Since the emancipation of slaves in 1863, the role of education and educational institutions in the African American community in the United States has been a significant debate. After the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the importance of equal education and performance on standardized testing led the educational community to reevaluate the impact of education and its significance for African American students.
The Civil War (1861-1865), Reconstruction (1863-1877), and the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) ended slavery. Emancipation in 1863 brought with it the challenge of providing educational opportunities for the freed men and women and their children, particularly in the former Confederate states. Although free African Americans had attended schools in some northern states long before the Civil War, southern states had prohibited the teaching of either slave or free African American children.
Historical Context: Freedmen’s Bureau and Early Education
In 1865, Congress created the Freedmen’s Bureau to help former slaves adjust to freedom. The bureau continued to function until 1872 and, under the leadership of General O. O. Howard, established schools throughout the South. At their peak in 1869, these schools had about 114,000 students enrolled. The schools taught reading, writing, grammar, geography, arithmetic, and music through a curriculum based on the New England school model. A small number of African American teachers were trained in these schools, but the schools were usually staffed by northern schoolteachers, who brought with them their values, their educational ideas, and their methods.
These white educators from northern states promoted the stereotypical idea of the kind of education African Americans should receive. Samuel C. Armstrong and many like-minded educators stressed industrial training and social control over self-determination. Many believe this philosophy was designed to keep African Americans in a subordinate position.
Booker T. Washington vs. W. E. B. Du Bois
Booker T. Washington's Accommodationism
Booker T. Washington was the leading educational spokesperson for African Americans after the Civil War. Washington, who was born a slave, experienced the hectic years of Reconstruction and, in a speech delivered at the Atlanta Exposition in 1895, painfully articulated the outlines of a compromise with the white power structure, a policy later known as accommodationism. He believed in moral “uplift” through hard work. A student of Armstrong, Washington believed that industrial education was an important force in building character and economic competence for African Americans. At the Tuskegee Institute, which he helped establish in 1881, Washington shaped his ideas into a curriculum that focused on basic academic, agricultural, and occupational skills and emphasized the values of hard work and the dignity of labor. He encouraged his students to become elementary schoolteachers, farmers, and artisans, emphasizing these occupations over the professions of medicine, law, and politics.
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Although revered initially, Washington has become an increasingly controversial figure. Some people say he made the best of a bad situation and that, although he compromised on racial issues, he can be viewed as a leader who preserved and slowly advanced the educational opportunities of African Americans. Critics of Washington see him as an opportunist whose compromises restricted African American progress.
W. E. B. Du Bois's Activist Leadership
W. E. B. Du Bois was a sociological and educational pioneer who challenged the established system of education. Du Bois, an opponent of Washington’s educational philosophies, believed the African American community needed more determined and activist leadership. He helped organize the Niagara Movement in 1905, which led to the founding in 1909 of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Du Bois was a strong opponent of racial segregation in the schools. Unlike Washington, Du Bois did not believe in slow, evolutionary change; he instead demanded immediate change.
Du Bois supported the NAACP position that all American children, including African American children, should be granted an equal educational opportunity. It was through the efforts of the NAACP that the monumental US Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (1954) outlawed segregation in US public schools. Du Bois believed in educated leadership for the African American community and developed the concept of the Talented Tenth, the notion that 10 percent of the African American population would receive a traditional college education in preparation for leadership.
Post-Civil Rights Era and Afrocentric Education
Du Bois’s educational and political philosophies had a significant influence on the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Out of the effects of public school desegregation during the 1950s and 1960s and the Black Power movement of the 1970s grew a new perspective on the education of African Americans. Inspired by historians such as Cheikh Anta Diop and Basil Davidson, educational philosophers such as Molefi Kete Asante formed the Afrocentric school of education. Asante and his followers maintain that a curriculum centered on the perspective of African Americans is more effective in reaching African American youth than the Eurocentric curriculum to which most students are exposed. Low test scores and historically poor academic records could be the result, according to Afrocentrists, of a curriculum that does not apply to African American students.
Current Statistics on African American Education
According to The African American Education Data Book (published in 1997 by the Research Institute of the College Fund/United Negro College Fund), in 1994, approximately 43.5 million students were enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools, and nearly 5 million students were enrolled in private elementary and secondary schools. African Americans represented 16.5 percent of all public school enrollments. African Americans were underrepresented at private elementary and secondary schools, where they constituted only 9.3 percent of all enrollments. The number of African Americans enrolled in public schools declined as grade level increased, a finding that supports the evidence that African Americans leave school at higher rates than children of the same age in other racial groups. African Americans represented only 12.5 percent of those who received regular high school diplomas in 1994.
