Levi's Unbuttoned by Jennifer Sey

Author:Jennifer Sey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: All Seasons Press
Published: 2022-10-25T11:10:03+00:00

There is no in between. Which means that the continuum is not a continuum, but a door. You’re on one side of it or the other. In or out. It might look something more akin to this:

By today’s “anti-racism” standards, Abraham Lincoln is already considered to be on the wrong side of this line. And, who knows, Martin Luther King Jr. might find himself there soon, too, for having said: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

There is plenty of racism in this country. I would never argue that there isn’t. The thing is – we need real actionable strategies to overcome the impacts of racism, both structural and individual. Closing the education gap between white kids and black kids is a good place to start. If you can’t read, you can’t learn. And this has dramatic impacts on life outcomes. If a child can’t read proficiently by the fourth grade, he or she is four times more likely not to graduate from high school on time. The median income for an adult without a high school diploma is about $30,000 a year, making it very difficult to break the cycle of poverty.

And here are the facts as of 2019: a sample of students was tested for reading proficiency in the eighth grade by the Education Department’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). This is done every two years and it’s known as the nation’s Education Report Card. Achievement levels are reported in four categories: advanced, proficient, basic and below basic.

Overall, 4 percent tested at the advanced level, 29 percent were proficient, 39 percent at basic and 28 percent at below basic. Pretty bad. This means that close to one third of the nation’s children can barely read by eighth grade.

But wait, it gets worse. When you analyze the data for black students, 47 percent are below basic proficiency. Close to half of the nation’s black children cannot read or can barely read. And the situation has deteriorated due to school closures. One Virginia study shows that reading skills were at a twenty-year low as of the fall of 2021.

National test results released in August 2022, by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, showed that reading scores for nine-year-olds fell by the largest margin in over thirty years as a result of school closures during the pandemic. And of course, high poverty and non-white students were the most severely impacted. On September 1, 2022, Sarah Mervosh wrote in The New York Times:

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