Maintaining the Faith in Teachers' Ability to Grow:
An Interview with Asa Hilliard

School leaders must believe that all teachers can learn, just as they encourage teachers to believe that all students can learn.

By Dennis Sparks

Journal of Staff Development, Spring 1997 (Vol. 18, No. 2)

JSD: The National Commission on Teaching and America's Future's report, What Matters Most: Teaching and America's Future, argues that every teacher has the right to a competent teacher. If you were a superintendent of schools, what would you do to ensure, in a timely way, that there was a competent teacher in every classroom?

Hilliard: I would borrow a strategy from Atlanta which grouped schools into three categories. One group was the high achievers. Supervision was withdrawn from them and given to the schools in the middle that were trying to become high achievers. The lowest performing schools became a high priority for the superintendent. In a very short time, some of the low performing schools began to experience fairly dramatic improvements in student achievement.

The school was viewed as the unit to create the momentum to bring along the faculty. While that didn't solve the total problem of uneven instruction, a rigorous accountability system could be used, combined with support for individual teachers. If low performing teachers did not change, hard decisions would have to be made about whether they should continue.
We need to pay greater attention to the history of individual teachers in raising academic achievement so we can work with teachers who are not particularly productive. We can't do that, though, unless we have a record of who's doing what with students. That means disaggregating information about student learning by teacher so we know who needs assistance.
We must also create a culture of collaboration in schools so teachers feel like they're in this together, that they can make decisions that will influence their students' learning.

Another important part of ensuring competent teachers for all students has to do with the beliefs we hold about whether lower performing teachers can become powerful teachers. That means all teachers need to be exposed to winning teachers and their kids so they can see that it's possible for teachers to become successful with these students.

JSD: It sounds like you're saying school leaders must believe that all teachers can learn just as they encourage teachers to believe that all students can learn.

Hilliard: That's exactly it. In the same way that we develop a belief in kids by observing successful students who we wouldn't expect to achieve, we often believe particular teachers can't improve through staff development. We now have an empirical record that demonstrates that teachers can take on new energy and use new strategies that make them successful. So it's extremely important that we maintain the faith in the ability of teachers to grow and meet our expectations.

JSD: How do we affect attitudes -- whether they are teachers' beliefs about students or school leaders beliefs about teachers -- so that we all come to believe more is possible?

Hilliard: There are districts that have dramatically improved student learning. Those schools have the same staff and students who were there when they were performing poorly. Being confronted with that reality can help leaders have more faith in the changeability of teachers. There are many examples of teachers and principals turning schools around.

JSD: How do we create the individual and collective will to create schools in which all students learn at high levels?

Hilliard: That's a tough one. Some of the current school reform initiatives, such as vouchers, speak to selfishness more than they do to our obligation to all children. The low level of resources provided to some schools and the low expectations for many students are inconsistent with the need to educate all kids. We tolerate mediocrity.
The issue of will is certainly broader than the schools. It's a political issue about whether we care about everybody. I'm not sure I know how to change society's general commitment so that we care about everybody. I am sure, though, that if we do care about everybody there are lots of examples of teachers and schools that can turn themselves around.

JSD: In that vein, you advocate using powerful master teachers as a resource for staff development. At the same time, you also acknowledge that those teachers are often marginalized, as are schools that are particularly effective? How do we prevent the marginalization of those individuals and schools?
Hilliard: The very existence of these people and schools is threatening to those who are not achieving. They fear they're not able even with hard work to reach the levels of these individuals. Examples of schools that have made improvements should help people feel less threatened because ordinary people became achievers. It puts high achievement within reach for any teacher. If we show that it's possible for people like themselves to produce these results within a relatively brief time, we can make the achievement of the few less frightening to the many.

JSD: How do you make the work of those master teachers more widely available?

Hilliard: Visitation would be best, but that's not feasible in most cases. The next most practical way is through video. Well-produced videotapes can bring real schools and classrooms to people who can't go there. I'm hopeful that, at some point, we will have hundreds, maybe even thousands of videotapes that would expose large numbers of teachers to what is possible.
Another part of the process is disseminating those tapes. Perhaps agencies such as federally-funded regional research and development laboratories could make this a priority so videos would be available to all schools.

