The Achievement Gap Before Kindergarten

If this report from the U. S. Department of Education about the existence of a significant achievement gap between black and white children before kindergarten is even 50% accurate, it should disturb us all.  I learned of the report from the November 19, 2009 online publication Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (see enclosure) and the gaps are in such fundamental skills as letter recognition, reading, vocabulary, elementary phonics, recognition of shapes, counting, and other basic math.
 
This suggests a serious lack of attention and direction at home and, even more frightening, the possible inability of parents to teach such skills.  Whatever the causes, this demands intervention and remediation.
 
Maybe it is time again for community service organizations to step in.
 
What if black churches, fraternal and sororal groups, local school and college volunteers could/would offer simple skills tests to children to identify their shortcomings and then work with individual children (or small groups) to shore up those skills?  It has been done in the past and with sufficient will, can be done again.
 
Embarrassment, ridicule and lack of self-esteem gnaws at the gut of young children and the harm done is sometimes irreparable.  In our society where literacy and technical skills are the mother’s milk of advancement, failure so early in life can too often induce bitterness, dysfunction and disaster.
 
Somehow we must control and eventually douse this flame; otherwise it becomes an inferno that might consume us all.

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From Oslo, Norway

Through the kindness of friends in Scandinavia and intervention from on high, I received a personal invitation to the Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony in the Oslo, Norway City Hall on December 10th and to the Nobel Peace Prize Concert on December 11th in the Oslo Spektrum.  In fact, I write you from Oslo where the Norwegian Nobel Committee will confer this most prestigious award upon President Barack Obama tomorrow.

As was our good fortune to attend President Obama’s inauguration in Washington on January 20, 2009, Professor S. Allen Counter, neurobiologist and Director of the Harvard Foundation and I are here to witness another historic recognition of this gifted leader.  It is coincidental (or is it?) that he receives the prize one day before the release of the film Invictus in which Morgan Freedom plays the role of President Nelson Mandela of South Africa in the 1990s.

Twenty years ago President Obama was a second-year student at Harvard Law School and President Mandela was serving a life sentence in prison in South Africa. What dreamer could possibly have envisioned that these men would become president of their countries AND WIN THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE?!?  They did and, in so doing, demonstrated our potential for change so profound that it seems surreal to those of us who can remember apartheid and Jim Crow.

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