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In schools made up primarily of African American students and located mainly in economically depressed urban centers, nearly a quarter of all students participated in remedial reading programs, and 22 percent participated in remedial math. By comparison, schools with less than 50 percent African American students had 14.8 percent of students enrolled in remedial reading and 12 percent enrolled in remedial math. Furthermore, only 87 percent of African American high school seniors graduate on time compared with 93 percent of non-African American seniors.
For decades, black students in the United States have lagged behind their white peers in academic achievement. In 2014, the high school graduation rate for white students was 87 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. For black students, the rate was 73 percent.
Test Scores and Academic Performance
African American students have historically scored far below whites in geography, writing, reading, and math. The National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 reported that the average seventeen-year-old African American student had a reading score only slightly higher than that of the average white thirteen-year-old. Compared with whites, African American Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) takers had lower high school grade-point averages, fewer years of academic study, and fewer honors courses. Data collected by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, however, reveal that African Americans had registered gains in reading, math, and other subjects between the 1970s and the 1990s. Despite these gains, African Americans are underrepresented among high school seniors applying for college and represented only 9 percent of the college population in the 1990s (a decrease from 10 percent in the 1970s).
It is not surprising that many African Americans see no value in postsecondary education. Regardless of socioeconomic status or whether they had received a high school diploma, a higher percentage of African Americans who were eighth-graders in 1988 were unemployed and not in college than their white counterparts in 1993, a year after their scheduled high school graduation. Despite affirmative action legislation, African Americans still are less likely to be hired for a job when competing against equally qualified white applicants.
College degrees are regarded as a primary vehicle for reducing poverty and closing the wealth gaps between people of color and whites. Yet, the disparities that exist are alarming. African American students are less likely than white students to have access to college-ready courses. Even when Black students do have access to honors or advanced placement courses, they are vastly underrepresented in these courses. Black and Latino students represent 38% of students in schools that offer AP courses, but only 29% of students enrolled in at least one AP course.
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Socioeconomic Status and Educational Resources
In both 1980 and 1990, African American high school sophomores were concentrated in the lowest two socioeconomic status quartiles. The proportion of African Americans in the lowest socioeconomic status quartile declined from 48 percent in 1980 to 39 percent in 1990. In both 1980 and 1990, African Americans were underrepresented in the upper two socioeconomic status quartiles. In addition, African Americans often attend schools with fewer resources in poorer neighborhoods of large, urban areas. Fifteen percent of schools that have primarily African American students have no magnet or honors programming, as opposed to only 1.6 percent of schools with a majority of white students. Also, a higher percentage of schools with a majority of African American students participated in the National School Lunch Program.
The poverty level in the African American community is one of the factors believed to be responsible for consistently low scores on standardized testing. Along with poverty, the African American community has also experienced a greater amount of violence and delinquency among high-school-age youths. The homicide rate among African American men increased by more than two-thirds in the late 1980s, according to a study by Joe Schwartz and Thomas Exter (1990).
Students of color are often concentrated in schools with fewer resources. According to the Office for Civil Rights, 1.6 million students attend a school with a sworn law enforcement officers (SLEO), but not a school counselor.
Discipline Disparities
Black students spend less time in the classroom due to discipline, which further hinders their access to a quality education. Black students are nearly two times as likely to be suspended without educational services as white students. Black students are also 3.8 times as likely to receive one or more out-of-school suspensions as white students. In addition, Black children represent 19% of the nation’s pre-school population, yet 47% of those receiving more than one out-of-school suspension. In comparison, white students represent 41% of pre-school enrollment but only 28% of those receiving more than one out-of-school suspension.
Black students, boys, and students with disabilities were disproportionately disciplined (e.g., suspensions and expulsions) in K-12 public schools, according to GAO's analysis of Department of Education (Education) national civil rights data for school year 2013-14, the most recent available. These disparities were widespread and persisted regardless of the type of disciplinary action, level of school poverty, or type of public school attended.
Officials GAO interviewed in all five school districts in the five states GAO visited reported various challenges with addressing student behavior, and said they were considering new approaches to school discipline. They described a range of issues, some complex-such as the effects of poverty and mental health issues. For example, officials in four school districts described a growing trend of behavioral challenges related to mental health and trauma.
