Wisdom, and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislatures and magistrates, in all future periods of this commonwealth, to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them . . . John Adams, Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1780.

Each year New York City’s elite Stuyvesant High School admits on the basis of the Specialized High School Admissions Test nearly 1,000 ninth grade students, fewer than 10 of whom are Black, about 10 percent from the Black and Hispanic groups combined.  

The SHSAT, essentially a math test, violates a cardinal principle of test design:  It is not aligned with the New York City Mathematics curriculum (or even with the rest of the city’s curricula). Also, no one really passes it because admitting schools determine who can get in without so much as a set cut score, and its purpose since the passage of the Hecht-Calandra Act in 1971 is for discrimination and exclusion, a point previously made on these pages.

However, its annual results are effective in drawing attention to the inequities in the opportunity to learn across the city’s neighborhoods and among its racial and ethnic groups of students.

New York State’s Mathematics Assessment at grade 8, when the SHSAT is given, allocates student performance in four categories:  Levels 1 to 4. It is reasonable to assume that students scoring at Level 4 would be well-qualified for attempting the further hurdle of the specialized high school test if that test were aligned with the curriculum they had studied. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that was in fact the case.  We can then look at the opportunity available to students in New York City to learn Mathematics to that level. 

The inequitable distribution across the city of opportunities to learn Mathematics, as well as other subjects, is an institutional barrier to educational achievement for many of the city’s children. It would be unacceptable if the quality of water or electricity differed dramatically from neighborhood to neighborhood in New York City.  All the more unacceptable is it that the quality of education provided by the city schools differs, as it does, so dramatically from one neighborhood to the next from one racial or ethnic group to the next.  As John Adams wrote, it is the duty of civic officials to “cherish” education everywhere, not only in certain privileged groups and neighborhoods.

City-wide, 44 percent of Asian students, 29 percent of White students, 10 percent of Hispanic students and only 8 percent of Black/African American students reach Level 4 in Mathematics in grade 8. Why are there those differences in achievement? Is it a matter of cultural differences? That is often suggested, but it is unlikely, as, for one thing, these commonly used racial and ethnic categories are misleadingly homogenized.

If we examine the group most commonly the locus of the cultural difference argument, there are between two and three times as many Chinese as Asian Indian residents of the city; 70,700 Chinese students k-12 compared with 36,000 Asian Indian k-12 students (and only 5,400 Korean children k-12). There are 50,900 Chinese, 24,200 Asian Indian and 12,100 Korean students enrolled in college or graduate school. A third of Chinese adult are without a high school diploma, but only 20 percent of Asian Indian adults are without that minimal qualification and only 8 percent of Korean adults. While just under one-third of Chinese adults in the city have attained a Bachelor’s degree or higher, 44 percent of Asian Indian adults have reached that educational level, as have 55 percent of Korean adults. Median household incomes also vary within the Asian category: from $57,000 for Chinese households, to $68,000 for Korean and $77,000 for Asian Indian households. (The city average is $61,000.)

We therefore find, considering just these three, that “Asian” includes many groups with differing educational needs and resources, varying from the comparatively disadvantaged Chinese residents to the comparatively highly advantaged Asian Indian residents.  No argument about a unified Asian “culture of achievement” seems possible to sustain in the face of these differences.

If not culture, what? For one thing, differences in family resources are well-known to have an effect on individual student educational opportunities. Parental educational attainment strongly affects student achievement in the absence of a public school system fit for purpose.

Just 5 percent of students whose parents did not finish high school reached the “Advanced” level on the grade 8 Mathematics Assessment of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. That’s roughly equivalent to New York Level 4, as did 12 percent of grade 8 students whose parents graduated from college. Household income is another well-known factor affecting student educational achievement in the absence of an equitable public schools system. According to NAEP, only 6 percent of New York grade 8 students who are eligible for the National Lunch program score at the Advanced level in Mathematics; 15 percent of those not eligible, those from more prosperous families, test at the Advanced level in grade 8 Mathematics. (National School Lunch Program eligibility is based on family income.) 

A student eligible for the National Lunch Program, whose parents did not graduate from high school, or whose parents only graduated from high school, is at a compounded disadvantage in relation to a student from a more prosperous family of college graduates.  Why is that?  College educated parents are likely to encourage and expect educational achievement from their children and advocate for high standards of instruction in their children’s schools, provide extra-curricular educational opportunities at home or elsewhere and those with higher incomes can afford other supplementary educational opportunities for their children (including expensive tutoring for the SHSAT). On the basis of parental educational levels and family income Asian Indian and Korean students have an advantage over Chinese students within the Asian category.  This, again, in the absence of a public school system that sets its goal at a standard for all students, not just the fortunate.

