A Continuing Portrait of Inequality: The Black Child in Today's America

“The world does not want and will never have the heroes and heroines of the past. What this age needs is an enlightened youth not to undertake the tasks like theirs but to imbibe the spirit of these great men and answer the present call of duty…”   --Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson, son of former slaves, pioneering Harvard-trained historian, founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, and inspirer of Black History Month, sought to teach future generations of Black children about the great thinkers and role models who came before us. He was very clear that celebrating our rich Black history of struggle and courage was not the same as getting stuck in the past, but if we are going to understand the present and protect the future we must understand where we came from and what it took to get us here. Black History Month is not just for Black Americans. It is for all Americans as we are at the tipping point of a country where the majority of our children are non-White. Black history is American history. We can all be inspired by the progress made but clear about the progress that still remains to be made if we are going to move forward. We should use the extraordinary leaders from our history as examples to help us with the critical task of preparing this generation of children to be the new leaders our community and nation need right now.

The Children’s Defense Fund’s recent report on The State of America’s Children 2014 shows children of color are already a majority of all children under 2 and in five years children of color will be the majority of all children in America. All of our children—including all of our Black children—truly must be ready in critical mass to take their place among the workers, educators, members of the military, and political leaders of tomorrow. America is going to be left behind if our children are not enabled to get ahead and prepared, in Dr. Woodson’s words, to “answer the present call of duty.” Yet CDF found the state of Black children in America today is grim.

Black children are sliding backwards on our watch and the Black community needs to wake up and the country needs to wake up and do something about it with urgency and persistence. Black children are more than three times as likely to be poor as White children. A Black baby is born into poverty every two-and-a-half minutes. Over 4 million Black children (40 percent) were poor in 2012, compared to 5.2 million White children (14 percent). Twenty-five percent of poor children are Black although Black children are only 14 percent of the child population. In six states—Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Ohio, Oregon, and Wisconsin—half or more Black children are poor, and nearly half the states have Black child poverty rates of 40 percent of more.  

Just under 40 percent of Black children live with two parents, compared to 65 percent of White children and 85 percent of Asian children. Each day, 1,153 Black babies are born to unmarried mothers and 199 to teen mothers. Although the percent of children born to unmarried mothers has increased for both Black and White children, nearly 3 in 4 Black babies are born to unmarried mothers compared to less than 1 in 4 White babies. Black children living with single mothers are three-and-a-half times as likely to be poor as Black children living with married parents.   

Black children suffer worse health outcomes. Black babies are more than twice as likely as White babies to die before their first birthdays and Black children are twice as likely to die before their 18th birthdays as White children. Black babies are more likely to die before their first birthdays than babies in 72 other countries, including Sri Lanka, Cuba, and Romania. Although 95 percent of all children are now eligible for health coverage, Black children are 40 percent more likely to be uninsured than White children and over 1 million Black children (9.5 percent) are uninsured. Access to health coverage is not actual coverage until we make every effort to enroll every child.

Children who cannot read or compute are being sentenced to social and economic death in our competitive globalizing economy and too many Black students fall behind in school early on and do not catch up. Black children begin kindergarten with lower levels of school readiness than White children and our country has been very slow in investing in high quality early childhood programs unlike many of our competitor nations. More than 80 percent of fourth and eighth grade Black public school students cannot read or compute at grade level and Black children are more than twice as likely to drop out as White children. Each school day, 763 Black high school students drop out. Black students scored the lowest of any racial/ethnic group on the ACT^® college entrance exam. Only 5 percent of these Black high school students were college ready compared to 33 percent of White students and 43 percent of Asian students.

Black children are at great risk of being funneled into the prison pipeline. A Black boy born in 2001 has a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison in his lifetime. The schools are a major feeder system into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Black students made up only 18 percent of students in public schools in 2009-2010 but were 40 percent of students who received one or more out-of-school suspensions. A Black public school student is suspended every 4 seconds of the school day. A Black child is arrested every 68 seconds. Black children and youth make up 32 percent of children arrested and 40 percent of all children and youth in residential placement in the juvenile justice system. Black children are overrepresented in abuse and neglect cases and in foster care. 

