Over the past 20 years, minorities have made substantial progress in raising their test scores in reading and mathematics and their Scholastic Aptitude Test scores. Nevertheless, there is still a big gap between their achievement and that of white students-and a feeling of great frustration. People want to believe the problem has a simple cause and a simple solution, even though many "solutions" have been tried, and none has lived up to expectations.
One of the many solutions was community control -- giving parents more power in school governance. In the 1960s, people believed this would turn schools around for minority youngsters; it didn't. Later on, there were court decisions based on the belief that, if teachers learned to understand and speak black English, there would be a dramatic improvement in achievement among black students. This, too, failed.
The latest proposed solution is based on the theory that white kids do well because the curriculum in place makes them feel as though they are at the center of the universe. Its proponents believe that rewriting the curriculum so that it is "Afrocentric" will give African-American students this feeling of centrality. And they hope that, as the new curriculum raises students' feelings of self-esteem, it will also raise their achievement levels.
School boards and superintendents go along with these solutions because they feel vulnerable. They haven't made as much progress in raising minority achievement as they had wanted, and they hope this new idea will work. Adopting it will at least show that the schools are trying. Some school managers also think that, if a particular group wants something that doesn't cost money, why should they stand in the way?
These are not the best ways to make educational decisions. Making widespread changes when there is no evidence that they work is bad practice. And what about the intellectual soundness of such a curriculum? In an article that appeared in Network News and Views (February 1991), Erich Martel, a teacher of world and American history in the D.C. public schools, offers a disquieting assessment of Afrocentric education.
Martel says there is no evidence that an Afrocentric curriculum will improve students' self-esteem. In fact, he quotes a leading advocate of Afrocentric education, Asa Hilliard III, to support his point. (No one, as far as Hilliard knows, "has done the research to be able to say, other than by impression or opinion, what's going to happen.") Martel also quotes Dr. James Comer, a pioneer in working with disadvantaged children in inner-city schools, who puts rewriting the curriculum "well down the list" of things that are helpful in improving children's self-esteem.
A bigger problem, according to Martel, is that the history in the best-known Afrocentric curriculum is more "myths" and "half-truths" than history. What does that mean? And why does it matter?.
History is not written in stone. In each era, scholars reexamine what historians of the past have said; they look anew at historical records and rummage around for data that have previously been ignored. As a result of this painstaking process, historians challenge and modify -or even discard ideas that were once accepted. But the process doesn't stop there; work done by individuals becomes part of tile body of history only when it is widely accepted by other historians.
Martel gives, as examples, W.E.B. DuBois and John Hope Franklin. Following accepted principles for doing historical research, they came up with new interpretations of data, which turned around the commonly accepted view about the Reconstruction period. The community of historians, both black and white, accepted their views. They didn't write "black" history; they wrote history-and it passed muster.
But, according to Martel, the writers of these new Afrocentric curriculums don't follow in the footsteps of DuBois, Franklin or any of the other historians who helped correct American history so that it includes the contributions of black Americans. Instead, these "experts," most of, whom are not historians, create their own versions of history without the necessary scholarship and fend off criticism by calling white critics "racist" and black ones "dupes."
We should not support curriculums that scholars say are filled with "myths" and "half-truths." Instead, we should support proposals that will allow more time for teaching history -- like the one with which Martel concludes his article. He calls for three I-year courses with strong multicultural emphases:
This will enable us to give proper attention to Africa, from evolution to antiquity, through the slave trade and colonialism down to the regaining of independence in the 20th Century. African history, just as the history of other global regions, is replete with examples of the triumphs and achievements of humanity as well as its follies and setbacks. Its history doesn't need to be glorified or distorted for its significance and lessons to be appreciated. It needs to be included-on the basis of accurate scholarship.