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Race and Prosperity: Why Reading, Math, and Social Development Are Key
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20143 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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2 / 1992 |
5,527 Words |
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Ronald F. Ferguson
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Politically, African American males have progressed a great deal over the past few decades. Today, in 1991, we are firmly entrenched in the leadership ranks of the nation's largest cities. Carl Stokes, the first African American to head a major city, become the mayor of Cleveland in 1967. Over the next two decades, blacks won mayoral seats in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroti, Cleveland, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Atlanta, New Orleans, and other cities. As a consequence, more resources than ever before flowed from government coffers into African American communities: Black people got jobs, and black businesses got contracts.
A younger generation of mayors, including Michael White of Cleveland and Kurt Schmoke of Baltimore, is evidence that a second wave is under way. Beyond city hall, an African American male sits as the governor of Virginia. Another chairs the U.S. military joint chiefs of staff. Political pundits suggest that both men are serious vice presidential possibilities for 1992.
Black males have progressed on other fronts as well. For example, the gap between blacks and whites in average years of schooling has virtually closed because of rising high school graduation rates for blacks; standardized test scores have risen steadily; the rate of childbirth for black teenagers has fallen (but not as fast as the marriage rate); and the murder rate for black adult males, while rising since 1984, is nevertheless lower than in the early 1970s. The story regarding college attendance is mixed, but still hopeful. The rate at which black high school graduates entered college rose through the early 1970s, fell from the late 1970s until the mid-1980s, and began to rise again in 1986. For whites, the trend was flat in the late 1970s and rising in the 1980s.
While young black males have been closing the gap with white males in years of education and in reading and math skills, differences nevertheless remain. These difference have been growing in economic importance. The evolving structure of demand for goods and services, technological change, and shifts in the international division of labor are causing the U.S. income distribution to become more unequal. Across the economy, differences in rates of pay between people with more skill and education versus those with less have been expanding.
These changes in the economy have been so profound that real incomes (i.e., incomes adjusted for inflation) for young men in the United States have fallen since 1973 for all but college-trained whites. Indeed, even as
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