The Education of African People:
Contemporary Imperatives

By Asa G. Hilliard III Ed.D and Luisa Martin
... In my music, my plays, my films, I want to carry always this central idea: to be African. Multitudes of men have died for less worthy ideals: it is even more eminently worth living for.
Paul Robeson, 1934
... There can be no greater tragedy than to forget one's origin and finish despised and hated by the people among whom one grew up. To have that happen would be the sort of thing to make me rise up from my grave.
Paul Robeson, 1938
(From I want to be African: Paul Robeson and the Ends of Nationalist Theory and Practice 1919–1945 by Sterling Stuckey)¹
"What do I mean? I mean this: that while Booker T. Washington seeks to promote the material advancement of the black man in the United States, and W. E. Burghart Du Bois his social enfranchisement amid surroundings and in the atmosphere uncongenial to racial development, Edward Wilmont Blyden has sought for more that a quarter of a century to reveal everywhere the African unto himself; to fix his attention upon original ideas and conceptions as to his place in the economy of the world; to point out to him his work as a race among the races of men; lastly, and most important of all, to lead him back unto self-respect. ... Here, then is work for cultured West Africans to start a reform which will be world-wide in its effects among Ethiopians, remembering as a basis that we, as people, have our own statutes, the customs and institutions of our fore-fathers, which we cannot neglect and live. ...Now, if the soul that is in the Ethiopian, even in the United States, remains Ethiopian, which it does, to judge from me coon songs which have enriched the sentiment of making by their pathos, then, I say, the foregoing words, true as everyone must admit they are, point distinctly to the impossibility of departing from nature's way any hope of lasting good to African nationality."²
African people all over the world are in a life and death struggle for survival, but many are not conscious of it. The education and socialization processes to which we are exposed rarely help us to gain a holistic perspective of what is happening to us. We do not know who we are. We do not know from whence we have come. We do not know where we are going.
For thousands of years, African on the continent of Africa and in its diaspora have operated independently to create sophisticated educational socialization systems, some of which became the envy of the world.³ Most of us are ignorant of this valuable heritage. Much of it is as meaningful to us today as it was for centuries, and even millennia.⁴
It is no accident that we are alienated from and ignorant of our cultural heritage, its vitality, and its utility for us now. Our alienation and ignorance is the product of calculating oppressors who enslaved, colonized, segregated, and created ideologies of white supremacy.⁵ , ⁶ These system's and practices have their remnants in the world today. The calculated strategy of suppressing and falsifying our history, suppressing and stigmatizing our identity (ethnic cleansing), and propagandizing us with teaching of white supremacy, is something that continues today in both overt and covert forms.⁷ The primary purpose of all of these forms of oppression was to divide, and therefore dominate us. Even today, there are powerful people who intend to see that we are disintegrated as a people. The labels "liberal" and "conservative" have no meaning here. The end goal of both ends of the political spectrum, and in the middle, in the "mainstream" Western world is the same. In both cases, Africans as a group are seen by Europeans as "the problem."
Before the problem of what to do about the education of African people can be approached, a fundamental decision must be made. It is a decision about ethnicity, rather than "race" or class, both of which tend to be obvious, though not central. Quite simple, if our ethnicity does not matter, then there is no need for this essay nor for us to try to do anything as a group. But if it does matter, then we must be clear about the fact that we belong to an ethnic family with all of the responsibilities that come with that decision. That culture is not "tribal," it is African.
"The final gift of African 'tribalism' in the nineteenth century was its life as a lingering memory in he minds of American slaves. That memory enabled them to go back to the sense of community in the traditional African setting and to include all Africans in their common experience of oppression in North America. It is greatly ironic, therefore, that African ethnicity, an obstacle to African nationalism in the twentieth century, was in this way the principal avenue to black unity in ante-bellum America. Whether free black or slave, whither in the North or in the South, the ultimate impact of that development was profound. During the process of their becoming a single people, Yoruba, Akans, Ibos, Angolans, and others were present on slave ships to America and experienced a common horror—unearthly moans and piercing shrieks, the smell of filth and the stench of death, all during the violent rhythms and quiet coursings of ships at sea. As such, slave ships were the first real incubators of slave unity across cultural lines, cruelly revealing irreducible links from one ethnic group to the other, fostering resistance thousands of miles before the shores of the new land appeared on the horizon—before there was mention of rights in North America..."⁸

(Europeans) know the role that ethnicity plays in the geopolitical scheme of things, and that it is of extreme importance. That is why the historical culture war on Africans was waged, to prevent any re-emergence of ethnic consciousness among us, to prevent the unity that will lead to effective mobilization of our efforts as a group and to effective resistance to oppression.

