Hard Truths: The failure of the black family and black male achievement

Wilda Heard

• Seattle Public Education Examiner

In A Disaster Which Is Much Bigger Than Hurricane Katrina: Black Unwed Births I said:

This is a problem which never should have been swept under the carpet and if the chattering classes, politicians, and elite can't see the magnitude of this problem, they are not just brain dead, they are flat-liners. There must be a new women's movement, this time it doesn't involve the “me first” philosophy of the social “progressives” or the elite who in order to validate their own particular life choices espouse philosophies that are dangerous or even poisonous to those who have fewer economic resources. This movement must urge women of color to be responsible for their reproductive choices. They cannot have children without having the resources both financial and having a committed partner. For all the talk of genocide involving the response and aftermath of Katrina, the real genocide is self-inflicted.

Moi has taken Detroit Prosecutor Kim Worthy to task for some of her initiatives because moi is not sure that some of her proposals will pass Constitutional muster. But, girlfriend I feel your pain and know where you are coming from. In Detroit Public School Program Hopes To Increase Parent Involvement I said:

In Parents Must Be Part of the Education Equation I said:

One of the mantras of this blog is that education is a partnership between the student, parent(s) or guardian(s), teacher(s), and the school. All parts of the partnership must be involved. 

Christine mac Donald is reporting in the Detroit News,Worthy Proposes jail For Parents Who Skip Kids' Conferences

This next comment is in no way PC. Prosecutor Worthy is correct that parents MUST be involved in the lives of their children. Problem is, jailing them will not force the majority of them into meaningful involvement and interaction with their child. Society has a couple of options to counter the  this it’s my life and I’ll do what I want philosophy. The first is discouraging and condemning out-of –wedlock births, particularly among low-income women. Too bad the First Lady doesn’t want to take this one on. The second thing is to intervene early and terminate the rights of negligent and abusive parents, freeing children up for adoption earlier. Finally, this society needs to support adoptive parents with financial and counseling resources. Not PC, but there it is.

Now, the Detroit Free Press is reporting that the Detroit Public Schools have come up with a department store “rewards program” to get parents to participate in their children's lives. Peggy Walsh-Sarecki is reporting in the article, DPS Has Perks For Parents

Jesse Washington of AP has written a comprehensive article which details the magnitude of the disaster which is occurring in the African American community. In the article,Blacks Struggle With 72% Unwed Mother Rate which was reprinted at SeattlePI.Com Washington sounds an alarm which if you can't hear it, makes you deaf.

This is not about racism or being elitist. This is about survival of an indigenous American culture. This is not about speaking the truth to power, it is about speaking the truth. The truth is children need two parents to help them develop properly and the majority of single parent headed families will live in poverty. Children from single parent homes have more difficult lives. So called “progressives” who want to make their Sex and the City life style choices the norm because they have a difficult time dealing with the emotional wreckage of their lives, need to shut-up when it comes to the survival of the African American community. This is an issue that the so called educated classes and religious communities have to get involved in.

If you are a young unmarried woman of any color, you probably do not have the resources either emotional or financial to parent a child(ren). If you don't care about your future, care about the future of your child. If you want to sleep with everything that has a pulse, that is your choice.BUT, you have no right to choose a life of poverty and misery and misery for a child. As for those so called “progressives?” Just shut-up.

Michael Jackson said it best with the lyrics to Man In The Mirror

Now, Trip Gabriel is reporting about more fallout from the failure of the African American family in the New York Times. In Proficiency of Black Students Is Found to Be Far Lower Than Expected Gabriel reports:

An achievement gap separating black from white students has long been documented — a social divide extremely vexing to policy makers and the target 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 proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys.

Poverty alone does not seem to explain the differences: poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches.

The data was distilled from highly 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 recently in 2009. The report, “A Call for Change,” is to be released Tuesday by the Council of the Great City Schools, an advocacy group for urban public schools.

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

“What this clearly shows is that black males who are not eligible for free and reduced-price lunch are doing no better than white males who are poor,” said Michael Casserly, executive director of the council.

The report shows that black boys on average fall behind from their earliest years. Black mothers have a higher infant mortality rate and black children are twice as likely as whites to live in a home where no parent has a job. In high school, African-American boys drop out at nearly twice the rate of white boys, and their SAT scores are on average 104 points lower. In college, black men represented just 5 percent of students in 2008.

The analysis of results on the national tests found that math scores in 2009 for black 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 recently looked at causes besides poverty, and this report may further spur those efforts.

“There’s accumulating evidence that there are racial differences in what kids experience before the first day of kindergarten,” said Ronald Ferguson, director of theAchievement Gap Initiative at Harvard. “They have to do with a lot of sociological and historical forces. In order to address those, we have to be able to have conversations that people are unwilling to have.”

There are some very uncomfortable conversations ahead for the African American community about the high rate of unwed mothers, about the care of women during pregnancy, and about early childhood education in the homes of children and most important, about the lack the active involvement of fathers for children.

Time to start talking. The conversation is not going to get any less difficult.

Dr. Wilda may be contacted atdrwilda.examiner@yahoo.com

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