Research has shown that students who experience discipline that removes them from the classroom are more likely to repeat a grade, drop out of school, and become involved in the juvenile justice system. Studies have shown this can result in decreased earning potential and added costs to society, such as incarceration and lost tax revenue.
Racial Bias in Education
A variety of recent studies help to illustrate the differences in the ways black and white students experience a school day. Teachers might be less likely to spot black students who excel academically, for instance. Using national data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Sean Nicholson-Crotty, PhD, at Indiana University, and colleagues found black students were 54 percent less likely than white students to be recommended for gifted-education programs, after adjusting for factors such as students' standardized test scores.
Such disparities might have something to do with teachers' expectations for students. Teachers' expectations for themselves also come into play. In a series of studies, Rutgers University psychologist Kent Harber, PhD, studied white middle-school and high-school teachers in mostly white, upper-middle-class districts and more diverse, working-class districts in the northeastern United States. In other words, white instructors might go easy on their black students in order to avoid appearing racist, if only in their own minds.
White teachers' implicit prejudices or stereotypes can also make them less effective when teaching black students, suggests a study by Drew Jacoby-Senghor, PhD, at Columbia University, and colleagues. When the "teachers" had higher levels of implicit racial bias, their black (but not white) students scored more poorly on a history test based on the lesson. Those who watched recorded lessons originally presented to black students also did more poorly on the history test, suggesting that the quality of the lesson itself, and not the student's aptitude, was to blame.
And that's not necessarily because black students are causing more problems, Gregory notes. Yet the biases that contribute to the discipline gap can be subtle. Stanford University psychologists Jennifer Eberhardt, PhD, and Jason Okonofua, PhD, explored this in a sample of 57 female teachers of all grade levels from across the country, the majority of whom were white. They asked the teachers how they'd handle certain instances of misbehavior, and found racial stereotypes didn't influence the teachers' decisions after a student's first infraction.
Unfortunately, children can be pegged as troublemakers before they even start kindergarten. Department of Education's 2013-14 data reveal that black children represent 19 percent of preschool enrollment, but 47 percent of the out-of-school preschool suspensions.
Restorative discipline works to remove racial bias in Houston schools
Parental Attitudes and Community Involvement
Although much of the effort of public policymakers goes into integrating schools and creating more diversity in inner-city schools, African American parents have been more interested in developing a stronger academic program in their children’s schools. A survey taken in 1998 by Public Agenda, a nonpartisan public-opinion research firm, showed that 80 percent of African American parents favored raising academic standards and achievement levels in primarily African American schools over emphasizing integration. Eleven percent of the parents polled said they would like to see the schools both integrated and improved. Of the white parents polled, 60 percent expressed a fear that discipline and safety problems, low reading scores, and social problems would result if African American students were transferred to a mostly white school.
The Public Agenda survey demonstrates the differences in opinions on education based on racial background. For example, nearly 50 percent of African American parents felt that teachers demanded too little of their children because of the children’s race. Despite the difference in opinion on these public issues, both African American and white parents expressed a great interest in their children’s school success and the quality of their children’s education.
Addressing the Challenges and Moving Forward
Research points to ways to start chipping away at bias in schools. In his work with preschools, Gilliam has found teachers who had regular relationships with a behavioral consultant had the lowest expulsion rates. Ending the practice of expulsion would be good not only for black children, who are disproportionately affected, but for all preschoolers, he says.
Gregory and her colleagues have developed a program, My Teaching Partner-Secondary, which pairs teachers with coaches for two years. In a randomized controlled trial, teachers in the control group asked black high-school students to leave their classrooms for misbehavior at two to three times the rate of non-black students (a group that included white, Latino and Asian-American students). In coaching classrooms, there was no difference in discipline referral rates. "The target of our intervention wasn't necessarily classroom management, but on how to create more engaging instruction for the whole class," Gregory says.
Yet teachers who created more opportunities for higher-level thinking and problem-solving had more equitable disciplinary patterns. When it comes to increasing black students' representation in gifted programs, Nicholson-Crotty and his co-authors recommend recruiting more teachers of color to diversify the teaching force. Other research highlights helpful ways for teachers to communicate with students.
