213.Unstack the Odds--Black Males: A Crisis, Pt 4

Unstack the Odds: Help All Kids Access College—and Graduate!
by
Joe Rottenborn

Executive Director, Mahoning Valley College Access Program (MVCAP)

6. Black Males: A Crisis, Pt 4

“He says the biggest revelation he had reading his own autobiography came in the parts about his father, who abandoned the family when Jay was 11. ‘It was still wrong, at the end of the day, that he left.’ Jay says, ‘but he did stick around at a time when it wasn’t cool or popular—he married my mom at a time when guys were just leaving, and you’d never even meet your dad. So it made me ease up a little bit in how I felt about him.”--Mark Binelli, “King of America: From Coachella to the White House, How Jay-Z Runs the Game,” Rolling Stone, June 24, 2010, p. 47.

Dakarai Aarons also commented on the release of the report A Call for Change, which examined data from the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). As he stated: “The council's report suggests that the underperformance of black male youths is nothing short of a national emergency, and it calls for the convening of a White House conference.”

Aarons quotes Michael Casserly from an interview as saying, "This is not just an education issue, and it is not just an urban issue. It is a broader national issue that is going to require sustained and coordinated effort on the part of a lot of people.” (Dakarai Aarons, “Black Male Achievement in a 'State of Crisis,' Study Says,” Education Week, November 9, 2010.) http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/District_Dossier/2010/11/black_male_achievement_paints.html
Chauntel Riser, coordinator of the African-American Resource Center at California State University Fullerton (CSUF), put it this way: “So it’s not that they don’t want to, they just don’t know how to graduate . . . .” According to Christina Lunceford, assistant director of the Center for Research on Education Access and Leadership at CSUF, “We are in a crisis across the country especially with African-American males. There are not a lot of African-American males going to college and even fewer are graduating.” (Soyoung Kim, “Achievement Gap Persists in African-American Graduation Rates,” Neon Tommy, March 5, 2011.) http://m.neontommy.com/news/2011/03/achievement-gap-persists-african-american-graduation-rates

Regarding the graduation gap involving Black male college athletes, Lynn O’Shaughnessy offered a posting on the graduation rates of men’s basketball teams competing in the 2011 NCAA Tournament. She drew statistics from the annual report issued by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida and commented as follows: “The gap between white and African American players, however, grew by four percentage point[s] to 32%. Ninety one percent of white basketball players graduate, but only 59% of African-American basketball players graduate. Obviously, that’s unacceptable.” (Lynn O’Shaughnessy, “2011 March Madness: Best and Worst Graduation Rates,” The College Solution: CBS Moneywatch, March 15, 2011.) http://moneywatch.bnet.com/saving-money/blog/college-solution/2011-march-madness-best-and-worst-graduation-rates/4787/?tag=col1;blog-river

By contrast, among participants on teams in the 2011 Women’s NCAA Basketball Tournament, the graduation gap was much smaller between the races, as “. . . 92 percent of white players graduate, compared to 84 percent of black players, or a gap of just 8 percent.” (“Women’s NCAA Teams Outdo Men in Classroom,” The Huffington Post: College, March 16, 2011.) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/15/womens-ncaa-teams-outdo-m_n_836240.html