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BLACK EDUCATIONAL PROGRESS SLOWS

Black Enrollment Declines

Although black Americans made major economic and social gains in the mid twentieth century, that progress stagnated by the 1980s. "Many blacks remain separated from the mainstream of national life under conditions of great inequality in education, housing and health care," concluded the National Research Council in A Common Destiny; Blacks and American Society in 1989. Certainly progress in higher education had slowed. Blacks remained underrepresented in graduate and professional degree attainment and were actually losing ground in undergraduate education compared to the momentum of the 1970s. By 1989 the number of black men enrolled in universities and colleges in the United States had declined to 436,000 from the high point in 1976 of 470,000, according to an American Council on Higher Education study. Although the number of black women rose from 563,000 in 1976 to 645,000 in 1989, the overall percentage of black students in higher education fell during the decade from 9.4 to 8.6. Some black leaders attributed this drop to federal educational policies that had shifted financial aid away from college grants. Other explanations include a tightening of the open admissions policies of the 1970s. Even though the scores of blacks on the SAT continued to improve into the 1980s, on the average the scores lagged behind those of whites. At some schools this widespread change in academic standards disproportionately affected minority applicants. The University of California, Berkeley, attempted to avoid this inequity when in May 1989 officials announced that academic entrance standards would be raised for some students. Fifty percent of the 1989 freshman class would be admitted only on academic credentials. The remainder would be divided into separate categories and would compete for admission based on the following categories: 1) socio-economic disadvantage; 2) underrepresented minorities; 3) older students; 4) the disabled; and 5) rural students.

Racially Charged College Campuses

Some college campuses provided a hostile atmosphere for minority students who did enroll. Racist graffiti, jokes, brawls, and anonymous hate letters were reported at 175 colleges across the country, according to The New York Times in May 1989. Ground zero of collegiate racial conflict was Dartmouth College, where in 1986 on the Martin Luther King holiday twelve students used sledgehammers and crowbars to wreck shantytowns erected to protest the South African policy of apartheid. All but two of the students were staffers of the Dartmouth Review, a weekly publication with a right-wing perspective that had previously waged a campaign against a black professor. All twelve students were suspended by a panel of students, faculty, and administrators, and classes were canceled for a day to hold a forum on "racism, violence, and disrespect for minority opinion." Following this incident, racist letters were sent to black women students at Smith College in Massachusetts. At the University of Wisconsin a fraternity skit used various African effigies as objects of ridicule, and racist jokes were broadcast on the student radio station at the University of Michigan. Explanations for this outbreak of racist acts were varied. Some administrators suggested that white resentment of distinctive educational opportunities for minorities, such as black cultural centers and affirmative action, fueled the hostilities. Others felt the lack of emphasis on civil rights during the Reagan administration had undermined the public's support for affirmative action and given rise to racist attitudes.

City Public Schools Still Unequal

Race was a factor in many problems in the public schools as well. Despite the thirty-year effort to improve equal educational access since the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that separate schooling is inherently unequal, many black children in cities were still not a part of the educational mainstream. Although black students made up 16 percent of the population, 41 percent of these black students were enrolled in urban, predominantly minority schools in low-income areas. Six such cities—Chicago, Cleveland, Houston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and New York—whose schools were disproportionately minority, were studied by the Carnegie Foundation, and the resulting report, "An Imperiled Generation: Saving Urban Schools," concluded that many of these city schools had been written off as "human storehouses to keep young people off the streets." Suggesting that no other crisis would be as calmly accepted by the American public, the 1988 report determined that, for these cities at least, the "reform movement largely by-passed our most deeply troubled schools." Data from yet another study, this one by the Office of Civil Rights in 1988, revealed that in the 3,378 school districts examined, blacks were twice as likely as whites to be suspended, receive corporal punishment, or to be placed in special-education classes. An Office of Civil Rights analyst suggested that the inability of teachers and administrators to handle students with backgrounds different from their own was the reason for the inequities. Mary Hatwood Futrell, president of the National Education Association, agreed, saying that teachers often deal with students of a different race in a discriminatory way because of their own biases and backgrounds. When the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People commissioned a Louis Harris poll in January 1989, whites and blacks surveyed disagreed about the severity of racial problems. However, both races agreed on one key point—that more money and effort should be used to improve education for the underclasses. At the end of the decade, it appeared that schools with primarily minority populations were badly in need of improvement.

Reform and Inner-City Schools

The national reform movement bypassed most inner-city, predominantly minority schools for several reasons. The essential underlying factor was economic. City schools, relying on local property taxes for their funding for public education, drew on a considerably smaller tax base in proportion to their student populations than did those in nearby wealthy suburbs. In Chicago, for example, annual spending for city secondary-school students in 1989 was about $5,500, compared to about $9,000 per student in nearby Winnetka. Children enrolled in cash-poor city schools suffered from teacher shortages (hiring permanent substitutes was much cheaper than hiring qualified teachers), reduced curriculum offerings (few foreign languages, no advanced math or science lab courses), desperate shortages of materials, and health-threatening physical facilities. Many teachers and administrators in nearly totally segregated city schools were perplexed when their reform-minded legislators "mandated" that students score higher on standardized tests. Principal Ruthie Green-Brown of Camden High, located in Camden, New Jersey, the fourth-poorest city of more than 50,000 in America, pointed out the unfair practice of comparing Camden students' progress with those in nearby suburbs: "If they first had given Head Start to our children and prekindergarten, and material and classes of fifteen or eighteen children in the elementary grades, and computers and attractive buildings and enough books and supplies and teacher salaries sufficient to compete with the suburban schools, and then come in a few years later with their tests and test demands, it might have been fair play." As it was, however, some state legislators seemed confident that reform could be enacted through mandating proficiency testing alone.