“Hispanic,” similarly, is a heterogeneous category, including 700,000 Puerto Ricans and 700,000 Dominicans, 162,000 residents of Mexican origin and many other groups among the 2.5 million Hispanic residents of the city.  Just 18 percent of Hispanic adults in New York City have attained a Bachelor’s degree or higher: fewer in the Puerto Rican and Dominican and Central American groups, only 9 percent among adults of Mexican origin. Median household income for Hispanics is $42,000. 

Black residents of the city are also a varied group.  For example, nearly 200,000 Black residents of New York City are from Jamaica, others from other Latin American countries, still others from Africa. New Yorkers of Jamaican origin have a median household income of $59,490 and a 22 percent rate of college graduation. Overall Black adult education attainment, Bachelor’s degree and higher, is 25 percent and median Black household income is $45,000.

Compare to White, non-Hispanic, educational attainment, Bachelor’s degree and higher, which is 51 percent. Median White household income is $81,000. As with the others, New York’s White, non-Hispanic, population is mixed: 930,000 of White residents are foreign-born:  half from Europe, more than one-third from Latin America.  Forty percent of foreign-born White, non-Hispanic, New Yorkers speak a language other than English in the home.

Poverty rates also contribute to inequities in home and extra-curricular educational opportunities:  20 percent of Asian Indian and Chinese and only 6 percent of Korean children under 18 live in poverty compared with 30 percent of Black and 33 percent of Hispanic children, making it all the more difficult for the families of the latter to compensate for the inadequacies of the public schools their children attend. The home resource education advantage of White, non-Hispanic, children in New York over Hispanic children is 33 percent in educational attainment and $39,000 in median household income, over Black children 26 percent and $36,000. The advantage of Asian Indian children over Black children is close: 19 percent in parental educational attainment and $32,000 in median household income.  Chinese and Korean children also have considerable advantages in household income and adult educational attainment over average Black and Hispanic children. 

There is no need to resort to cultural issues for explanations of the lack of equal educational achievement in New York City.

The argument here is that these city-wide differences in average racial and ethnic family resources should be factored in when calculating the educational resources necessary to achieve equity in opportunity.

The inequities in educational opportunities in New York City are made much worse, because the educational opportunities of students in New York vary by race/ethnicity within, as well as between, neighborhoods. The city has 32 Geographic School Districts across its five boroughs.  The percentages of students taught well enough to reach Level 4 in grade 8 Mathematics varies by district, that is, by neighborhood, from 3 percent to ten times that.  A random student in District 5 could increase the likelihood of reaching Level 4 nearly five-fold through the simple expedient of moving across 122^nd Street to District 3.  Or, to put it another way, a given student in Community School District 3 would see her chances of becoming “proficient” in Mathematics reduced from 14 percent to 3 percent if she happened to move a block into District 3. This situation is by no means unique to Districts 3 and 5.  There are even more dramatic examples elsewhere in the city.

Neighborhood school district results by race and ethnicity show wide variations from the city-wide averages. Considered by district, Asian Level 4 Mathematics percentages range from 10 percent to 57 percent; White student Proficiency percentages range from 5 percent to 55 percent; Hispanics from 2 percent to 19 percent and Black Level 4 Proficiency percentages range among districts from 1 percent to 15 percent.  There is, then, an overlap in the 10 percent-15 percent range of outcomes for all students. In other words, it appears that student performance changes with variations in the opportunity to learn provided by the schools in their district, exacerbated by racial and ethnic variations in such factors as parental income and educational attainment.  For example, a Black student in Districts 20 or 17 has a better chance of being taught Mathematics to Level 4 than an Asian student in District 27.  A Hispanic student in District 21 has a better chance of being taught Mathematics to Level 4 than a White, non-Hispanic student in District 13.  Some of New York’s neighborhood Districts provide better instruction to all students, without regard to race, ethnicity and parental factors.  Others provide inadequate opportunities to learn for all their students. Most Black and Hispanic students are in those districts.

Furthermore, even if there were equal provision of education resources in the schools, Asian Indian students in New York City would have a large advantage based on parental education level alone and an additional advantage based on their relatively high median household income, followed by White, Korean and Chinese students, in this manner having a wider range of opportunities than Hispanic and Black students.  This appears to be borne out based on New York State Mathematics tests and the SHSAT results.

