Across the United States, teachers can quickly tell you who is the most 'at-risk' student sitting in their classrooms. The answer is the same, whether it's from a teacher in Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, Houston, New Orleans, Detroit, Newark, or Birmingham. It's the student who struggled in 3rd grade. It's the student in 8th grade reading grade levels behind his peers. It's the student who spends majority of the his time in detention or in-school suspension. It's the student who has problems focusing in class, thus becoming disruptive. It's the student who stays on his teacher's mind each and every day of the school year. He is the one a teacher never forgets years later—always wondering where he is now, how he is doing, is he still alive. Who is this student? He's the African American male.
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), there is a direct correlation between struggling learners with low reading levels and socioeconomic backgrounds. Students from high-poverty areas experience academic challenges (PDF) and attend low-income schools with limited academic resources. These students are consistently underachieving, and this achievement widens during the adolescent years. The data and the stats are the same across the United States: we have a broken education system.
As a result, public education has now become a system of 'haves' and 'have nots' (those in poverty versus