The education gap that plagues the African
Communities in Amerikkka is not a new story. Every since the kidnapping of our
people from our Motherland, Black youth have been alienated and knowingly mis-educated
inside an educational system created by the white ruling class of Europe and
the U.S. History is best qualified to teach us that the white ruling class of
this country is invested in and will forever attempt to keep the masses of
working class and African people impoverished and subjected to hostile
conditions. The current sweep of educational reform, from the local to national
stage, functions to further this truth under the glaze of a “post-racial” or
“colorblind” society. Even with all of the empty partisan rhetoric the
conditions on the ground have not changed significantly for the majority of
African youth trapped inside the mis-education camps of the western world known
as institutions of primary, secondary, and “higher” education. The solution to our
collective problem must and will come from poor and working class people’s
ability to organize ourselves to provide the education for our youth.
The problem that we are faced with today is a
legacy of a social status quo in this country that perpetrates the idea that an
educated African is a dangerous one. This philosophy comes from the wealthiest
one percent of this country and is the underlining reason for the manufacturing
of the ongoing educational gap. In April 1965, under the regime of then U.S.
President Lynden B. Johnson, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)
was signed into law, one of the many laws in Amerikkka’s “war on poverty”. The
ESEA was created to target schools and school districts where forty percent, or
more, of the students came from low-income families and was originally only
intended to be in effect for five years. Title I of this bill mandates the
distribution of funds to schools and school districts that are in obvious need
of better funding, and low achieving schools and school districts that need
improvements on tests scores. Every five years since the initiation of this
decree it has been continually reauthorized and or amended to ensure that the
public education system would continually turn out new generations of laborers
to exploit for capital gain.
There is a class interest in the under-education
of working class people and their children and this interest is what generates
the continuous mass incarceration of the poor, working class, Native and
African peoples of this country. The most recent national statistics on education
from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show that almost
seventy percent of state educational students are proficient in reading or math
skills. The student dropout rate represents youth between ages 16 and 24 years
old who have not received a high school diploma or equivalent GED certificate.
This dropout rate has declined from 14% in 1980’s to 8% in 2009, but note that
this figure does not include youth who have been captured and imprisoned inside
the concentration camps of Amerikkka. High school dropout rates have been on
the decline across all demographics between 1980’s and 2009, although rates for
European Amerikkkan students have remained the lowest among all groups. The
dropout rate among Hispanic students has remained nearly twice that of the
African students whose dropout rates have lingered at nearly twice that of
European Amerikkkan students. The decline in dropout rates during the last two
to three decades is directly related to the mass incarceration of youth in this
country. The "land of the free" holds less than 5% of the world’s
population, but hold over 25% of the world’s prisoners. We, as poor, working
class African people must recognize that this education gap will be perpetuated
as long as we send our youth to be mis-educated by the ruling class of
bourgeois capitalist in educational institutions which teach bourgeois ideals.
The culture of lies taught in Amerikkka attempts
to confuse working class, Black and Brown people into believing that the
educational disparity is not dependent on just on social or economic causes. The
truth of the problem is that we do not control the education of our youth, and
we depend on the oppressor to educate our children. We must recognize our
common enemies' agenda and a part of its result is the educational under-achievement
that continues to plague poor, working-class, Brown and Black Communities.
Direct community organizing is the solution to keep pressure on the elected
officials to place working class interest first on the political agenda. We,
the people with the problem, must organize ourselves to resolve this issue and
regain our self determination.
0 Response(s):
Post a Comment