It is invidious to shrug and attribute student education outcomes to what has been called “pre-conception I.Q.,” the ability to choose wealthy or highly educated parents.  It is the duty of the schools to ensure that the outcomes of education are not simply an artifact of where students began.  And it is the duty of “magistrates and legislatures” to allocate resources where they are needed in order to support educators in that endeavor, not least because, especially today, “Wisdom, and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people [are] necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties.”

Based simply on how it miseducates Black and Latino children, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest school district in America, is even more racist in its outcomes than the larger and notoriously racist New York City public schools. Dropout Nation readers, who have read numerous pieces here about the district, have long ago known this. But the crisis bears repeating over and over again.

As mathematics is increasingly important for employment and participation in society, we can take the extent to which L.A. Unified is successful—or not—teaching mathematics as a meaningful indicator of its success as an educational institution. We can look at whether it is successful in educating all the children in its care.

First, some context.  Los Angeles, the city, has roughly the same number of residents reporting themselves to the Census as “White alone” as “Hispanic” at two million each, nearly half a million reporting as “Asian,” and not quite 400,000 reporting as “Black or African American.” [The surrounding communities also served by L.A. Unified differ little demographically from L.A. itself.] These proportions are quite different from those of the nation, with 236 million “White alone,” 41.4 million “Black or African American,” 58.8 million “Hispanic,” and 18 million “Asian alone.”

Los Angeles is less White, more Hispanic, less Black and more Asian that the United States in general. However, as with the rest of the nation, White, non-Hispanic, and Asian residents of the city have higher incomes and higher levels of educational attainment—factors increasingly tightly linked—than its Hispanic and Black residents. It is not too much to say that it is because the city’s White, non-Hispanic, and Asian residents have higher levels of educational attainment that they have higher incomes.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress measures Mathematics, Reading and other subjects at grades 4, 8, and 12.  The assessments at grade 8 are useful as indicators of the quality of education provided by districts and states as by then students have been in school for most of their lives and there is little change in achievement levels afterwards. People who were strong in mathematics in middle school are likely to be strong in math in later grades; people who did not do well with math in middle school are unlikely to become mathematically literate in later life.

NAEP allows analysis for racial/ethnic groups and eligibility for free or reduced-price meals—a measure of income—among other factors.  In 2017, nationally, a quarter of White, non-Hispanic, students in grade 8, qualifying for free or reduced price meals (that is, relatively poor) scored at or above Proficient on the Mathematics assessment, while more than half of White, non-Hispanic students, who were from families with incomes too high to qualify, scored at the Proficient or Above levels.  Just over a third of the poorer White, non-Hispanic, students and 14 percent of the more prosperous White, non-Hispanic, students were reported as scoring “Below Basic,” that is, they could not do middle school mathematics.  In other words, most White, non-Hispanic, students, and the great majority of those from middle class families, could do some middle school mathematics.

The latter higher income group of students, as you would expect, often can count on help from other sources: parents, tutors, private after-school classes and all around better resourced schools. These family resources may be taken as totaling an amount equal to at least an additional one-third to one-half of the public investment for each child, while the public resources—the greater funding of suburban schools—in many places double the investment in the education of less privileged children.

On the other hand, NAEP finds that nearly 60 percent of Black and 48 percent of Hispanic students whose families have incomes low enough to qualify for the National School Lunch Program in eighth grade score at the Below basic level on the Mathematics assessment.  Most poor Asian and White students learn at least some middle school mathematics; half of Hispanic and most Black students do not.

That is the national picture.

This racial gap is much worse in Los Angeles with its extreme income inequalities. A demographic map of Los Angeles would hardly show more strictly defined concentrations of racial and ethnic groups if segregation were legally enforced. The center of the urban area is nearly exclusively Black. The arc of the area, from Pasadena to Malibu, White, non-Hispanic, and the remainder Hispanic apart from two or three Asian areas.

This sociopolitical segregation is also economic segregation. For example, Watts, the classic Black neighborhood of the city, has a median household income of $25,000 per year. Average household incomes in the predominately White, non-Hispanic, areas to the north and west begin at $60,000 and rise rapidly through the $100,000s.

The Opportunity Atlas of Raj Chetty’s group at Harvard shows that a Black child born into what passes for a middle income family in the South Figueroa area can look forward to living as an adult in a household with an income of $20,000 a year.  A White child in, say, the not particularly wealthy Baldwin Hills area, $65,000.

