Leading black education historian sets record straight

Brian Mickelson

By some accounts, the achievement gap between blacks and whites is driven in part by cultural misperceptions that communities of color do not share the same values on education as mainstream society.

But according to James D. Anderson, professor and head of the department of educational policy at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Anderson, a leading scholar on the history of education in African American communities and the author of the award-winning book “The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935,” casts some of the blame on the “gap hysteria” that started around the late 1990s.

“Everybody was talking about it,” he said. “The president was talking about it, governors were talking about it. So I decided to do some work on the historical context of the achievement gap, understanding it over time and trying in part to, if not erase, then reduce some of the hysteria surrounding it.”

During his research, he discovered an all too common and convenient scapegoat: the nation’s misconception that the achievement gap could be blamed on the African American community.

“It’s a subject that gets grossly distorted because it’s an easy answer,” Anderson said. “It’s easy for people to say, ‘Well, the problem is their culture; they don’t value education.’ And you get these invidious comparisons to high-achieving Asian students or West Indian students or even African immigrant students; that these students and their parents value education. In contrast to that, people point to the African American communities and say that there’s drugs, gangs or single parent households, and blame the culture.”

Anderson made his points clear in Boston during the recent “Race, Education and Democracy” Lecture and Book Series held at Simmons College. Sponsored by Beacon Press, which plans to publish a book of Anderson’s lectures, the series aimed to provide historical evidence supporting African Americans’ longstanding commitment to education, which dates back to the days of slavery.

When he first began writing his book, Anderson read slave diaries and found one pervasive theme — an insatiable desire to become literate.

“I started to realize that slaves always believed that, if not in a practical sense, at least spiritually, learning how to read would lead to their freedom and their salvation,” Anderson said.

Indeed, he noted, by the end of the Civil War, 15 percent of the slave population was literate. But the slave community had many other educational boundaries to overcome, including local laws prohibiting them from learning how to read and write and a lack of funding.

“There were all these African American organizations formed in the midst of the Civil War to create schools for their children,” Anderson said. “One of the more expansive school systems for African Americans was in Louisiana. The system was becoming too expensive to maintain and was closed down, [at which time] 10,000 African Americans in that area signed a petition that basically said, ‘Tax us — we’ll pay for it.’”

That type of commitment to education continued into the 20th century, notably in the 1920s and ’30s when racism was apparent in the refusal of mostly-white public school officials to provide funding for schools in predominantly African American communities.

During his research, Anderson came across roughly 5,000 contracts for the building of African American schools in those two decades — all containing funding commitments from countless black citizens. Those contracts, he said, led to schools being built in 900 counties, about 70 percent of all counties in 15 Southern states at that time.

“Why are African Americans paying for public schools?” Anderson asked during the lecture. “How is it possible that people from Louisiana, to Maryland, to Delaware, to Missouri, to Alabama could be acting in the same way at the same time? … There were no grassroots or civil rights campaigns, no television or radio. How was it possible? Values — they had the same values.”

Anderson points out that despite widespread stereotypes, African American populations in the United States have always stressed the immense importance of education, from slavery up until today. What most people fail to realize, he said, are the multitudes of other factors preventing students of color from succeeding on the same level as whites.

“In 1900, there was a 25 percent gap in elementary school attendance between whites and blacks in the American South,” Anderson said. “After they built these schools in 1930, the attendance rate for whites was 91 percent, and for blacks, 90 percent. They had built a school system to educate their young people throughout 15 cities. How ironic that anyone would ever question the value of education among African Americans.”

But the question remains: if values aren’t the problem, then what is?

It’s no secret that the majority of Massachusetts’ urban high school students are lagging behind their white counterparts. Over the past several years, only about 62 percent of students in urban school systems like Boston and Chelsea graduated within four years, according to a recent published report.

But unlike students in affluent white suburbs, Anderson said, inner-city kids face numerous obstacles to success, such as a lack of essential resources, different or less-thorough curricula, higher teacher turnover, fewer teachers certified in the subjects they teach, and an overall lack of faith in their ability to perform.

“Overall, you have to have an urban development policy that takes education with other things like being able to retain qualified teachers, giving them a wage and working conditions that will attract and keep them in the system,” Anderson said. “The kids need to have a curriculum with opportunities to learn the same things as students elsewhere. If you’re going to test them on uniform tests, then it makes sense that they should have the same opportunity to learn, and right now they don’t.”