HOW HE SEES IT The new math: Better grades equal better lives

By TONY BROWN
HAMPTON UNIVERSITY
This formula seems to work for boys, girls, blacks, whites and everyone in between: High-school grades determine college grades and college grades determine income after college -- or what part of the menu you can afford. Therefore, the only game in town is grades, and the way to make better grades is, studies suggest, through the number of hours devoted to study.
But society is not following my formula. As a result, it has produced an education crisis (for example, only 31 percent of high-school graduates can read a book); a crisis of underperformance among black college undergraduates that accounts for over 50 percent of the racial gap in college grades; and now a boy crisis.
Crises have origins. When we don't expect anything from boys, for example, that's what we get. Not just black boys, but white boys and all boys. Black boys were in crisis first partly because adverse societal phenomena strike a society's most marginal group first before moving inland to the more protected populations, and partly because of self-inflicted damage from cultural patterns. Ultimately, however, the entire society becomes degraded because, in reality, the trends in America suggest that we are more connected than many of us realize.
'Defective girls'
That's why when we push boys exclusively toward nonintellectual and physical activities because that's all we expect of them, or because we are afraid that intellectual activity might somehow set off a homosexual gene, we tend to get back in large numbers what some now ironically call "defective girls." If boys are to become the intellectual equals to girls, or if blacks are to close the academic performance gap with whites and Asians, then boys and blacks must do academically what the most successful academic groups do: make a commitment to sufficient time spent studying.
Unfortunately, "low expectations" and "blacks" have become synonymous; now "boys" is being added to the marginal language. That development is even more ominous because the bigotry of low expectations and mediocrity affect overachievers as well. In my work, I must detect this phenomenon. Therefore, I am careful about accepting A and B students at face value. I am only satisfied when they "become what they can be and what they ought to be." That means an A student who studies one hour a day and is satisfied with not finding out what he could become if he studied six hours a day, seven days a week, is a quintessential underperformer, in my opinion. And some conspicuous overachievers are invisible underperformers, encouraged by everyone's good intentions to take a bow. That's where the famous German philosopher known simply as Goethe and mature elephants come in.
"Teenage male elephants in a South African game park stopped their delinquent behavior after several adult bulls were introduced into the herd," columnist William Raspberry wrote about elephants and delinquency. This instance suggests that the change in behavior in elephants is the result of the presence of more mature role models and better values that stamp out delinquent behavior, i.e., encouraging higher standards.
Good behavior
And, if what is true for elephants is also true for humans, then Goethe said it best: "If you treat an individual as he is, he will stay as he is, but if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be." In other words, a good role model must insist on good behavior. We can start with a famous Army advertising slogan -- "Be all that you can be." In rehabilitating humans, my recipe is to add a pinch of Goethe and the mature elephants and we end up with: "Become more than you thought you could be."
At my school, the faculty members pretty much think of themselves as mature elephants, or empathetic role models who challenge our students to a higher-than-conventional standard of academic performance. We do not let ethnicity or ancestral background influence our opinion of the potential of any student. That would be the bigotry of low expectations. That's why Goethe's message of "being more than you think you can be" resonates so well with us and why our gold standard is excellence.
My Mama taught me that power is an illusion if it is not the power of the spirit, that wealth is counterfeit if it is not the wealth of the heart. But six hours of study a day could be a simple solution to a complex world's problems -- at least people would make better grades.
X Tony Brown, dean of the Hampton University Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications, was the founding dean of the School of Communications at Howard University in Hampton, Va. Hampton University's journalism program is supported in part by the Scripps Howard Foundation. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.