Education in the United States

The education of African Americans in the United States predates the creation of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedman, and Abandoned Lands that was established by an act of Congress in 1865 to assist newly emancipated slaves to become self-sufficient in all areas of life. As Bureau agents fanned across the South to assess conditions, they discovered

that black southerners had already created the rudiments of an educational system for themselves. That this was the case may be understood within the larger context of the curious history that education has played in the lives of Americans of African descent. For instance, as early as 1787, black parents petitioned the Massachusetts state legislature on behalf of their children to obtain equal educational rights for them. These Bostonians made their case on the grounds that their young were being denied access to the very school that they, like their fellow white citizens, shared the tax burden of supporting. The request, although denied, was an augur of the desire—and the struggle—that would characterize the black quest for education for the next two hundred plus years.

The above example also indicates that even as education is inextricably tied to notions of freedom, justice, and citizenship, it is also linked to the oppression of subordinated racial groups in the United States. Since the beginning of formal schooling in the United States, a dominant view that citizenship should be limited to free whites informed popular attitudes about the role that education should play in the lives of Americans of African descent and other people of color. The majority of white citizens in the American South believed that educating captive Africans would render them unfit for servitude and make it impossible to subordinate them or to retain them as slaves (Woodson, 1919). Such views were not at all unfounded. There were examples aplenty in colonial and antebellum America that pointed to the insight, courage, and sense of responsibility that education instilled among those fortunate enough to have access to it. Consider, for example, the case of the late eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley. Arriving to the New England colonies as a young captive Senegalese, Wheatley would become renowned for her elegies, captured in the 1773 collection published as Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Although poems written during her early years suggested that Wheatley identified wholesale with her white captors, those written during the later years of her life pointed to a change in her consciousness. For instance, Wheatley provided a subtle, and peculiar, critique of New World slavery in the following elegy:

But how, presumptuous shall we hope to find
Divine acceptance with th' Almighty mind—
While yet (o deed Ungenerous!) they disgrace
And hold in bondage Afric's blameless race?

Let virtue reign—And thou accord our prayers
Be victory ours, and generous freedom theirs.
(Wheatley, 1773, p. 238).

Conflicting views of the role and purpose of black education have characterized the nearly 400-year struggle around the schooling of Americans of African descent in the United States. On one end of the ideological and programmatic spectrum was the advocacy of an education to extend the practice of freedom and democracy to black communities. Along these lines, the quest for black liberation was realized through a two-pronged approach to education. According to noted educational historian James D. Anderson, "the short-range purpose of black schooling was to provide the masses of ex-slaves with basic literacy skills plus the rudiments of citizenship training for participation in a democratic society. The long-range purpose was the intellectual and moral development of a responsible leadership class that would organize the masses and lead them to freedom and equality" (1988, p. 31).

On the other end of the ideological and programmatic spectrum was the advocacy of an education for black students to ensure the maintenance of white supremacy. Such was especially true during the post-Reconstruction era. An observation made by W. E. B. Du Bois, reported in a 1918 issue of The Crisis, is typical of the second-class education provided to black children and youth during this period. Here, Du Bois decried the material disparities he found in the education of black and white students in Butte, Montana, public schools:

What, now, is the real difference between these two schemes [white and black] of education? The difference is that in the Butte schools for white pupils, a chance is held open for the pupil to go through high school and college and to advance at the rate which the modern curriculum demands; that in the colored, a program is being made out that will land the boy at the time he becomes self-conscious and aware of his own possibilities in an educational impasse. He cannot go on in the public schools even if he should move to a place where there are good public schools because he is too old. Even if he has done the elementary work in twice the time that a student is supposed to, it has been work of a kind that will not admit him to a northern high school. No matter, then, how gifted the boy may be, he is absolutely estopped from a higher education. This is not only unfair to the boy but it is grossly unfair to the Negro race. (Du Bois, 1995, p. 263)

As indicated, black communities have long advocated for themselves an education for liberation—that is, one that promotes their full participation in the civic and economic life of the nation or that provides the means for self-sufficiency. Yet, as also indicated, the goals of black communities notwithstanding, white power interests have historically used the material and political resources at their disposal to exercise tremendous control over the direction of the education of black children and youth.

