African-American Education

Trends and developments in the education of African-Americans over the past 40 years are directly related to trends and developments in civil rights. At its inception in the 1940s, the modern civil rights movement had as one of its major goals improved education for blacks. Indeed, throughout the decades of struggle, the principal civil rights battles have involved education. There is the close relationship between civil rights efforts and educational improvements for African-Americans. He discusses the movement's primary legal strategy - to challenge the nation's dual, segregated system of education - yet also points out that the civil rights movement was by no means limited to the courts.

One of the primary concerns in elementary and secondary education since World War II has been school desegregation. This focus has been central because education is traditionally seen as the primary means of social mobility for African-Americans and because it is through desegregation that blacks can have access to the same facilities and instruction as whites.

During the past 25 years several well-meaning attempts at reforming American public education have been made. Some of the reform programs were purported to redress historical inequities in education opportunities and access for African-Americans and other minorities. Many of the programs were based on the compensatory education model and were designed around assumptions about the causes for consistent and severe underachievement among African-Americans and disadvantaged children. Three of the most prominent of these programs were Head Start, Follow Through, and Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Other remedial programs were also tried, and several desegregation methods such as busing and the magnet school concept were employed. However, due to their narrow focus, limited scope, and lack of sound theoretical framework, these compensatory education and reform programs have had limited and questionable effect on school adjustment and performance of African-Americans children from low-income families. Compensatory education models were found to be unresponsive to the needs of black and disadvantaged children, and other school reform movements were not specifically designed to benefit African-Americans children and had negligible impact on their school performance.

A sizable proportion of proprietary school enrollments are made up of low-income African-Americans students and students who did not complete high school-students who are less likely than those in other institutions to succeed in education. Insofar as it is possible to make all other things equal, students who choose proprietary schools are more likely to complete their programs than those who opt for comparable public programs.

Such evidence leads some observers to conclude that the trend toward higher minority participation in proprietary schools is a positive development. On the other hand, some educators contend that if black enrollment of African-Americans in proprietary schools continues to rise while the African-Americans college-going rate stabilizes or falls, the gap in socioeconomic status between blacks and whites could widen. African-Americans undergraduate enrollment declined from 10.1 percent in 1980 to 9.5 percent in 1984. Some observers also note that minority students could harm themselves if they continue to flock to proprietary schools. Such schools, these observers fear, offer students, at best, short-term opportunities and, at worst. No help at all for the education. "I worry about kids who go to sleazy ones, incur debt burdens, don't learn anything," says Gary Orfield, director of the University of Chicago's Metropolitan Opportunity Project.

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