Gun violence is the leading cause of death among Black children ages 1-19 although there is no hiding place for any of us from pervasive gun violence in America. Each day, three Black children or teens are killed by guns. Black children and teens are nearly five times more likely to die from gun violence than White children and teens. The number of Black children and teens killed by guns between 1963 and 2010 is 17 times greater than the recorded lynchings of Black people of all ages between 1882 and 1968. Where is our equivalent anti-lynching movement today to give our children a chance to grow up safely?

I hope this Black History Month is not just about our history but about our obligation to protect our children and move our nation forward in our multiracial world. I hope it is a call to action to the Black community and every community to build the long overdue movement to stop the backwards slide of children of color on our watch and end the disgrace of letting children be the poorest group in the world’s richest economy. If America does not begin to get it—that our future is entwined with our children’s futures—we’re going to miss the boat to the future.

It's Time to End Child Poverty in Rich America with Urgency and Persistence

"…[T]hey have become great and rich…they do not judge with justice the cause of the orphan,…and they do not defend the rights of the needy…shall I not bring retribution on a nation such as this?" -- Jeremiah 5:27-29 "A population that does not take care of the elderly and of children and the young has no future, because it abuses both its memory and its promise. -- Pope Francis

Fifty years after President Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Poverty, the United States is still not a fair playing field for millions of children afflicted by preventable poverty, hunger, homelessness, sickness, poor education and violence in the world’s richest economy with a gross domestic product (GDP) of $15.7 trillion.

Every fifth child (16.1 million) is poor, and every tenth child (7.1 million) is extremely poor. Children are the poorest age group and the younger they are the poorer they are. Every fourth infant, toddler and preschool child (5 million) is poor; 1 in 8 is extremely poor. A majority of our one- and two-year-olds are already children of color. In five years children of color who are disproportionately poor, nearly 1 in 3, will be a majority of all children in America and of our future workforce, military and consumers. But millions of them are unready for school, poorly educated and unprepared to face the future. Nearly 60 percent of all our children and more than 80 percent of our Black and nearly 75 percent of our Latino children cannot read or compute at grade level in fourth and eighth grade and so many drop out of school before graduating. Seventy-five percent of young people ages 17-24 cannot get into the military because of poor literacy, health or prior incarceration.

The greatest threat to America’s economic, military and national security comes from no enemy without but from our failure, unique among high income nations, to invest adequately and fairly in the health, education and sound development of all of our young.

We call on President Obama and America’s political leaders in every party at every level to mount a long overdue, unwavering, and persistent war to prevent and eliminate child poverty and finish the task President Johnson and Dr. King began. Two- and three-year-olds have no politics and we must reject any leaders who for any reason play political football with the lives of millions of our children and our nation’s future. If America is to lead in the 21st century world, we must reset our economic and moral compass.

While remembering that children do not come in pieces and that hunger, homelessness, violence, and parental attention all affect childhood well-being, building on best practices and sound research about the crucial importance of early childhood development, the first step to prevent and alleviate indefensible and costly child poverty is to build a quality early childhood continuum of care from birth through age 5 so that every child, regardless of the circumstances of birth or lottery of geography, is ready for school and has a fair chance to reach their God-given potential. We know if we properly support children in their early years of rapid brain development, not only will they benefit, but so will all America. This is not only the just but the smart and cost-effective thing to do. Nobel laureate economist James Heckman estimates a lifelong economic rate of return of 7 to 10 percent each year for every dollar invested in quality early childhood programs. Former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke told CDF conference attendees in 2012: “Very few alternative investments can promise that kind of return. Notably, a portion of these economic returns accrues to the children themselves and their families, but studies show that the rest of society enjoys the majority of the benefits, reflecting the many contributions that skills and productive workers make to the economy.” And MIT Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow in his foreword to a 1994 CDF report Wasting America’s Future was prescient when he wrote: “For many years Americans have allowed child poverty levels to remain astonishingly high — higher than for American adults; higher than for children in nations that are our competitors; higher than from the entire period of the late 1960s and 1970s, a period when we had less wealth as a nation than we do now; and far higher than one would think a rich and ethical society would tolerate. The justification, when one is offered at all, has often been that action is expensive: ‘We have more will than wallet.’ I suspect that in fact our wallets exceed our will, but in any event this concern for the drain on our resources completely misses the other side of the equation: Inaction has its costs too…As an economist I believe that good things are worth paying for; and that even if curing children’s poverty were expensive, it would be hard to think of a better use in the world for money. If society cares about children, it should be willing to spend money on them.”

