There once was a time in the African American community when education was valued more than all else with the exception of family and hard work. Today, it seems that much of the focus of African Americans, especially youth, is the attainment of material things. This is rather evident when we observe academic performance with respect to race and ethnicity.
Historically, even with our passion, African Americans have traditionally not performed well comparatively on standardized test. Many hypothesis have surfaced over the years in an attempt to explain this phenomena. Yet there seems to still be a vast chasm between the performance of African Americans on standardized test when contrasted with other ethnic groups.
In New York, recent 2010 test scores showed a 25 percent drop in passing rates from last year. More importantly there was a large divide in performance between the city’s white and Asian students and black students. Based on test scores from third through eighth graders, 75 percent of white students and 82 per cent of Asian students met the state standard in math, as compared to 40 percent of black students. For English, 33 percent of black students met the requirements compared to 64 percent of white and Asian students.
What has been observed in New York is reflective of most of the United States. In Los Angeles, a vast achievement gap remains between low-income blacks and their white and Asian confederates. In fact, across the state of California recent test scores show that 44 percent of black students met or exceeded state standards in English last year compared to almost 80 percent of white students.
In Wisconsin, reading scores for African American fourth-graders trail those of their racial peers in every other state and the District of Columbia, according to a national government report. Although overall, the state’s eighth-graders matched their highest score of the last decade, the average score for African American eighth-graders was the same as that for three other states. The average score for African American Wisconsin eighth-graders was even below the average score for the state’s eighth-grade English language learners. This is to say that African American students scored poorer in reading than students for whom English is not their first language.
Across the nation, test scores and the graduation gap between African American and other students is wide and continues to grow. Until parents teachers and students value education as they do sports, music, entertainment and other material items, we will continue to fall behind both in academic and standardized test performance.