But now, games are being played. Many Europeans know full well what rules are in the world. They know the role that ethnicity plays in the geopolitical scheme of things, and that it is of extreme importance. That is why the historical culture war on Africans was waged, to prevent any re-emergence of ethnic consciousness among us, to prevent the unity that will lead to effective mobilization of our efforts as a group and to effective resistance to oppression. From the dust cover of Joel Kotkin's book, Tribes, we see the following.⁹
"In this original examination of business, history and ethnicity, Joel Kotkin shows how "global tribes" have been at the center of the world's economy for hundreds of years—and how they will dominate commerce in the twenty-first century. Though the world's economy is becoming increasingly interdependent, Kotkin shows that as national borders dissolve, the impact of "tribalism" has never been stronger. And he offers some intriguing predictions on how certain "tribes" will adapt to coming economic changes."
Among the "tribes" featured in the book by Kotkin are:
"The Jews: The oldest of global tribes, the Jews figured prominently in the origins of modern transnational business. Although small in numbers, and in the face of their millennia-old dispersion, they have produced more Nobel Prize winners—and billionaires— than most European and East Asian countries.
"The British: Although no longer as dominant as they once were, the British and their progeny in North America remain the most important ethnic grouping in the world economy, controlling by far the world's largest corporations.
"The Japanese: The first Asian group to form a truly global ethnic economic network, the Japanese are second in size and scope only to the Anglo-Americans. Their 'diaspora by design' now constitutes a one-world city stretching from Bangkok to London and linked by banks, trading companies and media as well as hundreds of special schools that educate thousands of youngsters in the essentials of 'the Japanese spirit.'
"The Chinese: The fifty-five million overseas Chinese are the fastest-growing economic force in the world, controlling an empire that included the booming regions of coastal China, the high tech centers of California's Silicon Valley and the most vibrant sections of Manhattan. The three major financial centers of the Chinese—Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong—possess combined foreign reserves twice as large as those of Japan, Germany or the United States.
"The Indians: The more than twenty million overseas Indians today represent one of the best educated, affluent groupings in the world, with strong presences in Britain, North America and East Asia. The Indians may prove to be the next diaspora to emerge as a great economic force."
An original vision of the past and the future of world business, Tribes is guaranteed to provide discussion and controversy.
Kotkin names other ethnic "tribes" who are poised to cross the threshold to gain a niche in the global marketplace. He also acknowledges the struggles of African-Americans, but does not foresee that we are on the verge of becoming one of the successful "tribes," that is, a successful global people.
The naming of the "tribes" is far less interesting for our purpose than Kotkin's theory of why they are so successful. Compare what he says about the successful "tribes" with what he says about those who are successful, or those individuals who belong to no ethnic group.
"In defining global tribalism, I have set up to examine five principal groups—the Jews, British, Japanese, Chinese and Indians—all of who powerfully illustrate this phenomenon. Although each of these five tribes possesses a vastly different history, they all share the following three critical characteristics:
1. A strong ethnic identity and sense of mutual dependence that helps the group adjust to changes in the global economic and political order without losing its essential unity.
2. A global network based on mutual trust that allows the tribe to function collectively beyond the confines of national or regional borders.
3. A passion for technical and other knowledge from all possible sources, combined with an essential open-mindedness that fosters rapid cultural and scientific development critical for success in the late-twentieth-century world economy." (pp. 4-5)
Finally, Kotkin summarizes the essence of his thesis in another way. He merges two powerful notions.
"The power of global tribes derives from their successful coalescing of two principles, that, in classic liberal thought, have been separated: an intrinsic "tribal" sense of a unique historical and ethnic identity and the ability to adapt to a cosmopolitan global economy." (p. 16)

"Whitening the African"