If America’s dream continues to fade for millions of poor, near poor and middle class children and families; work and wages continue to decline; and education and basic survival needs — including adequate food and housing — continue to be ravaged to protect the powerful interests of the top 1 percent that has cornered 22 percent of the nation’s income, then America will miss the boat to the future. More importantly, we will miss a great opportunity to show the world a living and just society in a majority non-White and poor world desperately in need of moral example.

To those who claim our nation cannot afford to prevent our children from going hungry and homeless and prepare all our children for school, I say we cannot afford not to. If the foundation of your house is crumbling you must fix it. Education is a lot cheaper than ignorance. Preschool education is a bargain compared to prison and we should be ashamed that America is the largest incarcerator in the world. And consider how many good jobs a quality universal early care system would provide at a time of rampant unemployment and declining wages. A quality universal pre-K system (and I hope kindergarten system) is a win-win for everyone.

After Dr. King’s assassination riots and looting broke out in cities across America including Washington, D.C. where I had moved from Mississippi to help prepare for Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign. I went into schools to talk to children to tell them not to loot and jeopardize their futures. A young Black boy about 12 looked me in the eye and said “Lady, what future? I ain’t got no future. I ain’t got nothing to lose.”

The Children’s Defense Fund has spent the last 40 years trying to prove that boy’s truth wrong in our economically and militarily powerful and spiritually poor nation. And we willnever stop until we succeed. It’s time to give him and the 16.1 million poor children like him today a fair chance to succeed and to keep Dr. King’s dream — America’s dream — for him and the millions like him alive.

Steps Forward on School Discipline

The United States is far from providing each child with as much education as he can use. Our school system still primarily functions as a system of exclusion....[T]here is an enormous reservoir of talent among Negro and other poor youth. This society has to develop that talent. The unrealized capacities of many of our youth are an indictment of our society's lack of concern for justice and its proclivity for wasting human resources. As with so much else in this potentially great society, injustice and waste go together and endanger stability.

--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?

In many American schools the holiday celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday is used as an opportunity to teach children about his life and legacy. But in too many of those same schools, Black and other nonwhite and poor children’s extraordinary talents are still being wasted today. Nearly three-quarters of Black and Latino fourth and eighth grade public school students cannot read or compute at grade level. Long after legal segregation has ended Black students are still most likely to be excluded from the classroom: Black students made up only 18 percent of students in public schools in 2009-2010 but were 40 percent of students who received one or more out-of-school suspensions. A Black public school student is suspended every four seconds. When Black students are so often left behind and pushed out it should not surprise us that Black students are more than twice as likely to drop out of school as White students; each school day 763 Black high school students drop out.

So I applaud the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice for their recent action to address harmful school discipline policies that push so many thousands of the most vulnerable children out of school each year and into the juvenile justice and adult prison pipeline. If the education system is to do its part in dismantling the Cradle to Prison Pipeline and in replacing it with a cradle to college, career and success pipeline, we must end the current practice where children in the greatest need are suspended and expelled from school mostly for nonviolent offenses including tardiness and truancy. I have never understood why you put a child out of school for not coming to school rather than determining why they are absent.

I hope the new set of resources released by the Departments of Education and Justice will help schools create positive, safe environments while relying less on exclusionary discipline tactics. These resources, officially known as “guidance,” will help schools and districts meet their legal responsibility to protect students from discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin as required under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. While the guidance offered is voluntary, school districts that fail to use effective strategies to address disparities in how discipline is applied could be subject to legal action from the Department of Education or Department of Justice. As we recognize the 50^th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and so many other important hard won victories in the Civil Rights Movement this year, we must remember those victories could be lost without meaningful enforcement of the laws advocates fought so hard to win half a century ago.  

The Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) has been speaking out against school discipline policies that continue to stack the odds against poor children and children of color for all of our 40 years. In 1975 CDF released School Suspensions: Are They Helping Children? At the time CDF found the vast majority of suspensions were for non-dangerous, nonviolent offenses. While the largest numbers of suspended students were White, suspensions disproportionately hurt more children who were Black, poor, older and male. The great majority of suspensions served no demonstrated valid interests of children or schools. Instead they pushed children and their problems out into the streets, causing more problems for them, their parents and their communities. Too much of what we learned then remains true today. Several of CDF’s state offices have been mobilizing students, youths, parents, advocates, educators, community leaders and coalition partners to ensure students are not unfairly punished and pushed out of school into the prison pipeline. The new guidance is a valuable tool for them and all parents and communities.

While the guidance does not prohibit schools or districts from using any particular nondiscriminatory policy, it does call into question some policies that have historically excluded Black and Latino students disproportionately and are of questionable educational value—including “zero tolerance” discipline policies which require mandatory consequences for certain infractions, and policies that prevent students from returning to school after completion of a court sentence, which compound the often discriminatory effects of the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Perhaps the most absurd and outrageous are policies which allow or require suspension or expulsion for students who have been truant—punishing children for being absent by forcing them to be absent.    

The new guidance recommendations are valuable to everyone concerned about success for all of the nation’s children—including students, parents, educators and community members. Information is available at this government website for almost every school and district in the country showing how many students were suspended or expelled, whether Black or Latino students or students with disabilities were suspended at higher rates than other students, and how individual schools and districts compare. Check your own school district now. Check too your own school or district’s code of conduct to see whether the discipline policy is focused on creating a positive school climate and preventing misbehavior, whether consequences are clear, appropriate and consistent, and whether there is a commitment to fairness in the application of discipline.

Then, follow up. The new guidance reiterates the longstanding right of parents to seek federal intervention on behalf of their children’s civil rights. If you are a parent and believe that your child has been discriminated against on the basis of his or her race, color, national origin, sex or disability, file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR) through the online form here. Go to school board meetings and ask questions. Meet with your neighbors to learn about the experience of students in your community’s schools. Use the additional resources provided by the government’s school discipline website. Participate in webinars about the guidance and learn what other organizations are doing to empower educators with alternatives to exclusionary discipline. With all of this information—what Dr. King called “collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive”—you can make your case in the media, organize around school board elections, reach out to local and state elected officials, and come together with others to demand change.

For the Children’s Defense Fund’s first report in 1974, Children Out of School in America,we knocked on many thousands of doors in census tracts around the country. We found that if a child was not White, or was White but not middle class, did not speak English, was poor, needed special help with seeing, hearing, walking, reading, learning, adjusting, or growing up, was pregnant at age 15, was not smart enough, or was too smart, then in too many places school officials decided school was not the place for that child. In sum, out of school children share a common characteristic of differentness by virtue of race, income, physical, mental or emotional “handicap,” and age. They are, for the most part, out of school not by choice but because they have been excluded. It is as if many school officials have decided that certain groups of children are beyond their responsibility and are expendable. Not only do they exclude these children, they frequently do so arbitrarily, discriminatorily and with impunity. It’s way past time to end child exclusion from the indispensible lifeline of education. This time, like so many good laws and regulations, the true test of the value of this new guidance will be how well it is implemented. Let’s all join in to make sure everyone has a stake in helping our children strive and thrive in school. Their future and our nation’s future depend on it.

Treat Children as Children

“Most parents have long understood that kids don't have the judgment, the maturity, the impulse control and insight necessary to make complicated lifelong decisions.” 
-- Bryan Stevenson, Equal Justice Initiative

“Don’t lose hope. Understand? With hope you can always go on.” 
-- Pope Francis after washing young inmates’ feet at the juvenile detention center where he chose to break tradition and celebrate Holy Thursday Mass in one of his first official acts as pope. The prison’s chaplain, Father Gaetano Greco, said the visit would “make them see that their lives are not bound by a mistake, that forgiveness exists, and that they can begin to build their lives again.”

Children are not little adults. Adolescents are not the same as adults. We’ve known this for years. The research showing that their brains are still developing is clear. Although young people act on impulse, they have the ability to positively change and have a productive future.

That’s why it’s outrageous that in the 21st century we still ignore the consequences of automatically funneling children into the adult criminal justice system against so much research on youth development and juvenile justice best practices. It’s bad for public safety and it’s bad for the youths and their families.