David Yeager, PhD, at the University of Texas at Austin, and colleagues have developed a strategy known as wise feedback, in which teachers emphasize their high standards and convey their belief that students are capable of meeting their expectations. But teachers can't do it alone. Christopher Liang, PhD, a professor of counseling psychology at Lehigh University, is developing methods to help principals recognize and avoid patterns of racial inequities in their schools.
Gregory has seen a growing willingness among educators to confront the touchy topic of racial disparities. Still, Gregory sees reasons for optimism in the work teachers are doing every day. "There are wonderful educators and administrators who are showing us, in their daily practice, the way to engage youth and prevent problems," she says.
The capabilities developed in homes and communities can be used as springboards for learning in school if teachers recognize children’s strengths (Adair 2015).
The ultimate solution to the education gap is the elimination of race and class prejudice and oppression. In the meantime, creating an ultra-supportive environment appears to be the best-perhaps the only-chance for children from challenging backgrounds to be successful in school and in life (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation 2016).
The Global Perspective
As we speak, millions of crisis-affected girls and boys across the African continent are being denied their human right to a quality education. In the absence of financial means to provide a quality education, or still suffering the brunt of protracted conflicts, Africa’s children do not enjoy the same rights as the rest of us. As an immediate consequence, girls are forced into child marriage, boys are recruited into armed groups, millions of children are hungry, and millions more are illiterate.
As we commemorate the Day of the African Child under this year’s theme of “Education for all children in Africa: The time is now”, we need to follow the lead of the African Union and the African people in receiving their long-awaited right to a quality education across the continent. A panoply of interconnected challenges undermines local and national initiatives to deliver on the collective goal of ‘education for all’ in Africa.
Extreme poverty and conflicts over resources expose children and adolescents to armed conflict and violence on a daily basis. Forced displacement is on the rise as a result of conflict, climate change, extreme poverty and instability. In Africa, the climate crisis is also an education crisis.
Over the past 10 years, an estimated 42 million crisis-affected children in Sub-Saharan Africa have faced climate shocks amplified by climate change. In 2023, Cyclone Freddy left a path of chaos and destruction. Extreme poverty and economic losses add to the collected risks that are pushing children and the young generation out of school and derailing efforts to deliver on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Four out of 10 children in Sub-Saharan Africa live in extreme poverty.
These collective challenges have resulted in the single largest education crisis in the world today. According to UNESCO, 98 million children are out of school in Sub-Saharan Africa. Sudan is on the brink of the worst education crisis in the world today. Since conflict began in April 2023, a staggering 18 million children have been pushed from their schools. Even before the conflict, there were 6.9 million out-of-school children.
In Nigeria, 20 million girls and boys are out of school. In Ethiopia, conflict, drought, poverty and other factors have resulted in 13 million children out of the classroom. This adds up to 51 million children out-of-school in just these three countries alone.
All of us need a new vision that is based on human rights for all, and education is at the core of such a vision. Not just education for the few or the privileged, but education for all of Africa’s children. It starts with resources. In the face of such blatant inequity, we, as a global community, need to shoulder our responsibility by urgently and substantially increasing funding for education in Africa.
Education Cannot Wait (ECW) is calling for US$600 million in additional resources to reach our US$1.5 billion resource mobilization target. Addressing the injustice towards Africa, we also need to support African leadership. As outlined by the African Union, member states across Africa are expected to ensure free, inclusive primary education, reduced costs for secondary education, and substantial investment and support for early childhood education.
Given its power to lift-up entire generations and transform minds, education is the single most powerful tool we have in delivering on each and every one of the SDGs in Africa. National ownership and localization are imperative to our efforts.
The Day of the African Child commemorates a student uprising in 1976 in Soweto, South Africa. At that time, students marched en-masse to protest the poor quality of education and apartheid. While apartheid came to an end under the leadership of Nelson Mandela, nearly 50 years later, after the attacks on students in Soweto, children across Africa are still being denied their inherent right to a quality education and schools are being attacked. How many more children must die or must be pushed into the shadows, generation after generation?
Key Statistics Summarized
| Metric | African American Students | All Students |
|---|---|---|
| Public School Enrollment (1994) | 16.5% | 100% |
| Private School Enrollment (1994) | 9.3% | 100% |
| High School Diploma Recipients (1994) | 12.5% | 100% |
| High School Graduation Rate (2014) | 73% | 87% (White Students) |
| Preschool Suspensions | 47% | 19% of preschool population |