When we were brought to these shores enslaved, we knew who we were. We were Africans. We often put the name African in the names of our independent organizations as late as the latter part of the 1800's and early 1900's. For example, we formed the Free African Society in 1787, following by the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1794 and shortly by the African Methodist Episcopal Zion and The Abyssinian Church (another name associated with Ethiopia, or Africa). The first Baptist church founded by Africans, were called the African Baptist or "Bluestone" Church in 1758.¹⁰ It was followed by other African Baptist churches in1800 and 1805 and an Abyssinian Baptist church in 1808. There were African Free Schools in New York. The Africans who formed a Masonic lodge, the Prince Hall Lodge, first called it the African Lodge.

Clearly, there was a solid ethnic family identity based upon shared continental cultural heritage. It will be of great importance to research the question of how Africans began to refer to themselves as "negroes," "colored," "blacks," "minorities," "disadvantaged," and "at-risk."

Clearly, there was a solid ethnic family identity based upon a shared continental cultural heritage. It will be of great importance to research the question of how Africans began to refer to themselves as "negroes," "colored," "blacks," "minorities," "disadvantaged," and "at-risk."¹¹ Were these names derived from Africans? Were the changes the result of the efforts of outsiders to deny and to suppress the cultural heritage and the unity of Africans? What is crystal clear is that using such names to refer to a group of people effectively removes them from time and space. It takes them out of the human historical process. They become a people without a tradition, without a homeland, without an interest. They became spectators and "cultural welfare" recipients. Moreover, what we received as "cultural welfare," "mainstream culture," has been described by one social scientist as the "culture of narcissism."¹²
Actually, we have a great deal of documentation on this question. We see from history that these changes were due to ruling class while supremacists who knew exactly what they were doing. They were following a policy that they invented and called "whitening." To understand this policy, its depth and pervasiveness, and its strategic and calculated intent, we must look at the record.
The white elite in the United States and in Brazil faced the same problem at the end of the 19th century. Both had a large African population as slavery ended. They worried about what to do with these Africans. The two elites created two different approaches to their "problem." The United States chose to get rid of the "negro problems" by segregation, overt segregation. Brazil (and other "Latin" American countries) chose absorption or assimilation of the African into the European population, with certain limits. Neither could conceive of the notion of cultural or ethnic democracy. Neither recognized or respected African people of African culture as legitimate.
In 1914, Theodore Roosevelt wrote an article in a popular magazine describing what he had seen and heard in Brazil. He was told the following by one observer, "Of course the presence of the Negro is the real problem, and a very serious problem, both in your country, the United States, and in mine, Brazil. Slavery was an intolerable method of solving the problem, and had to be abolished. But the problem itself remained, in the presence of the Negro...
"Now come the necessity to devise some method of dealing with it. You of the United States are keeping the blacks as an entirely separate element, and you are not treating them in a way that fosters their self-respect. They will remain a menacing element in your civilization, permanent, and perhaps even after a while a growing element. With us the question tends to disappear and become absorbed."¹³
By absorption, Roosevelt referred to the white Brazilian elite's whitening policy of both cultural and genetic absorption, or put another way, cultural and physical genocide. His observation on the physical absorption is interesting.
"In Brazil ... the idea looked forward to is the disappearance of the Negro question through the disappearance of the Negro himself—that is through his gradual absorption into the white race.
"This does not mean the Brazilians are or will become the "mongrel" people that they have been asserted to be by certain writers, not only French and English, but American. The Brazilians are a white people, belonging to the Mediterranean race, and differing from the northern stocks only as such great and civilized old races as the Spaniards and Italians, with their splendid historic past, differ from those northern stocks. The evident Indian admixture has added a good, and not a bad, element. The very large European immigration of itself ends, decade by decade, to make the Negro build a smaller element of the blood of the whole community. The Brazilian of the future will be in blood more European than in the past, and he will differ in culture only as the Americans of the North differ."¹⁴
These were unilaterally decreed solutions. No African was consulted. As Skidmore shows in Black Into White, the strategy is rooted in an ideology of white supremacy. In the case of Brazil and many other Latin American countries, the white supremacy is masked by a propaganda of a "raceless" society.¹⁵ The "color blind" societies produced "invisible white supremacy." In some, the final solution was complete.
"Negroes in Buenos Aires no Hay'—there are no blacks in Buenos Aries so the natives of the city, the Portenos, tell their visitors, and so it appears. ... The process of vanishing was rather abrupt one, not really starting to take effect until the 1950's."¹⁶
Andrews in The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, goes on to show that in the one hundred year period, the African population of Buenos Aires declined from nearly 30% to virtually zero. The story of this decline is instructive, given the current elite thinking about what to do with the Africa.
So we can see, that the liberals (Latin American assimilationist/integrationists) and the conservatives (segregation/apartheid thinkers) were both in agreement. The African had to go. Both liberal and conservative elitists were white supremacists and were cultural totalitarians. African culture, and African people as an ethnic group were not recognized or respected then. The same is true today.

