Dr. Jawanza Kunjufu recently died at the age of 71. He was best known for his 1980s series Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys. Kunjufu identified a problem he labeled “fourth grade failure syndrome.”
Black boys appear to perform well in primary grades (1-3) but don’t transition well into the intermediate grades (4-5). Beginning in fourth grade, children go from learning to read to reading to learn. When black boys do not have a successful transition, they fall behind in reading comprehension. As a result, these students lose interest in their schoolwork and eventually disengage from academics entirely by the time they reach high school.
It was assumed that the decline in Black male achievement began in high school, when peer groups became the major influence. Kunjufu’s discovery helped educators realize that intervention measures were needed before middle school, not during high school when it was too late.
Kunjufu also noticed that teachers failed to recognize the differences in learning styles between boys and girls. He said, “Two-thirds of children and an even larger percentage of Black boys are right-brain learners (visual pictures, oral/auditory), but 90 percent of the lessons are oriented toward left-brain learners (visual-print.)” Kunjufu argued that teachers cannot just teach what they want to teach. They must teach in the same way that their students learn.
But who is doing the majority of the teaching?
Kunjufu remarked that “83% of elementary school teachers in America are White females.” That means that “the future of the Black race is in the hands of White female teachers, yet many will admit they did not receive one class on Black history, Black culture, or Black male learning styles in college.”
Kunjufu stated that there should be more Black male teachers in elementary schools to combat the “biases in education that lower expectations for Black boys and hinder their academic success.”
At the turn of the century, President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. It increased funding for poor school districts, emphasized higher achievements for poor and minority students, and set new measures to hold schools accountable for their students’ progress. It also enlarged the use of standardized testing by requiring students in grades 3–8 to take reading and math tests every year to ensure they are at grade level.
Bush developed the concept of No Child Left Behind after learning about a crisis while serving as governor of Texas. According to a top advisor to Bush, the Texas Education Agency reported that 33,000 children failed the third-grade minimum reading skills exam. Bush inquired about what had happened to the children who failed. The bureaucrats informed him that 29,000 children had been promoted to the fourth grade. The meeting convinced Bush to make a reading initiative a top priority. When Bush traveled the state seeking support, an elderly teacher told him that his initiative would fail because there are just “some kids” who can’t read.
“Some kids” referred to minorities.
The Bush administration later referred to the elderly teacher’s viewpoint as “the bigotry of low expectations.” Bush attempted to remedy a problem that Kunjufu had identified two decades earlier.
By this time, Kunjufu was dealing with another problem.
When the elderly teacher told Bush about “some kids,” it hinted at an ulterior motive behind special education. Kunjufu observed that Black boys made up only 8% of the public school student population but constituted almost 30% of the students placed in special education. He insisted that special education was “never designed to be a dumping ground for black boys.” Kunjufu described the situation as similar to the one he encountered while writing Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys.
In 2005, Kunjufu published Keeping Black Boys Out of Special Education.
He posed a series of questions: “Why are African American males placed in special education more than any other group? Is there a link between special education and imprisonment? Is illiteracy a forerunner to imprisonment? Why are White girls the least likely to be placed in special education? Why are White males more likely to be placed in special education than White females? Have we constructed a feminine classroom and shoved male students inside?”
Ten years later, researchers revealed a national trend.
Girls outperformed boys in practically every measure of social, academic, and vocational well-being, prompting philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers to publish an updated edition of her controversial 2000 book The War Against Boys.
Sommers noted that girls were originally treated as second-class citizens in public schools, but the country responded by making serious attempts to remove patriarchal bias from the educational system. However, under the pretense of assisting girls, public schools have implemented policies that penalize boys merely for being boys.
Sommers refuted the academic experts who advanced the notion that the “problem with boys is that they are boys” and that “their nature needed to be changed so that they can be more like girls.” Sommer claimed that boys require love, discipline, respect, and moral guidance, but they do not need to be saved from masculinity.
Kunjufu dedicated his life to countering the conspiracy to destroy Black boys, but has the conspiracy been successfully countered?
In 2021, The Urban Review, a journal that focuses on the improvement of urban schools and education, published a study titled Countering Educational Disparities Among Black Boys and Adolescents from Pre-K to High School. The researchers acknowledged the same problems that Kunjufu highlighted decades ago. These researchers felt that using intersectional theory would help them better grasp the problem and create solutions. Intersectional theory explains how different parts of a person’s identity, such as race, gender, class, and sexuality, interact to create distinct experiences of privilege and oppression.
Unfortunately, the conspiracy to destroy Black boys has not been successfully countered, but will intersectional theory help, or is it another part of the conspiracy?
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