In general, White, non-Hispanic, and Asian households in Los Angeles have above average incomes, Black and Hispanic households have below average incomes. Consequently, there are not enough White, non-Hispanic, and Asian middle school students eligible for the National Lunch Program in LAUSD for NAEP to legally count. And there are not enough Black middle school students who are not eligible for the National Lunch Program for NAEP to count.  Only Hispanic students are represented on both sides of the income divide.

These racial, ethnic and economic divisions in the city are reflected in educational outcomes. More than half—55 percent—of poor Hispanic students in Los Angeles have not learned mathematics at grade level by middle school.  Catastrophically, nearly three-quarters (72 percent) of the district’s Black students have not learned mathematics at grade level by middle school and just six percent score at or above NAEP’s “Proficient” level. On the other hand, over half of White, non-Hispanic, and Asian LAUSD middle school students learn mathematics at or above grade level and only 13 percent do not. 

Per pupil public expenditure in L.A. Unified is approximately $12,000. If we take the middle-class family-funded educational “supplement” of after-school, weekend and summer classes and other educational activities as a minimum of one-third of that, we arrive at a $16,000 public/private investment in middle class students. At 50 percent it is $18,000, an enough explanation for the racial gap in middle school mathematics achievement in the district.

Closing that gap within the district itself would require, minimally, the allocation of public funds on the same scale to schools serving impoverished Los Angeles students.  Those would go to supporting enhanced early childhood education, after-school, weekend and summer classes, more teachers and teacher training, more support personnel, smaller class sizes. These measures are substantially the unprecedented (and more-laudable) demands made by United Teachers of Los Angeles, the American Federation of Teachers local, in its strike last year.

It is remarkable that the management of the district opposed those proposals, and pitiful that victory resulted in such grudging, minimal, changes. 

Beyond the presence of former Gov. Nikki Haley and the BMW plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina has always been an unusual state. Yet its racial caste system – and how it keeps Black children from gaining high-quality education – makes it as normal as Wisconsin and Mississippi.

After Europeans arrived, they settled it with enslaved people from the rice growing regions of West Africa, who used their traditional knowledge and skills to turn the Low Country into a major source of food and indigo for the first British Empire. The slave owners, who seldom visited the malarial plantations along the coast, grew rich. The slaves, who survived, remained slaves. Away from the coast, the Piedmont foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains were settled by Scotch-Irish migrants working their way down the Appalachian Mountains.

This immigration pattern can still be seen today in the demographics of the state. The western-most counties are nearly entirely White. Though the coastal counties are now populated by White immigrants from outside the state, the Low Country is still mostly-Black.  

At the beginning of the twentieth century most farms in the center of the state were worked by tenants and sharecroppers, many of whom were White, but most of whom were Black, and they were still the majority of the state’s population. The textile and tobacco factories that were becoming common were the scenes of union organizing alternating with violent strikebreaking against the impoverished workers, Black and White, men and women.

Fitting for the place where Denmark Vesey and others were executed for leading a slave revolt at the beginning of the 19^th century, Jim Crow was particularly severe in South Carolina. The Black population disenfranchised, allowed only minimal education. J. E. Swearingen, then the state’s Superintendent of Education, wrote in his 1915 Annual Report: “The Negro . . . cannot remain ignorant without injury to himself, his white neighbors, and to the commonwealth.  [On the other hand, h]is training should fit him to do the work that is open to him.” That year, according to researcher Elspeth Smith-Stuckey, more than 90 percent of the segregated schools for Black children had only one teacher. In 1920, Superintendent Swearingen’s “reform” budget asked for $5 per Black student and $$25 per White student.

The Great Migration saw much of the Black population of the state move north, leaving more than one million descendants of enslaved Africans now living in the state continuing to suffer from the heritages of slavery and Jim Crow. Today, Black South Carolina residents are concentrated, not in the Low Country, but in a band across the middle of the state from Allendale to Marion counties, where they form more than half the population. These counties are among those in the state with the lowest per capita income and the lowest percentage of college graduates.

There is little inter-generational income mobility in South Carolina.  Nowhere in the state are a child’s chances of reaching the top fifth of the national income distribution, given parents with incomes in the bottom fifth, greater than 5 percent.  That is the average for all state residents.