The new census categories of "mixed" and "other" have already started some Africans to reframe their identities, identities based solely on their pigment, or "races."

These matters are important to any discussion about the education of the African, especially since there has been a relatively recent shift in the U. S. positions, a "melting pot" shift. Still, certain powerful segments of the white elite are still determined that the African has to go. The new census categories of "mixed" and "other" have already started some Africans to reframe their identities, identities based solely on their pigment, or "race." Aside from the fact that this is buying into the fabricated European category of "race," there is another issue. It is absurd to conceive of "mixed" "races" when there are no pure ones to start. For example, Africans and others have been mixing with Europeans in Europe for hundreds of years, starting before the Greeks and continuing through the Moorish conquest of parts of Europe. Therefore it does not make sense to build a new identity on the European racial construction, or on a reaction to it.¹⁷ Where is the pure unmixed "white" person, even in Europe?
These issues are contemporary matters, and not merely matter of a distant past. For example, we may consider the goals of some elite white private schools. "In this study we examine an extraordinary program: young blacks from economically impoverished backgrounds entered the elite world of the upper-class prep schools, a world permeated by overt and covert, blatant and subtle forms of discrimination. Yet in spite of their families' poverty, in spite of the discrimination they face, they competed successfully with the scions of the most privileged families in America. These black youngsters not only endured a very difficult experience, they flourished. In this book, then, we are dealing not with the assimilation of a few wealthy black families but with the creation of new elite individuals through a special education program. And as a result of their education, these individuals may move from the lower class black ghetto to the upper-class elite in just a few years, possibly leaving behind friends and families, perhaps even the black sub-culture as a whole. Thus this unusual program provides a rare opportunity to investigate how quickly and thoroughly an upper-class style and identity can be acquired."¹⁸
The analysis here is limited to race and class. No cultural or ethnic recognition or respect of African people is shown. No recognition or respect of African leadership and its opinions on these matters is shown.

