The Struggle for Control of the Education of Black Children

By Dr. Josef Ben Levi

Presented by Omni-U Virtual University 

“When Black children are denied their full history, they are denied their identity, their agency, and their inheritance.

Historical Justice Press Journal (2025)*

It continues to be part of a campaign of resistance to Black educational growth.”

Supreme Court decisions, such as Brown v. Board of Education  (1954), established the educational imperative that included  the creation of tracking systems to keep the majority of African Americans out of college preparatory courses, i.e., Advance Placement courses in Math, Science and History - as well as the watering down and eroding of Black history.These are all symbols of strong White resistance through what is known, in Latin, as “argumentum ad silencio historico,” the argument from silence.  

Silence is not just absence. Silence is power. In U.S. history, silence has been one of the most effective tools to protect “White supremacy” while erasing Black truth. 

This is why the silence of Linda McMahon, current U.S. Secretary of Education, matters so deeply. She has not come out openly saying she wants to ban Black history — but her refusal to affirm that it belongs in public classrooms is its own kind of violence. It is the continuation of a long campaign to prioritize White education while making Black education optional, marginal, or dangerous. (HJP, 2025) It continues to be part of a campaign of resistance to Black educational growth.

This resistance would come in the form of IQ Testing and the assumptions raised by presumed low intelligence as well as  segregation in schools (tracking Black children into “slow” classes) (Terman, 1916). 

Psychologists like Henry Goddard argued that entire racial groups were “feebleminded.” Labels of “gifted” or “low-performing”  still shape educational futures early on — often along racial and economic lines (Gould, 1916). If test scores and IQ numbers were once used to rank, exclude, and sterilize, maybe it’s time to ask: what are we really measuring — and who benefits from reducing human potential to a number?

Some conservative Blacks and Whites have even suggested that, to overcome their current problem, Blacks should abandon their Black collective identity and deal with their individuality (D'Souza, 1995). That is such a ridiculous proposition. Are Black people in America supposed to digest as their reality the notion of cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) within the context of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's social contract? (Rousseau, 1743/1968). What about Rousseau's discussion of the origins of inequality among the human races (Rousseau, 1755/1993). How deeply was France engaged in the African “slave trade” when he was writing on these subjects in the 18th century?

What nation of people denies their self-worth at the expense of another? What kind of sense does that make? Are Whites in America or Western Europe for that matter, willing to give up their nationalist leanings? I think not! There are no societies that have abandoned their collective cultural identities, including White Western societies. But, in the case of Africans in America this has been touted as a prerequisite for acceptance into society.

These actions by the White resistors led to the movement for a culturally relevant and responsive curriculum   instead of the one Whites deliberately structured- a system which fortified the existing racial order that White-washed the curriculum and left AfricanAmericans...  

 ignorant of their cultural and linguistic histories (Pinar, 1994).

African American activists saw that "desegregation" was not an answer since its philosophy redefined and ignored questions of power and deprivation in African American communities. 

Educational institutions then became the focus of African American power advocacy. Like their predecessors in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, they saw that education was a political issue and that the standard curriculum was at its focus. Activists rallied to change textbooks with racist and exclusionary language; to include African Americans in  textbooks, and  a revised curriculum that included the experiences of African American people as well as different learning styles and other ways of teaching diverse students. 

One example of this activism took place in New York City, where one of the first contemporary movements for “community control of African American schools” took place. When African Americans took control of the educational destiny of their communities -including the implementation of an African-Centered curriculum in New York with a community school project, which was opposed by White teaches as reverse racism. White teachers  refused to participate in the change the African American community was demanding and went on strike. 

Those teachers and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) took the community schooling project to court and the courts ruled in their favor. Consequently, the White teachers regained  control of the schools and the attempt by African Americans to control the educational destiny of their children was terminated. 