B rown and Educational Justice

Education took on decisive meanings for black students in 1954 when the U.S. Supreme Court rendered its decision in Brown et al v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. This landmark education ruling provided the legal basis for equal education for all subordinated racial groups, not the least being the black infant plaintiffs at the center of the celebrated case. Brown was sweeping in its mandate to shape race and education in the United States. The Supreme Court, though, did not provide clear guidelines to end de jure public school segregation and the imprecision of the ruling, captured in the order to proceed in the dismantling of segregated schools "with all deliberate speed," all but guaranteed that the desegregation of public schools would occur at a snail's pace. For instance, some of the white communities affected by the ruling attempted to close public schools rather than allow black students to attend them. Others adopted "freedom of choice" plans that permitted students to choose the schools they wanted to attend. Predictably, freedom of choice plans generally resulted in continued segregation of public educational facilities. Even in instances where authorities attempted in good faith to implement plans to desegregate schools, these efforts were often undermined by state-level action.

As a result of white resistance to the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling, little dismantling of de jure segregation in public schools occurred during the decade after Brown. In addition, Brown 's implications for nonsouthern schools were even less clear. The segregation of schools in northern, western, midwestern, and southwestern regions of the country occurred largely as the result of housing patterns that allegedly were not the result of direct state action, although researchers later found evidence that demonstrated the complicity of both local and federal governments in maintaining the color line (e.g., Massey and Denton, 1993). It wasn't until 1973, in Keyes v. School District of Denver, that the U.S. Supreme Court expanded Brown to include the dismantling of de facto segregation in public schools.

Despite the often-violent resistance to desegregation, the constitutional impact of Brown was enormous and lasting in creating educational opportunities for black students in the United States. For instance, the Supreme

Court's ruling resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of desegregation suits filling lower court dockets. In addition, the Brown ruling had extralegal, or indirect, effects that shaped education in the United States, even those that perhaps went beyond the intention of the landmark 1954 decision. In upholding the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in its rendering of Brown, the Supreme Court largely affirmed civil and political rights, also known as first generation rights. However, once black students gained access to predominately white schools, especially institutions of higher education, they not only pressed for their civil and political rights guaranteed by Brown, they also demanded that schools recognize their social, cultural, and economic rights. These latter rights are also called second generation rights and are affirmed by the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), to which U.S. courts are not bound.

Black students' exercise of second generation rights manifested itself, among other things, in the establishment of black studies programs at colleges and universities throughout the United States. The first such program was established at San Francisco State University in 1968, and many others soon followed, including the institution of black studies at Harvard, Yale and Ohio State, to name a few, in 1969. In addition, the increase in the number of black students on college campuses was the impetus behind the establishment of other organizations and programs to support these students, as well as to recruit and prepare those in precollege settings for success in higher education, especially in the areas of science and engineering. In 1971, for instance, two undergraduates at Purdue University founded the Society of Black Engineers, now the National Society for Black Engineers (NSBE), to improve the recruitment and retention of black students in the field. NSBE now has a membership of 15,000 members, 17 precollege programs, and 268 student and 50 alumni/technical professional chapters.

Curricular and institutional changes at American colleges and universities that resulted from the increased presence of black students stimulated similar changes in U.S. public elementary and secondary schools as well. These changes are evident in yearly observances of Black History Month and the establishment of black student unions, as well as in the adoption of multicultural curricula in K–12 schools. Demands for multicultural education in K–12 schools also contributed to changes in the content of textbooks and, recursively, in how schools and colleges

of education and state departments of education certificated teachers and administrators, especially those preparing to work in school districts with large minority student populations.

