Competence of Black Pupils Is Found to Be Far Lower Than Expected

An achievement gap separating black from white college students has extensive been acknowledged — a community divide extremely troublesome to policy makers and the goal of one blast of school reform after another.

But a new report focusing on black males suggests that the picture is even bleaker than generally known.

Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are competent in reading, in comparison with 38 pct of white boys, and only 12 pct of black eighth-grade boys are skilled in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys.

Poverty alone does not appear to justify the differences: poor white boys perform just as fine as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, measured by whether they be eligible for sponsored school lunches.

The data was distilled from well respected national math and reading tests, known as the National Assessment for Educational Progress, which are given to students in fourth and eighth grades, most lately in 2009.

While the outlines of the problem and many specifics have been before reported, the group hopes that including so much of what it calls “jaw-dropping data” in one place will flash a new feeling of national urgency.


The report demonstrates that black boys on average fall behind from their earliest years. Black moms have a higher infant mortality rate and black children are two times as likely as whites to live in a home where no parent has a work. In high school, African-American boys drop out at nearly two times the rate of white boys, and their SAT critical reasoning scores are on average 104 points lower.

The study of results on the national exams found that math scores in 2009 for african american boys were not much different than those for black girls in Grades 4 and 8, but black boys lagged behind Hispanics of both sexes, and they fell behind white boys by at least 30 points, a gap sometimes interpreted as three academic grades.

The search for explanations has lately looked at causes besides poverty, and this report can further spur those efforts.

There is accumulating indication that there are racial differences in what children experience before the first day of kindergarten.

Those include “conversations concerning early childhood parenting practices.

The report urges convening a White House discussion, encouraging Congress to appropriate more money for educational institutions and establishing networks of black mentors.

What it does not discuss are plan responses identified with a strong school reform movement that emphasizes closing failing schools, offering charter schools as alternate options and raising the quality of teachers.

The report did not go down this road as there is not a lot of research to point to that many of those strategies generate better results.

One big urban school district that has made progress is Baltimore’s, where the dropout rate for African-American boys declined to 4.9 pct during the last academic year, down from 11.9 percent four years earlier. Graduation rates for black boys were also up: fifty seven pct in 2009-10, in comparison with 51 pct 3 years earlier. Author Resource:- Learn more about black boys skills Learn more about black boys education report Read about black chilldren achievments Find out why blacks learn worse