One of the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF)’s earliest research projects was its 1976 reportChildren in Adult Jails, documenting the inhumane, ineffective practice of treating children like adult criminals and housing them side by side in the same prisons. Some states had already begun abolishing this harmful practice decades earlier but others were resisting change or dragging their feet. Judge Justine Wise Polier, who was New York State’s first woman judge and presided on New York City’s Family Court for 38 years, was then the director of CDF’s Juvenile Justice Division housed at the Field Foundation. In the foreword to the 1976 report she chided the states that continued to prosecute children in the adult criminal justice system saying, “[i]t has been over three-quarters of a century since states began to legislate that children should be treated as children.”

Nearly 40 years later the good news is that there are only two states left that automatically treat all 16- and 17-year-olds like adult criminals. The bad news is that Judge Polier’s home state, New York, is one of them. North Carolina is the other. It’s time for change.

Our society takes adolescent brain development into account in many ways and takes steps to protect children and youths. We don’t allow youths to do certain things because we say they are not mature enough to fully appreciate the consequences of their actions. Young people can’t see certain movies without an adult until their 17th birthdays and can’t see others at all until they turn 18. They can’t buy alcohol until their 21st birthdays. In New York young people can’t get a tattoo under age 18. The New York City Council recently voted to raise the legal age of buying tobacco products and electronic cigarettes from 18 to 21.

Yet (there is a double standard) the day a young person turns 16 in New York, they are automatically treated as adults in the criminal justice system when charged with a crime. This means a 16-year-old can be arrested and spend a night or more in jail locked up with older adults without his or her parent or guardian ever knowing. A young person can spend five long years incarcerated alongside adults before they are old enough to buy a beer. And even younger children -- some as young as 13 years old -- can be treated as adults in New York State’s criminal justice system when charged with murder or other serious or violent offenses and assumed to be criminally responsible, and automatically prosecuted as an adult before they’ve entered high school, although they are not detained in adult facilities until 16 or in some cases 21.

Charging children and youths as adults and incarcerating them with adults is the opposite of an effective intervention that helps young people turn their lives around and decreases crime. It makes our communities less safe.

Youths processed in adult criminal justice systems are rearrested and re-incarcerated at higher rates than youths processed in the juvenile justice system. Eighty percent of youths released from adult prison reoffend for more serious crimes. Incarcerating youths in adult jails puts them directly in harm’s way. They suffer increased rates of physical and sexual abuse and high rates of suicide. Youths in adult facilities are 36 times more likely to commit suicide while incarcerated than those in juvenile facilities. They also are often subject to solitary confinement like adults -- 16- and 17-year-olds sitting in isolation 23 hours a day, for days, weeks, and months at a time. This is cruel and unusual punishment.

Like so many policies in our nation’s criminal justice system, youths of color are disproportionately affected and treated as adults. A black boy born in 2001 has a one in three chance of going to prison in his lifetime and a Latino boy a one in six chance of the same fate. The repercussions of treating youths as adults in the criminal justice system affect communities when young people returning home are denied jobs, educational opportunities, and housing as a result of having a criminal record. Families are torn apart by the immigration consequences of criminal records including deportation. The legacy of an adult criminal record on a child, his or her family, and his or her community is long lasting.

We know how to be smart on crime and provide children and youths age appropriate interventions. Some other states are doing this well. New York has also made important advances for children not yet in the adult system. Governor Andrew Cuomo championed juvenile justice reforms with the Close to Home Initiative which acknowledges that youths are best served in their communities where they can earn education credits and stay connected to their families instead of being isolated in facilities many hours away. In other states, advocates for youths in the system have helped reduce the number of children in adult jails and prisons 54 percent since 2000 and 22 percent since 2010 with commitment, hard work, and persistence. But an estimated 250,000 youths are still tried, sentenced, or incarcerated as adults each year.

In his State of the State address on January 8, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a Commission that will help devise a plan to raise the age in New York. The State Legislature should join him in implementing this sensible policy. It’s past time to raise the age and for New York and North Carolina to take the next step to treat children and youths as children and youths and protect them from adult criminals. We must never give up on any child until we have tried every means to put them on the path to successful adulthood.