Black futures in trouble
Black children are no longer the focus of education reform. The rest of us can't be so callous.
I've examined the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results more closely, focusing on Black students. Once again, as expected, the results paint a devastating portrait of educational inequity that should shake our nation's conscience.
I've resisted joining the doom committee because after over a decade of sounding the alarm that America cares too little about the intellectual development of black youth, I'm tired.
The story is tiring.
The inequalities are tiring.
The politics are tiring.
And the lack of credible solutions is tiring, too.
I know it's unfashionable in today's education circles to explicitly focus on Black students. The polite thing is to murmur vaguely about "equity" and hope no one accuses you of summoning Critical Race Theory like Candyman in the mirror.
However, somebody has to keep the spotlight on these NAEP numbers, even as reformers avoid old-school terms like "achievement gap.” While we're all playing linguistic limbo trying to dodge political lightning bolts, actual Black students are still struggling in actual classrooms. We can wait for the pendulum to swing back, for Black education to become trendy again, or we can admit that with only 17% of Black fourth graders reading proficiently. We can admit we have a specific crisis that deserves specific attention.
Five years after pandemic-related disruptions began, Black students' academic outcomes have not only failed to recover – they've gotten worse.
When 86% of Black eighth graders cannot read proficiently, we are witnessing not an anomaly but the continuation of policies and practices that have systematically undermined Black educational achievement since Reconstruction.
I’ve seen a few pieces from friends saying there have been some bright spots. Sure, hats off to Louisiana and Alabama, which are making gains overall. We should applaud them, but we must also ask why such successes remain the exception rather than the rule. Louisiana's gains came through comprehensive reform beyond simplistic solutions, combining explicit reading instruction with rich content knowledge building and intensive teacher support.
Few states have shown the political will to implement such sweeping changes. Why?
The path forward demands more than incremental reform or passing references to "achievement gaps." We need a fundamental reimagining of how we serve Black students, including:
A stubborn focus on evidence-based interventions and rigorous systems of assessment to consistently examine their efficacy
Equitable funding that directs additional resources to historically underserved communities, with tight strings that ensure local decision-makers spend on achievement
High-quality instructional materials that are culturally competent and build on the existing knowledge of students
Targeted recruitment and support of Black educators who are strong in the subjects they teach
Early intervention programs that identify and address learning needs before they compound
Community-driven solutions that recognize the expertise of Black families and educators
The 2025 NAEP results are not just an indictment of failure that we all own.
I want to scream that these aren't just statistics we're talking about – they represent millions of Black children being systematically denied their fundamental right to literacy.
The provocative question is denied by whom?
The system that was never designed for Black achievement?
Is that who we're waiting for to educate our children?
If so, I hate to say it, but we're fools.
As my brother Charles Cole says constantly: "No one is coming to save us. We're on our own."
That army of grant-funded people singing our blues for years have lost their voices. They’ve made the same switch-up that Kid Rock did.
So, yes, schools, teachers, districts, and states can and should do better. So can parents, guardians, and communities - the rest of us.
Our children deserve more than another round of hand-wringing over test scores. They deserve a deeper ecosystem of assets in their communities and an educational system that recognizes their brilliance, honors their humanity, and provides the resources and opportunities they need to thrive. Anything less perpetuates America's long history of educational debt to Black students – a debt that grows more costly with each passing year.
The question is not whether we know how to better serve Black students but whether we have the moral courage and political will to do so. The 2025 NAEP results suggest that, so far, the answer remains no. For the sake of millions of Black children, that must change.
Before I go, I expect this discussion to promptly turn to the fads many are consumed with: universal school choice and/or putting endless strings-free dollars into schools. I'm sorry, but giving parents scarce public education funds to buy kayaks and trampolines won't improve NAEP scores. Neither will placing the Federal Reserve in the Department of Education so districts can have billions of dollars to spend unwisely.
We've had a long history of broken promises in education. Our children deserve serious, scientific answers to their problems.
Many of your prescriptions are echoed in the recent Task Force Report on Minnesota's education of students of color, low income students and English language learners: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1StX4Li8i7CvVuTTc7emID0OJn-GYR8HL/view?usp=sharing
The report begins with citations to one Minnesota report after another, from 2004 to the present, calling for reform. The oldest of these warned in 2004 that Minnesota must cover the "full dollar cost" of educating these students, as determined by costing and effective practices research. But as each report comes and go, we keep on doing exactly what we did before We take the amount of revenue that we provided in the last biennium; we add on a given percentage, and deliver that money without any accountability, and then we keep on doing what we have done before at a higher cost In the last two years, for the very first time, the state actually imposed a requirement that districts teach reading according to the approaches that work. But still, there is no accountability for districts to actually do that
The Task Force report identifies several states where the Governor and legislature have called for massive reforms in funding paired with accountability. But Minnesota not so much.
One of the things we learned in task force presentations is that reform occurs when stakeholders joint together and demand bipartisan reform. Fannie Lou Hamer, who I am proud to say I met in Mississippi said: "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired" but she didn't just say it; she mobilized. We need to mobilize in Minnesota for the benefit of these kids.
The least prepared teach Black children. Standards are lowered to attract more teachers and those conditionally certified teachers are put in the classrooms with Black children to practice. Teachers practice without immediate corrective feedback on Black children. We have learned the elements of explicit instruction. We learned about working memory. The theory applies to teacher education also.