Education: Fighting The Failure Syndrome

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The signs of crisis are everywhere. Nearly 1 in 4 black men, ages 20 to 29, is in jail, on probation or on parole. Black men are less likely to attend college than black females or whites of either gender, and when they do go, they often drop out. Homicide, including fatalities resulting from clashes with police, is the leading cause of death among black males, ages 15 through 34. Says Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis Sullivan: "When you look at a long list of social pathologies, you find black men No. 1."

To reverse this downward spiral, a vocal minority of black educators are pushing a radical idea: putting elementary-school-age black boys in separate classrooms, without girls or whites, under the tutelage of black male teachers. Critics of the proposal say segregating classrooms by race and gender flies in the face of more than 25 years of civil rights gains. But supporters argue that such concerns are less important than the urgent need to rescue African-American males from a future of despair and self-destruction. "The boys need more attention," says Spencer Holland, a Washington educational psychologist and champion of the black-male classroom concept. "The girls are not killing each other."

Advocates of this approach believe low expectations and low self-esteem are largely responsible for the poor academic performance of African-American boys. A recent study of the New Orleans public schools, for example, showed that black males accounted for 80% of the expulsions, 65% of the suspensions and 58% of the nonpromotions, even though they made up just 43% of the students. "Black boys are viewed by their teachers as hyperactive and aggressive," says Jewelle Taylor Gibbs, a clinical psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. "Very early on, they get labeled."

The absence of positive male role models may also cripple black boys' development. Nationally, 55.3% of black families with children under 18 are maintained by the mother, many of them living in inner cities. Moreover, most elementary-school teachers are female, leading black boys to view academic success as "feminine."

Bill Cosby, Jesse Jackson and other black celebrities are too remote to offer realistic models of responsible manhood. The adult males whom many black boys try to emulate come from their own neighborhoods, and in tough urban areas, these "models" are all too often involved in drugs and crime. One , lesson boys learn from such men is that doing well in school is for sissies or, worse yet, for blacks who are trying to "act white."

Three years ago, in an attempt to overcome these problems, a school in Florida's Dade County opened two classrooms for black boys with no fathers at home, one in kindergarten and one in first grade. The results were encouraging. Daily attendance rates increased 6%, test scores jumped 6% to 9%, and there was a noticeable decrease in hostility. But after only a year, the U.S. Education Department brought an abrupt halt to the experiment because it violated civil rights laws.