A Must Watch: ‘Too Important to Fail’ Tackles African-American Boys & Education
Aside from being victims of generational poverty, many African-American boys are disproportionately placed in Special Education and/or expelled from school, making their access to education even more difficult.
Tomorrow night, PBS will premiere a documentary that takes a look at the educational crisis for young, Black men. In the expose “Too Important to Fail,” Tavis Smiley crisscrossed the country speaking to students and education experts to find out what’s really going on in schools.
In the documentary, Dr. Jawanza Kunjufu, an educational consultant, said the country’s reponse to the educational crisis facing Black boys would be handled much differently if the kids in question were white.
Dr. Kunjufu asserts:
“…if 53% was the dropout for white males, it would be unacceptable; if 41% of their children were being placed in special education, that would be a major crisis,” says Dr. Kunjufu. “If only 20% of their boys were proficient in reading in eighth grade, that would be a crisis. If only 2.5% of white males ever earned a college degree, that would be a major crisis in America.”
Watch the full episode. See more Tavis Smiley.
As a teacher in an urban public school, I agree with Dr. Kunjufu’s assessment. Although the overwhelming majority of educators do what we can, each year we are asked to do even more with fewer resources, less support, and overcrowded classrooms. I’ve personally witnessed the inequalities in the schools in my district. While many schools in middle class neighborhoods have laptops and pristine textbooks for each student, my school stuggles to prepare nearly 2000 teens for the 21st Century using outdated IBM computers and graffiti-riddled books. If the school looks rundown and abandoned by the higher ups, how can we expect the kids to care?
Our communities–and by extension our nation–will continue to decline if we cannot provide a quality education for our kids.
you can’t expect america to save you when they don’t even like you… save yourselves and forget america
Too much like right. How about all the Black ministers spend less time on their anti-gay crusade, talking about other churches and religions and get together and form a school system for Black boys. Their is a Catholic school system in this country because back in the day Catholics wanted their children to have certain religious values. Asians in this country have Saturday classes to teach their respective culture and language. The current system is not working for Black boys. It is not limited to inner city schools. The salvation for single Black mothers with Black boys should not be the Catholic school with white priests or the charter school run but neo-cons or liberals that want to save us.
@JustSayin – You’re irrelevant to this conversation. All you’re doing is echoing Rush Limbaugh talking points and can’t even come up with you own thoughts. I hate when white people come online and comment on something they know nothing of.
Anyways, as a 40yo Black male and someone who can relate to young men growing up in poor communities and coming from single parent homes, I get the struggle because I was there once. Thankfully, the military and GI bill saved me. (one of the few government legislation that have actually helped Blacks). In a perfect world, we would all live in the suburbs, in a two parent home, a family SUV in the drive way, and a dog name spot. But we don’t live in a perfect world.
For those of you who actually watched the documentary in its entirety, the point was not to debate whether parents are not doing enough – the point was to address the tens of thousands (if not millions) of black boys who are failing miserably. The bottom line is that we need to support and fund programs that will help these boys. I’m for government funded charter schools, trade schools and study centers. The only thing we need to ask in return is that these boys and their mothers demonstrate a commitment to wanting to improve their lives.
And as far as racist individuals such as the one I addressed in this post, we need to ignore people like this and continue to seek ways to improve our peoples lives. As Kat Williams says “The haters will always be there”
If you haven’t actually watched the documentary, I recommend that you do. Tavis does a good job.
rational people assume that anyone spewing one-dimensional, hateful nonsense about a group thinks – or hopes – that the spewer is not from that group. “race” has nothing to do with it.
actually, instead of trying `race’ and `gender’-bait, why not actually address bigrj’s ideas about trade schools etc? you did say that the school system needs some fixes. might those work?
That’s wonderful! They should be praised and acknowledged. However if you look up the population of black people living in America during the time of those inventors, it’s clear to see that this distinguished group unfortunately was not the norm. The goal through improving BOTH family structures and the education system is to make lists like the one you provided longer and more prevalent.
@Paige D.
You’re still NOT getting it. Let me see if I can break it down…
BLACK INVENTORS FROM WAY BACK WHEN SHOULD NOT OUT NUMBER THOSE WE HAVE TODAY!!!!
They had the worse schools. The worse conditions. The worse teachers. Yet there were more of them and they are more NOTABLE than the inventors we have today. They were far more DISADVANTAGED than Black Americans are today.
You are bringing up population size when that doesn’t have a thing to do with it. I’m talking about the conditions in which they lived which were FAR worse than those we have today. Yet there were MORE black inventors coming out of those conditions than the more pleasant conditions we have today.
What really is the excuse for today’s black people? There isn’t one.
Again it’s not the schools and it’s not the teachers. It’s black people…we have dropped the ball in so many ways. Yet we want to blame every damn thing and every damn body. I don’t think so.
There aren’t going to be anymore list like the one I provided because black people are too busy passing the buck instead of taking responsibility. You want to pinpoint the blame. Start with the family.
@Just Sayin
I’m interested in seeing some definitive numbers on the number of black inventors in the late 19th c. to mid 20th c. compared to the number of black inventors in the late 20th c. to the 21st c. to support your viewpoint statistically. After taking a look at this much more extensive database on black inventors http://inventors.about.com/od/blackinventors/a/black_historyC_2.htm, I’ve found that there were numerous black inventors during all the aforementioned time periods. But I digress. I’d like to go back to discussing this issue on a broader scale.
I’ve never said that schools should be the SOLE institutions responsible for raising children. I’ve never said that parents shouldn’t be held accountable for the actions of their children. I agree with you 100% parents that parents need to take on more responsibility in regards to their children. I’m tired of some black parents believing that other people should hold the most responsibility for raising their children. With that said, I took some time to research into your perspective. I’d like to be payed the same courtesy. If you take a moment to research some of the resources @Chica, @Me, and I have suggested, you’ll see that there are problems with the American education system that cannot be ignored. These flaws should be addressed, and fixed ALONG with parents becoming more active in their children’s lives. That’s the point I’ve been trying to get across