Whitening as Virtual Reality: the Latin American Example

In Latin America and the Cape Verdean Islands, the battle against assimilation has been a constant struggle for people of African ancestry. Although on the surface these nations appear to have no racial conflicts, and although most propagandized to the effect that racial oppression is absent, such is not the case when one examines closely the languages, with dozens of terms used to describe African physical characteristics, and the treatment of people who move closer to the black end of the color spectrum, the findings reveal conflicting problems that work against those who would attempt to hold on to their African heritage and who are obviously of African descent phenotypically. In the following discussion, examples of anti-African sentiments and attempts to eliminate all vestiges that identify these nations with Africa will be given.
To some Africans, the fusion of "European blood" with Africans was viewed as a form of cultural rape. Others welcomed the push to amalgamate, and especially "whiten," the race. The dictum, "advanzar la raza" (advancing the race), was coined to mean to decrease what is viewed as the "inferior black blood" by mixing it with the more desired "European or white blood" through intermarriage. Since black blood was and is looked upon as a mark of degradation, it is the responsibility of its bearers to improve the race by mating with someone of a fairer complexion.¹⁹
In her commentary on the experiences of Puerto Rican women of African ancestry, Angela Jorge posits, "When she begins to seek companionship with others who look like her (that is, black Americans), with those who will not reject her, she will hear !Conesa no juengues? (Literally, "Don't play with that one!") but it conveys a meaning of not getting involved... She quickly understands that any intimacy with a black American male is absolutely taboo, and that to engage in such a relationship is to be forced to assimilate socially into that group, essentially giving up her identity as a Puerto Rican."²⁰
The pressure to assimilate through intermarriage is not unique to Latin America. In the Cape Verdean Islands, when one gives birth to a white man's child, it is often said that she is "fixing up the race."²¹ However, the opposite is often said of a light skinned woman who has a child with a darker man. The term used in Cape Verde to describe this union is "mixing up the race."
In her study of race relations in Cape Verde, Meintel demonstrates how light skinned Cape Verde girls avoid intimacy with darker skinned boys. According to Meintel, "when the boys from the clubs deemed 'just anybody' arrived, they are met with pleas of fatigue and headaches (as to excuses not to dance), and they are made to make an early exit. Once the 'better' clubs arrived, they were persuaded to stay well past the usual time limit, blocking the entrance of less desirable groups."²²
Similar demands were placed upon Antillean girls to marry white were revealed by Franz Fanon in Black Skin White Mask. While away at college, Antillean women were encouraged to seek to marry white or someone very light in order to gain family approval. When asked as to whether they would consider marrying a person of African ancestry, these women strongly state their refusal to consider a black man as a possible suitor by stating, "get out of that and then deliberately go back to it? Thank you, no besides," they added, "it is not that we deny that blacks have any good qualities, but you know it is so much better to be white."²³ Extreme examples of the pathological effects on the minds of a racially insecure people, are demonstrated is a play entitled, Mascara Puertoriqueno, by Francisco Arrivi.
The experiences are familiar to many African-Americans from both the past and the present. Film maker Spike Lee opens up the topic for a wider audience in his film, School Daze.
The discussion of the whitening process is a natural lead into the discussion of the nature of African education. Ultimately, the issue that must be faced is the right of an ethnic group to exist. Any environment within which one may find one's self; this must be based on one's true heritage and not on that of others. Any design of education must start at this point.
Any group, in the struggles for this existence, must draw upon its past and upon its way of life as a cultural stream in its history on the earth. Beginning thousands of years ago, Africans created culture. The evolution of Africa's cultural creativity can be documented and studied. It not only exists, it reflects a way of life that is positive, beyond the mere material. African metaphysics is spiritually centered, all over the continent.
In order for African education and civilization to proceed, systematic study of the history and culture of African people worldwide is a fundamental requirement. Within the history and culture, we will find purposes of education.²⁴ Philosophy and theory are both explicit and implicit in the history and culture of African people. Many of these ideas have been well recorded from ancient times to the present.
In addition, strategies and structures (methods and curricula) for achieving a group's purpose though the education process are well attested in the African experience. Records of teaching and learning, the literature of African curriculum, physical structures of schools, biographies of heroic teachers are available for education in the present. Of course, contemporary and changing conditions require modifications of any models, but it is unnecessary and undesirable to begin the process of the design of African education as if there were no past. The oldest textbook in human history is the Teachings of Ptahhotep, a sage of the fifth Kemetic dynasty in Ancient Kemet (Egypt) circa 2,350 B. C. This book contains wisdom teaching of a great sage. The sage himself claimed these teachings to be ideas inherited from the ancestors who received them from the gods. The oldest physical structure for a university on earth to day still stands at Waset (Luxor) in Kemet (Egypt). Its ancient name was Ipet Isut; its contemporary name is the Karnak and Luxor temple complex.
Abundant literature survives to raise the curtain on this ancient higher educational tradition, the understanding of which implies what existed in primary and secondary levels of schooling. There are also surviving today many other African "secret" societies, or simply, African formal, traditional schools. The less modern and more traditional these schools are, the greater the independent genius of Africans in the designs of educational systems becomes apparent. Aim, method, and content of traditional African educational systems, can be studied and in some cases can even be observed at the present time.²⁵ Do not people of African descent deserve an education and socialization process that bears some meaningful relationship to our cultural antecedents?
Of course, any wise person takes into account the contemporary environment. That wise person will view contemporary related and competing system with a critical eye and will modify as appropriate.
We have much to learn from what West Africans call the "bush schools" (African traditional schools), but in looking at these experiences we must always remember that the schools do not stand alone. All education and socialization processes are situated within the broader societal context of economic, political, spiritual and artistic environments. African people cannot detach the education process from their own definition of their mission, which is to be fed by the study of cultural tradition and the geo-political realities of the world today. When this is done, specific articulation of curricula in the areas of the humanities, the sciences, health and physical education, politics, economics and above all spirituality, will be formulated.
The pragmatics of African education are easy to design, once the major issues are perceived and settled. Clearly, the education of the children is contingent upon the education of the adults in the African family. Given the centuries of miseducation, a massive mobilization for the reeducation of the African is an urgent necessity. However, this process can begin and its goals can be achieved, especially if we consider the many informal avenues for sharing information, especially the use of data processing and mass media technology.
The adults in any African community are part of the environment for children, providing support for community aim and for child development. Children cannot be educated in the African way in isolation from parents and community activities in education. Specific curriculum and organizational practices in education will be perennial problems, some of which have already been approached. These, as important as they are, are far less important than conceptual, theoretical, and philosophical clarity on what the problems for Africans are and what the resulting goals are.
The Portland, Oregon African-American Baseline Essays (Portland, Oregon Public Schools) provide a content schema for a limited number of academic areas that can be filled in. These essays constitute one attempt to demonstrate an approach to satisfying the need for a multi-disciplinary, longitudinal, world-geopolitical view of the African people: in short the story of African people in all facets of its culture from ancient times to the present everywhere.
The rapid growth and proliferation of "rites of passage" practices and theorizing is well underway and has already provided many models for thoughtful consideration.
Study groups of adults by the dozen are already demonstrating how a broad community of Africans can become informed, even though they may or may not be enrolled in formal educational institutions at this time. In fact, because the study groups are self-supporting , our agenda can be self determined.
The artist, musicians, and entertainers contain among their ranks some few conscious individual who understand the power of their medium and the need to serve their people. Some have begun to move beyond the selfish needs for material acquisition to a global understanding of our condition as a people, and to their major role as agents to help transform our people from dependence to independence.
There is no need to debate whether there should or should not be African centered education. For any African, the question can only be about the character of the education process. If any African would argue against an independent concept and vehicle for African education, that person will have made a defacto decision that African people ought not to exist, and this is where the line must be drawn.

