The Downhill Slide.
A 1990 study of more than 105,000 students in Maryland’s Prince George’s County, where African Americans made up about 65 percent of the enrollment, showed that black male pupils performed comparably to boys and girls of all races on first- and second-grade standardized math and reading test. But by fourth grade, African American boys experienced a sharp decline in their scores. More recent national studies have shown similar findings: In 1994, fourth-grade reading scores of African American boys lagged behind those of all other groups at the same grade level, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
It’s sobering to think that any group of kids as young as eight or nine years old can lose interest in school. But a number of experts have been making this observation about black boys for more than two decades. (Although the performance of black girls also declines around the same age, the dip isn’t nearly as pronounced and is often recouped in later years, researchers say.)
“I first saw the drop-off syndrome when I started working in school development back in the late sixties,” says Dr. James Comer, director of the Yale Child Studies Center and an educator who has been in the forefront of black child development and school reform for nearly 30 years. “It was especially noticeable among students from low-income families, boys in particular.”
Why do boys flounder more? “Around third and fourth grade, there’s a shift in the way teachers instruct kids,” says Harry Morgan, an early childhood development professor at the State University of West Georgia who has also spent over 29 years training teachers and conducting research on classroom behavior and learning styles. “In the earlier years, teachers encourage social interaction,” he says, “but by the fourth grade, classrooms become more of a static, lecturing environment.”
This change in teaching approach, from an informal, learning-by-doing style to the more structured, sit-down-and-listen setup, is toughest on male students, who tend to be more active than girls in the elementary grades. And for black boys, a teacher’s reactions to these high energy levels may be compounded by racism.
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“There’s often an undercurrent of fear or tension between black male students and many white teachers, and even some black ones,” says Morgan, who served as one of the early developers of Project Head Start in 1965. “This fear can be triggered over something as minor as a black boy walking around the room. On some subliminal level, the teacher is afraid to have even a very young black male defy the simplest rule. She’s afraid his defiance will escalate.”
Since some teachers are likely to resent a student who doesn’t seem able to sit still and cooperate, a troubled relationship can easily develop; the child might be perceived as a troublemaker or a slow learner, for instance. By fourth grade, this child may have already given up on school, especially if he hasn’t yet learned to read, according to Spencer Holland, an educational psychologist in Washington, D.C.
“Most fourth-grade teachers approach their curriculum based on the assumption that their class is full of readers,” he says. “So if a child isn’t literate by then, the new teacher isn’t going to go back and teach him how to read, because she’s hamstrung by her own curriculum.”
Exert from http://people.terry.uga.edu/dawndba/4500FailingBlkBoys.html Celeste Fremon & Stephaine Renfrow Hamilton
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