Many people in the African American community saw African-Centered content, African American teachers and administrators in African American schools as a way of showing that education was overly political and that politics was an important component in the battle for educational equality (Watkins, 1993). Yet, could it ever have been possible for African American teachers to have pulled off the reverse activity in a White school district and have the courts rule in their favor?

Starting with the Nixon administration- right through to the Reagan administration -reductions or elimination of the “Great Society Programs”, started by Lyndon Baines Johnson in the 1980s,  were abolished. This led to reduced student performance in math, writing, and reading, reduced tax bases, reduced federal and state funding, and an increase in poverty and a lack of health care through urban renewal, gentrification and the relocation of employment opportunities to the suburbs.

In integrated schools, tracking systems reinforced inequalities through lower tracks with lower quality teaching and a weak curriculum for African American students based on the theory of “cultural-deprivation”. American public schools have emphasized negative pathological labels such as “at-risk”, “cultural-deficit”, and “disadvantaged” as a theoretical rationale for educational policy making (Watkins, 1993). Differences in curriculum materials and other educational resources also came into play.

These were designed to track African American students into special education classes and lower tracks which were in contrast to evidence that showed when African American students are given the proper resources and support in the affluent suburban schools, they do better than their urban counterparts (Artiles, 2002; Connor & Ferri, 2005). The evidence is clear when it comes to the distinction between access to resources offered to African American students or what Sonia Neito calls a "resource gap" (Neito, 2006), and White students in relation to student outcomes. One other concern is that teachers ,less prepared to confront urban African American students, stereotype them because of cultural misunderstandings.

One of the consequences of the resource gap is that fewer African Americans go into teaching. Teacher certification testing has also had a negative effect on the supply of African American teachers. There is a direct correlation between the quality of instruction and the level of learning received by African American students. Yet, the level of instruction for African American students is lower than for White students.

Inequalities are also expanded by standards, accountability, high-stakes testing, and other restrictions. Standards based on rhetoric  while appealing, cannot assess issues of school improvement or create educational opportunities where they do not exist (Lipman, 2004). Accountability schemes force teachers to teach to the test and not to necessary skills sets. Classrooms known for drill and kill do not allow students to talk about what they know, read real books, do research, write, or construct and solve problems. State efforts to set standards fail to offer equal opportunities to learn. Lawsuits argue that standards must be met by all students, yet those students are not provided with the resources to meet those standards. In most cases states argue successfully that "money does not make a difference in educational outcomes." (Darling-Hammond & Williamson & Hyler, 2007).

During the 1960s, there was a call by parents and community leaders for ”community control” of schools. The second development was a call for the popularization of African-Centered ideas and the pembrace of African culture by African Americans. The movement to infuse African-centered curriculum into the Philadelphia school system serves as a model to evaluate the problems inherent in this attempt. It is worth noting here that there has not been any formally agreed upon criteria for what constitutes an African-Centered curriculum. Nonetheless, based on my review of the works of key players in this movement, a comprehensive African-Centered curriculum would strive toward the following five goals; first, assist students in developing the necessary intellectual, moral, and emotional skills for accomplishing a productive, affirming life in this society. Second, provide such educational instruction as to deconstruct established hegemonic pillars and to safeguard against the construction of new ones. Third, provide students of African descent with educational instruction that uses techniques that are in accord with their learning styles. Fourth, assist students of African descent in maintaining a positive self-concept, with the goal of achieving a sense of collective accountability. Finally, serve as a model for J.A. Banks’ "Transformation" and "Social Action" approaches to multicultural education (1988).

Decentralization of schools only menially provides parents with some control over how their children are educated. These events are enhanced by the fact that the majority of teachers, who are of Western European descent, are resistant to changing the normal course of business and it illustrates the actual power parents and community can weld when unified. Yet, there was a clear distinction in the change that occurred in the students with people and ideas they could readily identify with.

