Young, Gifted, and Black: Promoting High Achievement Among African-American Students

One of the more vexed and confounding realities of the 2004 elections was the spectacle of people voting against their own best interest. Perhaps the rift between the natural and historic Democratic constituency and the national party can be traced in part to the failure of Democratic leadership to listen to, legitimize, and implement the work of truly progressive educators, practicing physicians, and economists who spend their days thinking in concrete terms about how to solve some of the most bruising problems now affecting the vast majority of the American people with respect to public education, medical coverage, and job loss. Some voters just didn’t see the Democratic party spelling out solutions.

With respect to education and the failing schools of our cities, buzzwords Republicans love fill the air: charter schools, vouchers, high-stakes testing, No Child Left Behind. In practice, every single one of these "plans" does not stand up to honest scrutiny if the well-being of all children is taken seriously. The trouble is, they sound very impressive.

In Young, Gifted, and Black: Promoting High Achievement Among African-American Students (Beacon Press 2003), authors Theresa Perry, Claude Steele, and Asa Hilliard III parse through some of the myths and cant than have obscured a real understanding of what African-American achievement is all about. In each of the three essays, the writers present an abundance of historical, psychological, and educational data that situates academic excellence in the context of real life. The questions they pose cut to the very bone of authentic problem-solving.

Asks Perry, an associate professor of eduction at Wheelock College in Boston, "What are the extra psychosocial and cognitive competencies that are required of African-Americans, precisely because they are African-American, in order for them to achieve at high levels in school?" (page 3) To answer this question, Perry examines the exceptional academic achievement seen among African American students who attend Department of Defense Schools, Catholic schools, Black colleges, independent schools, and certain exemplary elementary schools around the country. Instead of wringing our hands, she and her co-authors argue, we ought to be making sure that all schools that teach African American students have the human and economic resources to model themselves on the places that are succeeding at this very moment.

After identifying what he terms the "quality of service gap," Asa Hilliard III, who is professor of education at Georgia State University in Atlanta, goes on to describe what successful classrooms look like, what they sound like, how they operate and by what means. Even schools with the least resources can produce academic excellence. He quotes Ronald Edmonds:

"We can, whenever and wherever we wish, teach successfully all children whose education is of interest to us. Whether we do or do not do it depends in the final analysis on how we feel about the fact that we have not done so thus far." (page 165)

Hilliard concludes, "Do we really want the African [American] children to be excellent? If so, there is no mystery about how to make that happen." (page 165)

Elected officials are voted into office to represent the people who elected them. Once there, it behooves them to take counsel from those who honestly have civic well-being at heart. Any Democrat elected to office would be well served by reading this collection of essays on education from outspoken leaders in their field. Solutions abound. And guess what? They don’t require underfunded federal mandates and Number 2 pencils.