Despite rising attention to college and workforce gaps, Black male students continue to be pushed out of K-12 schools.
In March, when The New York Times reported that 1 in 5 young Black men between the ages of 20 and 24 are neither in school nor employed, longtime educator Dr. David E. Kirkland was not surprised. The same article noted that Black men make up just 19% of enrollment at Howard University — one of the nation’s most prestigious HBCUs.
However, in his view, the article focused on the wrong end of a young person’s educational journey.
Opting out of college and the workforce is a symptom of a much larger problem for young Black men, one that begins as early as preschool, long before college enters the educational picture. The lack of Black men in higher education stems from next to no institutional or emotional support for Black K-12 schoolboys, lingering systemic racism in public education, and very few Black male teachers as role models.
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“Most Black boys go to school and learn to hate school,” says Kirkland, founder and CEO of the nonprofit forwardED, a former NYU professor, and one of the country’s leading scholars on educational equity. “They’re told from day one that they’re a problem — that they’re unintelligent. They’re made to feel like a threat before they’ve even been given a chance.”
In other words, Kirkland believes the phenomenon of missing Black college men is the endpoint of a long, predictable breakdown, triggered almost as soon as their education begins.
“We didn’t just lose them after high school,” he says. “We’ve been pushing them out since pre-K.”
#BlackBoysMatter #EducationEquity #StopThePipeline
