During the February 10th classroom activities, Ms. Kitty Riley was introduced as a guest speaker, She represented the "African People's Education and Defense Fund" (APEDF) as their Economic Development spokesperson.

The topic of her presentation was the raising of grant funds to finance a Community Kitchen and a Recording Studio. One of our students (Kelly) inquired as to why the proposed five-thousand dollar ($5,000.00) grant could be more beneficially spent on education. Ms. Riley relied: "Oh, we do that too."

The subject of education and it's funding, has been studied and reported, countless times. During a stint at the University of South Carolina, I came across a book entitled: "The Social Contract" by Robert Ardrey 1970.  Here is an extract from Chapter 2, Page 63:

"In 1966 an enormous Federally financed study, "Equality of Educational Opportunity," reported on the educational achievements of some 6000,000 students in American schools. Referred to usually as the Coleman Report, it became instantly unavailable at bookshops and from normal distributors of scholarly literature. After some eight months of trying,  I pried a copy out of the U. S. Government Printing Office. Why had it become unavailable became evident only after long exploration of its 700-plus pages of statistics. The Negro had failed in American schools - failed catastrophically, beyond statistical doubt or sentimental apology, beyond all explanation. It was not a documentto be freely circulated in Congressional areas wherein the Negro commanded the Swing vote.

I say "the Negro" but let us be wary of typologically thinking. A Negro student might exceed a hundred white fellows in academic acomplishments. But up and down and across the statistical tables one found approximately the same population range: curves revealed a repeated 15 percent of black students falling within the same range of academic accomplishments as the upper 50 percent of whites. It matters a little but not much whether the student had come from a segregated or integrated school. Socio-economic level of the family brought some influence, but small. Worse still for blacks was the record of the Oriental American, subjected in American life to discrimination cetainly as rigorous as the Negro, who consistantly equaled and in areas excelled the records of white students."

"A consequence of the Coleman Report was hysterically received study by California's Arthur Jensen, published in early 1969 in the Harvard Educational Review, suggesting the genetically inferiority of Negro intelligence. It ia a persuasive document, so persuasive that there were those who could provide no better answer than to threaten Jensen's life."

There are further explanations of this report but they are lengthy. Now that I have your attention, I might add that this information is still unavailable to the public. Freedom of Information Act? Try getting a copy. Certain portions of it may be severly redacted. However, there is a source, but only to academic institutions.

One or more files in this study are restricted.

This data is available only to users at ICPSR member institutions.

Sign an agreement that you will:

The data will not be loaned or otherwise conveyed to anyone other than the signatories of this agreement.

Destroy the data upon completion of the study.

Remember, that this information was financed with taxpayers money. In order for the Federal Govenment to restrict its availability to the general public, either directly or indirectly, shows the impact of the seriousness of this information.

So, it took me about one minute to find the full, un-redacted Coleman Report.  It's 749 pages.  I decided to look it up since it seemed so unlikely that there existed some scientific study that contained information demonstrating an inherent intellectual inferiority among black students that was so compelling and damaging that it had to be kept from the public. It's amazing that we're even having this discussion.

Here is the paper:  ColemanReport.pdf

It is available not only in our academic library databases, but also on Google Scholar (and thus to anyone with an internet connection).

Here is the full-text of Ardrey's book The Social Contract:  The_Social_Contract.pdf

What's more confounding about the text you chose to excerpt (and trying to determine why you chose to do so) is that the next several lines immediately following where you left off state:  "But the materials must be regarded with care. Are we truly considering intelligence? or a capacity to learn according to the demands of the materialist American environment? The Coleman Report is frank in its description of the tests administered:

These tests do not measure intelligence, nor attitudes, nor qualities of character. Furthermore they are not, nor are they intended, to be "culture free." Quite the reverse: they are culture bound. What they measure are the skills which are among the most important in our society for getting a good job and moving to a better one, and for full participation in an increasingly technical world."

It is considered fairly obvious today by scientists (and hopefully mostly everybody else) that race (i.e. skin color) has no biological meaning.  Further, as you alluded to, there has been much research done on the issue of the achievement gap (whole classes are devoted to it; I took one last semester) between different groups and it has been shown to be primarily a result of socio-economic status.  Children in schools of lower socio-economic communities (whether they be white, latino, black, etc.) perform at shockingly lower rates than children in higher socio-economic communities (as USF students we have access to databases that store journal articles of this current research that demonstrate how these inequities manifest and are perpetuated).  The fact that so many of these students in the lower SES areas are black and latino is why groups like the APEDF are trying to "serve the historically under-served," as Kitty Riley put it.

Love,

Travis

_____________________________________________________________________________

Joe, what I'm getting from your posting and comments is this:

There is an education gap that has thus far been unable to be properly addressed by the school system. The gap leads to an under-educated community which then extends to unemployment and under-employment in that community. If the problem was fixable by simply offering additional educational assistance, it would most likely have been solved by now as it has been given much attention and focus. While it is debatable whether or not that attention has been properly focused, it seems obvious that there exists other underlying issues affecting the gap. Many different studies have been done in an attempt to attribute the gap to one specific cause and no singular specific cause has come to light. Thus, simply addressing education as a solitary issue is too narrow to solve the problem. The socio-economic issue, however, is one that has been studied and shown to have a negative impact on education. So, it appears to be a cycle of poverty. The poverty affects the child's ability to be properly educated and the lack of a proper education affects the child's future ability to be economically successful. This cylce restarts itself with each generation. By offering additional opportunities for economic success beyond traditional classroom training for adults, and in addition to enhanced educational assitance for children, it could be possible to interfere with the cycle.   

Is this where you are going?

April