children.
"I don't know where we lost it or how we lost it, but people are not parenting," Cosby said last year during a speech in San Jose, California. "These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids - $500 sneakers for what? And won't spend $200 for 'Hooked on Phonics.'"
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