Conclusion

We must recognize, respect and honor the principle for cultural pluralism, granting to all groups the right to exist and to be respected. We must also be educated beyond our parochial interest in order to understand others in the world. A "multiculturalism" that leads to cultural democracy is quite different from the multiculturalism that leads to ethnic cleansing, cultural genocide, or coerced assimilation to some as yet undefined or alien universal norm.
Confused Africans who see themselves as allied with no ethnic group are in an interesting but unenviable position. However, with cultural democracy, the choice is theirs.
The education of African people is an urgent necessity. It is a matter of life or death. We cannot abide another generation of children whose socialization has been neglected by us, who have been miseducated by others, who have been abandoned to invent their own systems, without the wise direction of ancient tradition and community elders.
Some European pretend not to understand the values of ethnic cultures, especially the African move to educate themselves. Geopolitical struggles lead to such "amnesia." However, Africans cannot afford the luxury of listening to the siren songs of those who do not recognize or respect us, while strengthening their own position, such as in Alan Bloom's book Closing of the American Mind and E. D. Hirsch's book, Cultural Literacy. We have had such prescriptions for nearly four centuries at least. Trusting in our own cultural heritage, ancient and modern, we are in the best position to solve our own problem. We would have it no other way. The economic, political, ethnic, and spiritual development cannot be created in a vacuum. African self-determination is the only possibility for our development and enhancement.
(This paper appeared in Black Child Journal)
______________________________
Asa G. Hilliard Ed. D is Fuller E. Calloway Professor of Education, Georgia State University and a noted psychologist and historian. Luisa Martin is from Limon, Costa Rica and in her final candidacy for Ph. D in Political Science at Clark Atlanta University.

Footnotes

NOTE: You can click on "Back" to return to the footnote source or use the hot-link at the end of the footnote.

