THE CHALLENGE
Monday, January 12, 2009
By JOEL I. KLEIN and AL SHARPTON
The Wall Street Journal
It is not acceptable for minority students to be four grade levels behind.
Dear President-elect Barack Obama,
In the afterglow of your election, Americans today run the risk of forgetting that the nation still faces one last great civil-rights battle: closing the insidious achievement gap between minority and white students. Public education is supposed to be the great equalizer in America. Yet today the average 12th-grade black or Hispanic student has the reading, writing and math skills of an eighth-grade white student.
That appalling four-year gap is even worse in high-poverty high schools, which often are dropout factories. In Detroit, just 34% of black males manage to graduate. In the nation’s capital — home to one of the worst public-school systems in America — only 9% of ninth-grade students go on to graduate and finish college within five years. Can this really be the shameful civil-rights legacy that we bequeath to poor black and Hispanic children in today’s global economy?
Our country has grappled with this challenge for decades…
We have proclaimed our faith in education as a means of equalizing the conditions of men. But there is a grave danger that our present policy will make it an instrument for creating the very inequalities it was designed to prevent. If the ladder of educational opportunities rises high at the doors of some youth and scarcely rises at all at the doors of others, while at the same time formal education is made the prerequisite to occupational and social advance, then education may become the means, not of eliminating race and class distinctions, but of deepening and solidifying them. It is obvious, then, that free and universal access to education, in terms of the interests, ability and need of the student, must be a major goal of American education.
President Truman’s Commission on Higher Education, 1947