It is much worse for South Carolina’s African-American residents. The Opportunity Atlas produced by Raj Chetty’s group, now at Harvard, tells us that Black children born in low-income families in Charleston County, on the South Carolina coast, as adults, on average have incomes of $24,000 (less than half the national figure), an incarceration rate of 5.6 percent, a high school graduation rate of 73 percent and a college graduation rate of 17 percent. The average Black student in the Charleston schools attends a school where two-thirds of the students are from poor families, while the average White student attends a school where just 42 percent. of the students are poor.

White adults, who as children were born into low-income families in Charleston County, on average have incomes of $35,000, an incarceration rate of 1.8 percent, a high school graduation rate of 81 percent and a college graduation rate of 24 percent. In other words, there is a $11,000 penalty for being born Black in Charleston County.

In this comparatively wealthy part of South Carolina, the chances for inter-generational upward mobility are practically inexistent for Black children.

In majority-Black Allendale County, three counties up-state from Charleston, Black children born in low-income families, as adults, on average have incomes even less than those in Charleston, $21,000, incarceration rates of 2.5 percent, a high school graduation rate of 70 percent and a college graduation rate of 19 percent, while their White peers, with the same high school graduation rate and a lower college graduation rate (15 percent), have household incomes of $32,000 and an incarceration rate of less than 1 percent.

The penalty for being born Black in Allendale County, as in Charleston County, is $11,000 less in income and twice the chance of incarceration.

The chances are similar for inter-generational mobility for those born into high-income households.  In Allendale County, a White child born into a high-income family can look forward to a household income of $54,000—$12,000 more than a White child born into a low-income family in the county.  A Black child born into a high-income family in Allendale County can look forward to achieving a household income of $29,000—$8,000 more than a Black child born into a low-income family in the county, but $3,000 less than a White child born into a low-income family in the county.

In Charleston County, a White child born into a high-income family can look forward to a household income of $52,000—$17,000 more than a White child born into a low-income family in the county.  A Black child born into a high-income family in Charleston County can achieve, on average, a household income of $36,000—$15,000 more than a Black child born into a low-income family in the county, but only $1,000 more than a White child born into a low-income family.

In spite of the comparatively low rates of White college graduation in Allendale and similar counties, state-wide, the percentage of White college graduates is more than double that of Black college graduates. More of the state’s Black residents have not finished high school (18 percent) than have graduated from college (15 percent). This has a direct effect on family and household income, as college graduates are paid more than twice what workers of the same race with less than a high school diploma are paid and those with a doctoral degree are paid three times as much as those of the same race with less than a high school diploma.

Black households South Carolina are poorer than White residents of the state and poorer than the national average for Black households. This is to be expected. It’s the legacy of White people brutally enslaving and oppressing enslaved Africans, especially after the execution of Denmark Vesey, the founder of Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church, and others for allegedly plotting a slave revolt.

Sixteen percent of Black families in South Carolina somehow live on incomes of less than $10,000 a year, nearly three times the percentage of similarly deprived White households.  The national median White household income is $63,700, for Black households it is $40,200.  In South Carolina it is $58,500 for White households and only $32,200 for Black households. The median Black family income is just over half that of White, non-Hispanic, families. In South Carolina, more than four times the percentage of White households as Black households have incomes over $200,000 per year: 4 percent compared to less than 1 percent. More than twice the national average percentage for all Americans, 42 percent, of South Carolina’s African-American households are in the bottom fifth of the national income distribution and only 7 percent have incomes in the top 20 percent of the national income distribution.

Nearly forty percent of school-age Black children in South Carolina live in poverty. Unless there is a change in the state’s education system, things will stay that way.

The National Institute for Early Education Research ranks South Carolina as 11^th among the states for access to pre-school enrolling 41 percent of its 4-year-olds in state supported pre-kindergarten programs. But it ranks only 38^th for resources provided to pre-kindergartens. High quality early childhood education programs have been shown to have positive effects on primary school learning.  However, in South Carolina, with its deficient funding of prekindergarten, and below average K-12 per student expenditures, by fourth grade nearly two-thirds of African-American students in the state’s public schools are assessed by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) as functionally illiterate (“below basic”) and just 15 percent have the expected reading skills for that grade. The comparable percentages for the state’s White students are reversed: 40 percent reading proficiently and less than a third with skills that are judged as below basic. 

