Lest We Forget:
Only 3 out of 100 Black males entering kindergarten will graduate from college

Every 5 seconds during the school day, a Black public school student is suspended. Every 46 seconds during the school day, a Black high school student drops out. Every minute, a Black child is arrested and a Black baby is born to an unmarried mother. Every 3 minutes, a Black child is born into poverty. Every hour, a Black baby dies. Every 4 hours, a Black child or youth under 20 dies from an accident, and every 5 hours, a Black youth is a homicide victim. Every day, a Black young person under 25 dies from HIV infection and a Black child or youth under 20 commits suicide. Marian Wright Edelman, The Children’s Defense Fund

Discipline, Special Education, and Jail

• Black students, while representing only 17 percent of public school students, account for 32 percent of suspensions and 30 percent of expulsions. In 1999, 35 percent of all Black students in grades 7-12 had been suspended or expelled from school. The rate was 20 percent for Hispanics and 15 percent for Whites.

• Black children are labeled mentally retarded nearly 300 percent more than White children and only 8.4 percent of Black males are identified and enrolled in gifted and talented classes.

• Black males in their early 30s are twice as likely to have prison records (22 percent) than bachelor’s degrees (12 percent).

• A Black male born in 1991 (today’s 7th grade student) has a 29 percent chance of spending time in prison at some point in his life. The figure for Hispanic males is 16 percent, and for White males is 4 percent.

• A Black male is 700 percent more likely than a White male to be sentenced to a local, state, or federal prison.

• Black males are imprisoned at a rate of 3,405 per 100,000 (3.4 percent); Hispanics at a rate of 1,231 per 100,000 (1.2 percent); and Whites at a rate of 465 per 100,000 (.465 percent).

High School Performance, Course Enrollment, and Graduation

17.5 percent of Black students, 13.2 percent of Hispanic students, and 9.3 percent of White students in grades K-12 were retained at least one grade.3

13 percent of Blacks ages 16-24 have not earned a high school credential. The rate for Whites is 7 percent.

30 percent of Black high school students have taken advanced mathematics courses compared to 45 percent of Whites.

5 percent of Black high school students take a fourth year of a foreign language with 2 percent taking an AP foreign language course.

12 percent of Black high school students take science classes as high as chemistry and physics.

27 percent of Black high school students take advanced English.

Black students take AP exams at a rate of 53 per 1,000 students. The rate for Hispanic students is 115 per 1,000 and for Whites is 185 per 1,000.

The average SAT scores for Black students is 433V and 426M; for Whites it is over 22 percent higher at 529V and 531M.

The average ACT score for Black students is 16.9; for Whites it is nearly 30 percent higher at 21.8.

Unemployment

The unemployment rate for Blacks ages 16-19 is 25 percent.

The unemployment rate for Blacks without a high school credential is 30 percent, 19 percent with high school but no college, 10 percent with some college but no degree, and 6 percent with a bachelor’s degree.
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References:

Indiana Education Policy Center. (2000). Minority Overrepresentation in Indiana’s Special Education Programs. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University.

National Center for Education Statistics. (1993-1994). America &’s Teachers: Profile of a Profession. U.S. Department of Education.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2001). Educational Achievement and Black-White Inequality. U.S. Department of Education.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2003). Status and Trends in the Education of Blacks. U.S. Department of Education.

National Center for Education Statistics. (1995). The Condition of Education, 1994: The Educational Progress of Black Students. U.S. Department of Education.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2001). The Condition of Education,
2001. U.S. Department of Education.

National Center for Learning Disabilities. (April 2003). Minority Students in Special Education. New York, NY: NCLD.

U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. (2003). Poverty in the United States: 2002. U.S. Department of Commerce.

U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. (2002). The Black Population in the United States: March 2002. U.S. Department of Commerce.

U.S. Department of Education. (1999). Hope for Urban Education: A Study of Nine High-Performing, High-Poverty, Urban Elementary Schools. U.S. Department of Education.

U.S. Department of Education White Paper. (October 20, 1997). Mathematics Equals Opportunity. U.S. Department of Education.

U.S. Department of Justice. (12/31/03). Summary Findings of Prison Statistics. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/prisons.htm University of Nebraska-Lincoln. (2000). The Color of Discipline: Sources of Racial and Gender Disproportionality in School Punishment. Policy research Report #SRS1.

Edelman, Marian Wright. (2001). What Can We Do? Quoted from: How to Make Black America Better (p. 122). New York, NY: Anchor Books.

U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2003. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/

Alexandeer, K., Entwisle, D., & Kabbani, N. (2001). The Dropout Process in Life Course Perspective: Early Risk Factors at Home and at School, Teacher’s College Record, Volume 103, Number 5 (p. 775). October 2001. New York, NY: Teachers College, Columbia University.