Raise Your Expectations

Regardless of what we say in public, we all, regardless of color, carry the same unconscious assumptions. One of which is that a certain level of achievement is Black and another level is other races. Notice the first thing they noticed about Barack Obama – he is amazingly articulate. This is what you are hearing when a Black child speaks standard English and another Black child harasses he or she for "talking White." This is what George W. Bush was referring to when he mentioned "the soft bigotry of low expectations." We need to address this straightforward if we ever hope to close the so-called achievement gap that looms between Black children and other ones.

I recently blogged about our assumptions when we see a Black man running down the street and automatically wonder what he did or what is he running from. In the same frame of mind we are blinded by real potential in our children (I despise the word kid), because of unconscious expectations we place or do not place on them. When we here of a scholar, we tend to think of Asian or White. When we think of athletes we think of Blacks. When in fact all Asians are not smart (just ask any military person who has been to anywhere in Asia – they have their dumb and dumber too).

In 2007 and 2008, Leonard Pitts, Jr., author of “Becoming Dad: Black Men and Journey to Fatherhood”, traveled around the U.S. for a series of columns called "What Works," aimed at profiling programs that address that gap. He visited the Harlem Children's Zone, which encompasses 90 square blocks of holistic education, family counseling, medical care and tutoring in New York City, the Freedom Project in Sunflower County, Mississippi, which offers field trips, martial arts and academic enrichment in a rural county where the median income is $25,000 a year and the teen pregnancy rate is 25 percent (that’s a whole other topic in and of itself). He toured Self Enhancement Inc. in Portland, Oregon, a KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) School in Gaston, North Carolina, the East Lake Foundation in Atlanta, Georgia, and many others.

In all these places, he observed Black children -- well-spoken and clean-cut -- making a lie out of other peoples' expectations.

All these programs had common themes – when asked why children were doing such wondrous work in these places and substandard work elsewhere. He received the same type answers -- we have more power to fire bad teachers and reward good ones, they said. We require parental involvement. We have a longer school day and a longer school year. We mentor children that need it. We counsel children and families that need it. We are invested in them and make sure they know it.

But most of all, they spoke of the simple power of expectation: making it a conscious point to look for greatness in Black children in whom people had not thought to look for it before. And so the plain and simple secret to improving academic performance for Black, like any other children, expectations. Where Black children are concerned, we have other expectations.

Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children's Zone, when asked how he justifies asking for money to uplift poor children in Harlem. His response: "Someone's yelling at me because I'm spending $3,500 a year on `Alfred.' 'Alfred' is 8. OK, Alfred turns 18. No one thinks anything about locking him up for 10 years at $60,000 a year."

But then, we expect Alfred to be locked up, don't we? We, U.S. citizens, expect it so casually that we will not challenge the expectation even when it works against our own economic self-interest. The choice should be very simple: invest a smaller amount early and produce a citizen who pays taxes and contributes to the system or pay a much larger amount later for the upkeep of a citizen who consumes tax monies and contributes nothing. That we consistently choose the latter says something about how we assess the education of Black and Brown children in the U.S.

We live in a culture that writes off Black children because the expectation is not as it should be. Imagine the potential of the U.S. if we would only invest in education at the rate that we invest in the prison system.
It’s time to raise our expectations.