Just 60% of Ohio’s black urban males graduate

Black males’ graduation rate in urban schools is 13 percent below that of white males.

By HAROLD GWIN

VINDICATOR EDUCATION WRITER

YOUNGSTOWN — Former state legislator C.J. Prentiss wants to close what she calls the educational achievement gap for black males in Ohio’s public schools.

Prentiss is now Gov. Ted Strickland’s Special Assistant on Closing the Achievement Gap.

She met with more than 60 school and community representatives here Monday, urging them to participate in a state conference on increasing the graduation rate for black males May 30 in Columbus.

Youngstown was the last community on her tour of the state’s urban school districts before the conference, she said.

This isn’t the state dictating what should be done, but a call to galvanize communities to take action themselves, Prentiss said, citing statistics that show, in Ohio’s nine largest urban school districts, the graduation rate for black males is just 60 percent, compared with 73 percent for white males and 71 percent for Hispanic males.

It’s not a new issue, but one that hasn’t drawn a lot of mainstream attention until now, she said.

“African-American households have been talking about this for years,” she said.

Prentiss said that 50 percent of an individual’s cognitive brain skills develop during the first three years of life, and that’s why reading and language are so important for infants.

Tests show that poor babies score two years behind their more affluent peers at the time of entry into kindergarten, she said.

Most dropouts leave school in the ninth grade, ending a process that, for black children, begins around the fourth grade, when they begin to realize that the school curriculum doesn’t relate to their real world.

The children gradually become, “Alienated from school culture, comfortable with street culture,” Prentiss said.

What schools should do

Schools need to do be more successful at recruiting black male teachers as positive role models for black male students, she said.

Schools need also to hear more from community business people, in the form of exposure to a world outside a child’s home. Job shadowing and internships can make a significant impact, Prentiss said.

Groups like 100 Black Men (a chapter of which was recently formed in the Youngstown-Warren area) need to step up and have regular contact with children at risk, to serve as positive role models, she said.

“The governor feels we are at crisis,” she said, referring to his call for the state conference. “We know we are.”

Strickland proposed allocating $20 million toward the issue over a two-year period, she said.

gwin@vindy.com