Duped Americans Duped Americans For nearly four decades, the education establishment has delivered one failure and set of excuses after another. Education for blacks is nothing less than a catastrophe and education for white kids is nothing to write home about. In most cases, we fire them or run them out of town on a rail. But educationists are immune to those corrective forces. Instead, in the wake of one education disaster after another, we call them back for more advice and yet another half-baked experiment.
Black kids are fair game for half-baked schemes and their academic performance shows it.
Harlem school six-graders averaged a grade equivalent score of 5.5 in paragraph meaning and 5.4 in word meaning. The New York citywide average was 6.8 and 6.5 respectively. In no cases were Harlem school students as much as a year below grade level. Harlem third-graders were at or above grade level and in some subject fields scoring higher than their counterparts on the Lower East Side, including arithmetic reasoning and computation as well. White liberals, black and white politicians and civil rights organizations have done far greater harm to black academic excellence than yesterday's racists could have ever done.