The educational opportunities in the primary grades in South Carolina are clearly differentiated by race. As reported by NAEP, the state’s White fourth-graders, whether from lower- or middle-income families, read at the national averages for each of those groups. Black fourth-graders from lower-income families, that is, most Black families, have lower achievement levels than the national average for lower-income Black children. The state’s Black-White gap for lower-income student is 19 percentage points in favor of White students among those students reading at grade level. Although fourth-graders from the state’s relatively small number of middle-income Black families have higher achievement levels than the national average for their group.  Among middle-income students the gap is a virtually identical 20 percentage points in favor of White students at the proficient level.

Black students in South Carolina are twice as likely as White students to be functionally illiterate in fourth grade and are only a third as likely to be taught to read proficiently.

By eighth grade, the percentage (48 percent) of South Carolina’s Black students who are functionally illiterate has declined slightly from the percentage at fourth grade, but so has the percentage (11 percent) reading at grade level.  The White-Black gap is 30 percentage points among proficient readers and the Black-White gap is also 30 percentage points among those assessed as reading below basic, both gaps having widened after four years of schooling. More than half of the state’s Black students from lower-income families are functionally illiterate at grade eight, as are nearly a third of Black students from middle-income families. 

While 22 percent of Black students from middle-income families read at grade level, only a negligible 8 percent of those Black students from lower-income families have been taught by the South Carolina schools to be proficient readers. A White, non-Hispanic, student from a lower-income family is more likely to read proficiently than a Black student from a middle-income family and less likely to have been left functionally illiterate by their school. Having college-educated parents gives White students in South Carolina a 33 percentage point advantage over those with parents without a high school diploma, but the gap between Black students with college-educated parents and those with only a high school education is just 7 percentage points. A White student whose parents did not finish high school is more likely to be taught by their school to read proficiently than a Black child of college graduates.

Negative school effects in South Carolina overwhelm family education levels for Black children.

South Carolina fails to educate both Black and White children to the national averages for those groups, White children only marginally less, Black children very much less well. While nationally, in 2017, 18 percent of Black children in grade 8 read “proficiently” or above according to NAEP, in South Carolina just 11 percent achieved that level.  There has been some progress in the reading levels of Black children nationally; there has been none for Black children in South Carolina.

One explanation for these differences in educational opportunities might be found in the historic and continuing racial segregation of the schools in South Carolina.  According to data from Brown University’s US Schools index, in the Charleston metropolitan area, for example, where half the students are White and over one-third are Black, a White elementary school student is likely to be in a school where two-thirds of the other students are White, while a Black elementary student will be in a school that where over half the other students are Black. Due to persistent segregation the average Black student will be in a school that is 62 percent poor, regardless of the income level of that student’s own family.

Another factor restricting educational opportunities is school discipline practices.  The latest year for which state-level school discipline data is available from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is 2013-14. That year, 35 percent of students in South Carolina were Black and 53 percent White, but 61 percent of students given at least one out-of-school suspension were Black as compared to 31 percent who were White. Research has shown that school discipline rates are in large part determined by racial attitudes of teachers and administrators. Higher rates of out-of-school suspensions and expulsions are associated with repeated grades and failure to graduate from high school.

The educational opportunities available in South Carolina’s schools culminate with (or without) high school graduation.  According to the South Carolina state “report card,” the 4-year adjusted cohort graduation rate reported by South Carolina for the 2016-17 school year was 83 percent for Black students and 86 percent for White students. However, the percentage of students meeting the ACT College-Ready Benchmark in English was only 17 percent for Black students (and 53 percent for White students). Just half of African-American students in South Carolina who took the SAT in 2018 met the College Board’s College and Career Readiness Benchmark in English, compared to 86 percent of White students.  Half of Black SAT test takers met neither the English nor the Math Benchmark, as compared to just 12 percent of White South Carolina test-takers. If a South Carolina high school diploma were meaningful, this would give a graduation rate of just over 40 percent, rather than 83 percent, for Black students.

South Carolina no longer has legally segregated schools, but its schools remain largely segregated by race and doubly so by income.  The result is that although nearly a quarter of Black students from middle-income families in the state are taught to read at the expected level in middle school, fewer than a tenth of Black students from lower-income families are taught to read proficiently and half are left functionally illiterate.  Even those Black students from middle-income families are only half as likely to be taught to read proficiently as are their White peers and nearly a third of them are left functionally illiterate.  The consequences can be seen in the Bureau of the Census’s economic and educational attainment data for the state given above.  South Carolina’s Black citizens remain in the situation defined for them by the Founder’s at three-fifths of that of their White neighbors.