With the turn of the century and the transition from an agrarian economy to a post-industrial market society, there were significant changes occurring in the structure of the family and the workplace. As fewer women and children were engaged in factory work, this led to a movement to find something for idle children to do especially for those young people who were approaching high school age (Muller, 2013). To buffer that possibility, the Western academy invented a neutral, compromise educational field of study that they hoped would neutralize the African-centered movement. They called that new educational field multiculturalism.

J. A.Banks argues that "multiculturalism" is a "contribution approach" which is seriously limiting because it does not provide students with a global view. Multiculturalism in education, which was in fact started by an African American scholar in the 1880s named Dr. George Washington Williams (Franklin, 1985), was not originally a White liberal idea nor is African-Centered education a sub-field of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism's proponents argue that it allows for the forging of a homogeneous American culture, yet it ignores the important contributions of people of non-Western cultural heritage by maintaining White American intellectual hegemony. 

Multiculturalism has been more accepted as an infusion model of curriculum reform, which is the White academic compromise movement that merely supports recognition of ethnic holidays and selected ethnic heroes. The discussion of multiculturalism at school board meetings, however, has served as an inroad to the African-Centered voice (Banks, 1993).

BLOGNOTE

*Historical Justice Press (HJP). (2025). Linda McMahon and the Silence Agenda: Protecting White Education While Erasing Black Truth. 

Linda McMahon and the Silence Agenda: Protecting White Education While Erasing Black Truth. 

https://medium.com/@bmwbjwgtk/linda-mcmahon-and-the-silence-agenda-protecting-white-education-while-erasing-black-truth-9ea49a88700

Recommended Readings 

Watkins, William H. White Architects of Black Education.  

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed 

References

Artiles, A. J., Harry, B., Reschly, D. J., & Chinn, P. C. (2002). Over-identification of students of color in special education: A Critical overview. Multicultural Perspectives, 4, 3-10. January 2002.

Banks, J.A. (1993). The cannon debate, knowledge construction, and multicultural education, Educational Researcher, 22 (5), 4-14.

Darling-Hammond, L., & Williamson, J.A., & Hyler, M.E. (2007). Securing the right to learn: The quest for an empowering curriculum for African American citizens. The Journal of Negro Education, 76 (3), 281-296.

D'Souza, D. (1995). The end of racism: Principles for a multiracial society. New York: The Free Press.

Ferri, B. A., & Connor, D. J. (2005). Tools of Exclusion: Race, Disability, and (Re)segregated education. Teachers College Record, 107(3), 453–474.

Franklin, J.H. (1985). George Washington Williams: A biography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gould, S.J. (1996). The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Historical Justice Press (HJP). (2025). Linda McMahon and the Silence Agenda: Protecting White Education While Erasing Black Truth. https://medium.com/@bmwbjwgtk/linda-mcmahon-and-the-silence-agenda-protecting-white-education-while-erasing-black-truth-9ea49a88700e

Lipman, P. (2004). High stakes education: Inequality, globalization, and urban school reform. New York: RoutledgeFalmer.

Muller, J.Z. (2013). Capitalism and inequality: What the right and the left get wrong. Foreign Affairs, 92 (2), 30-51.

Nieto, S. (2006). The Longfellow lectures; Teaching as political work: Learning from courageous and caring teachers. Westchester: Sarah Lawrence College.

Nisbett, R. E. (2009). Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count. New York: W. W. Norton.

Pinar, W.T. (1994). Autobiography, politics and sexuality: Essays in curriculum theory 1972-1992. New York: Peter Lang.

Rousseau, J.J. (1743/1968). The social contract or the principles of political right. London: Penguin Classics.

Rousseau, J.J. (1755/1993). A discourse on a subject proposed by the academy of Dijon: What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law. London: Penguin Classics.

Terman, L.M. (1916). The Measurement of Intelligence. Boston: Houghton -Mifflin.

Watkins, W.H. (1993). Black curriculum orientations: A preliminary inquiry. Harvard Educational Review, (63) 4, 312-338.