Race and Education in Post–Civil Rights America

Even as the Brown decision contributed to unprecedented improvements in the condition of black education in the United States, it did not completely resolve the 400-year struggle that shaped the efforts of black students to obtain quality schooling in America. For example, as a federal legal intervention into the education of black students, Brown never fully equalized the resources that black students received, especially in terms of per student funding. Huge racial disparities persist in public education, largely as a result of the ways schools in the United States are funded. Most local funding derives from property taxes; it follows that in wealthier white districts, property values and, hence, property taxes are much higher than those in less affluent and poor districts where black students are concentrated. In the 1990s this resulted in funding disparities in which New York State, for example, spent $38,572 per student in its richest school district, a sum that was seven times more than that of its poorest district, $5,423. The disparity was even greater in Texas, where the wealthiest schools spent as much as thirteen times more on students ($42,000 per pupil) than the state's poorest district, which spent $3,098 per pupil (Gordon, 1998).

In addition, Brown contributed to the mass displacement of black educators in teaching and administrative positions in K–12 public schools (Ethridge, 1979). In the

absence of these educators, many students of color who integrated K–12 public schools often encountered second-generation discrimination and other challenges to obtain quality education (Meier, Stewart, and England, 1989). Second-generation discrimination refers to unjust education practices, such as the resegregation of students in previously desegregated schools and the disproportionate punishment of black students. As implied, these forms of injustice often stem from the failure of white teachers and administrators to recognize or respect the self-determination of their black students.

With respect to resegregation, integrated schools typically sort students into homogeneous subsets by ability groupings. This generally results in the concentration of white students in honors and gifted classes and of students of color in lower tracks, remedial courses, and special education programs. Although disparities in measures of academic attainment between black and white students began to narrow in the 1970s and 1980s, they began to widen in the 1990s and into the first decade of the twenty-first century, resulting in widely publicized reports of a "racial achievement gap" in public schools. The racial achievement gap reflects variances in standardized test scores that indicate that white and some Asian American students consistently outperform their black and Latino peers.

The 2000 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the "nation's report card," shows disparities among racial and ethnic groups. For example, in the area of mathematics, two-thirds of black and more than half of Latino and Native American eighth graders are performing below basic levels of achievement compared to a quarter of their white and Asian American peers. Similar disparities are evident in the area of science. For example, according to the NAEP's science results for 1996, three-quarters of black, two-thirds of Latino, nearly half of Native-American, and more than a third of Asian-American students performed below basic achievement levels in contrast to a quarter of white students that did so. The percentages in the below-basic category actually increased for all groups in grade twelve, with even greater disparities indicated between white students and their Asian-American and Native-American peers.

Racial academic disparities mirror significant differences in the quality of instruction that students receive, especially when it comes to the use of computer technologies. For example, in 1998 more teachers reported using computers primarily for drill and practice with their black eighth-grade students (42%) than they did with their white (35%), Asian-American (35%), or Latino (35%) eighth-graders. In contrast, fewer of these teachers reported using simulations and applications or learning games as their primary computer tools with black students (14% and 48%, respectively) than they did with their white (31% and 57%), Asian-American (43% and 57%), and Latino (25% and 56%) students (Wenglinsky, 1998). Some educational experts, such as Linda Darling-Hammond, point out that these differences result from the different levels of expertise among the teachers that are typically assigned to black and white students. Educational experts such as Asa Hilliard and Theresa Perry argue that these differences stem from the different expectations that teachers have for black and white students.

