Unfit him to be a slave

As would-be employees search for jobs in an increasingly troubled local economy, the District’s recently released unemployment rate is a sharp wake-up call. D.C.’s unemployment rate was 10.6 percent in July — one of the highest in the country. Of course, this citywide rate conceals the fact that the tragedy of unemployment is not been felt evenly among all job seekers in the District. Nationwide, the African-American unemployment rate is almost double the rate for whites. And that divide is at least as stark in the District.

But a reasoned response to the challenging economy that is causing so much hardship in some of our most vulnerable neighborhoods requires a more detailed analysis of the data.

There are more than 15 million African-Americans in work across the nation. Notably, the overwhelming majority of those workers graduated from high school. It should come as no surprise that greater educational attainment among African-American women is one of the reasons why more African-American women have jobs than African-American men. More than 1.5 million more black women have jobs than black men nationwide.

The fact is that the educational achievement gap between black and white students that preoccupies educators like myself casts a shadow for children over their adult lives. African-American public middle and high school students are half as likely to score at grade level or higher in reading as their white peers. This places African-American students at a disadvantage when they graduate from high school. Of course, those who don’t graduate from high school are placed at an even greater disadvantage.

In any labor market — especially today’s — those who are the least prepared suffer the most. The unemployment rate for African-American men ages 20 to 24 without a high school diploma is a staggering 55 percent. For those ages 19 to 20 the rate is a heartbreaking 91 percent.

But looking at unemployment among African-American college graduates we see a far brighter picture. The unemployment rate for black college graduates in 2008 was 4 percent: lower than the overall national unemployment rate for that year.

The benefits to children in adult life — and society at large — of graduating from college extend beyond mere employment to include earnings and careers: African-Americans with at least a bachelor’s degree earn more than twice as much as their counterparts who lack a high school diploma. These college graduates have the building blocks to create careers that are rewarding for them and for society as a whole.

In sharp contrast, those who are failed by underperforming urban education systems await a dire future. One in 3 D.C. residents are functionally illiterate, unable to get into a professional job and earn the salary that such employment commands, to fully engage in civic life, or to fully exercise their civil and legal rights. The opportunities available to such individuals are extremely limited anywhere in the nation, but they are still more limited in the District because more than half of all jobs in D.C. require college or advanced degrees, compared with only 1 in 4 nationally.

Fortunately, increasing numbers of African-American children are getting the head start that is essential for success in adult life. D.C.’s public charter schools are educating three times as many black students to be proficient readers as the city-run public schools. The District’s public charter schools also have a high school graduation rate 21 percent higher than city-run neighborhood high schools and a higher share of students accepted to college, nearly or fully 100 percent for many D.C. public charter schools.

African-American middle and high school students in District public charter schools are nearly twice as likely to be proficient in reading and math as their peers in the regular public schools.

As D.C. residents continue to struggle in the recession — and African-American adults especially so — we should renew our faith in the value of quality public education. Historically, it has been essential to the progress of my community. Not for nothing did the abolitionists say: “To educate a man is to unfit him to be a slave.”