Racial gaps in the way that discipline in public schools is meted out also persist in the United States. These gaps increased in the late 1990s and the early 2000s as a result of the adoption by districts of "zero-tolerance" policies to curb real and imagined violence in American schools (Gordon, 1998). Widespread reports and highly publicized incidents of the expulsion of black students in the late 1990s refueled concerns in communities of color about educational justice and prompted the prominent civil rights leader Jesse Jackson to observe that, with increasing frequency, "school districts [are choosing] penal remedies over educational remedies when it comes to disciplining students" (Washington Post, 1999, p. A3). While, in general, poorer students are more likely to be suspended than wealthier students, researchers have found that black students from the wealthiest families were suspended at almost the same rate as white students from the poorest families (Gordon, 1998). Interestingly, a 2005 Yale study found that, nationally, prekindergarten students were expelled three times as often as students in K–12 settings and, predictably, that black prekindergarten students were twice as likely to be expelled as were their white and Latino preschool peers (Gilliam, 2005).

Finally, despite integration gains in the 1970s and 1980s, public schools became more segregated in the 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century. Urban and fringe city school districts are being populated by increasingly multicultural populations of students of color from working-class and poor families, and more affluent suburban schools are being populated by homogeneous bodies of white students from middle-class families (Orfield and Yun, 1999). The reversal of school integration is attributable both to failed attempts to integrate schools at the local level as well as to significant Supreme Court rulings such as Milliken v. Bradley (1974) that removed the powers of federal courts to impose interdistrict remedies between cities and surrounding suburbs to desegregate city schools. Lastly, the resegregation of schools in the 1990s and 2000s occurs within a broader political context of changing public investments where states are increasingly spending more on criminal justice than they are on public education (Ziedenberg and Schiraldi, 2002). Indeed, during the opening years of the twenty-first century, states on average spent three times more on corrections than they did on public schools (Children's Defense Fund, 2004). Such public policy decisions have resulted in what Jonathan Kozol has called the "savage inequalities" that plague urban and rural schools, leaving them in the new millennium to provide their largely black student populations with what Robert Moses has called a "sharecropper's education."

Race and Education in the Twenty-First Century

Echoing a view expressed by W. E. B. Du Bois at the beginning of the twentieth century, the eminent American historian John Hope Franklin noted that the problem of the color line will also be part of the legacy and burden of the twenty-first century (Franklin, 1993). Perhaps nowhere is Franklin's observation more evident than in the area of education. The matter of the education of black students has resurfaced in the late 1990s and into the new millennium both to unify and to divide Americans. For example, the issue of school privatization has made for strange bedfellows in the political arena where liberal black civic and religious leaders have joined with conservative white politicians and foundations to support the establishment and public funding of vouchers. Most notable of these are the programs established in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Washington, D.C., that allowed students, mostly black, to use publicly funded vouchers to attend private schools. The same period has also seen the unprecedented inroads made by for-profit educational companies into public schools, particularly through the establishment of charter schools in predominately black educational systems. In a similar vein, in higher education, ethnic studies programs have yet to find complete acceptance or legitimacy in colleges and universities. In addition, there have been numerous attempts, some of them successful, to dismantle affirmative action gains.

At the same time, there is still broad support for race-conscious educational policies, such as diversity, multiculturalism, bilingual education, and school funding in the arenas of K–12 schooling and higher education. Also, a number of black communities have rallied around their schools, and some predominately black school districts have experienced a renaissance in the education of their students. In some instances, measures have been taken to establish Afrocentric schools within public school districts. Notable among these are the Paul Robeson Academy and the Malcolm X Academy in Detroit, Michigan, and the Malcolm X African American Immersion Middle and the Martin Luther King African-American Immersion Elementary schools in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Despite recent challenges to affirmative action in higher education, a number of colleges and universities and other institutions in the United States have redoubled their efforts to increase the number of black students and faculty members in academia. The U.S. Supreme Court's preservation of the narrow use of affirmative action in higher education in its 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger ruling also lends renewed hope and support for the struggle of black communities in the United States to obtain educational justice for their students. However, whether or not such conditions will be realized within the twenty-five-year period expressed by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in rendering the majority opinion in Grutter is one of the central questions confronting the education of black students in the twenty-first century.

See also Affirmative Action; Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas ; Civil Rights Movement, U.S.; Du Bois, W. E. B.; Education in the Caribbean; Educational Psychology and Psychologists

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