Stuckey, Sterling (1976) "I want to be African": Paul Robeson and the Ends of Nationalist Theory and Practice. 1919–1945. Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California. Return
Hayford, J. E. Casely (1969) Ethiopian Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation London: Frank Cass and CO. LTD, pp. 163, 174 and 176 (first published 1911). Return
Obenga, Théophile (1992) Ancient Egypt and Black Africa: A Student's Handbook for the Study of Ancient Egypt in Philosophy, Linguistics, and Gender Relations. London: Karnak House; Hilliard, Asa G. (1989) "Waset, the Eye of Ra and the Abode of Ma'at: The Pinnacle of Black Leadership in the Ancient World." in Van Sertima, Ivan (Ed), Egypt Revisited. New Brunswick: Transaction Press. Return
Hilliard, Asa G. III (1995) The Maroon Within Us: Selected Essays in African-American Community Socialization. Baltimore: Black Classic Press. Return
Woodson, Carter G. (1919) The Education of the Negro Prior to the Colored People of the United States from the Beginning of Slavery to the Civil War. Brooklyn, New Your: A & B Publishers (reprint); Woodson, Carter G. The Miseducation of the Negro. Washington, D. C.: The Associated Publishers, Inc. Reprinted in 1977 by AMS Press, Washington, D. C. , King, Kenneth (1971) Pan Africanism and Education: A Study of Race Philanthropy and Education in the Southern States of America and East Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press; Ani, Marimba (1994) Yurugu: An African Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior. Trenton: Africa World Press, Inc. Return
Carruthers, Jacob (1994) "African Centered Education" Kemitic Voice, 2, 7, 1 (A publication of the Kemetic Institute, Chicago, Illinois.) "The lowest point of modern Western philosophy was the inclusion of arguments for white supremacy and 'Negro' inferiority in philosophical writing during the 18th and 19th centuries. The prestige of some of the thinkers compounds the evil David Hume ("On National Character"), Charles Montesquieu (The Spirit of the Laws), and Georg Hegel (The Philosophy of History) were the forerunners for writers like Thomas Carlyle (The Nigger Question) and Joseph Gobineau (The Inequality of the Human Races) who were in turn the forerunners of Adolph Hitler. p.1. Return
Murray, Charles and Herrenstein, Richard J. (1994) The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New York: Free Press. Return
Stuckey, Sterling, (1987) Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America. New York: Oxford University Press, P. 1. Return
Kotkin, Joel. (1993). Tribes: How Race, Religion, and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy. New York: Random House. Return
Lincoln, C. Eric and Mamiya, Lawrence H. (1990). The Black Church in the African-American Experience. Durham: Duke University Press. Return
Moore, Richard B. (1992). The Name "Negro" its Origin and Evil Use. Baltimore: Black Classic Press (First published 1960, new edition edited with new introduction of W. Burghart Turner and Joyce Moore Turner). Return
Lasch, Christopher (1978). The Culture of narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: W. W. Norton. Return
Skidmore, Thomas E. (1993). Black Into White: Race Nationality in Brazilian Thought. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 75–6. Return
Skidmore, Thomas E. (1993). Black Into White: Race Nationality in Brazilian Thought. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 68–9. Return
Andrews, George. Reid (1980). The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800–1900. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Madison Press. Moore, Carlos (1988) Castro, the Blacks and Africa. Los Angeles: The University of California Center for Afro-American Studies. Rout, Leslie B., Jr. (1976) The African Experience in Spanish America: 1502 to the present day. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nunes, Maria Luisa (1987). Becoming True to ourselves: Cultural Decolonialization and National Identity in the Lecture of Portuguese-Speaking World. New York: Greenwood Press. Eduardo, Octavio Da Costa (1981). The Negro in Northern Brazil: A Study in Acculturalization. London: The African Publication Society. Fontaine, Pierre-Michel (Ed.) (1985). Race, Class and Power in Brazil. Los Angeles: University of California Center for Afro-American Studies. Freyre, Gilberto (1946) The Masters and the Slaves: A study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization. New York: Alfred A Knoph. Jorge, Angela (1976) "The Black and Puerto Rican Woman in Contemporary American Society," in Acosta-Belen, Edna (Ed). The Puerto Woman: Perspectives on Culture, History and Society. New York: Preager. Return
Andrews, George Reid (1980). The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aries, 1800–1900. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Madison Press. Return
Mac Ritchie, David (1884). Ancient and Modern Britons: Volumes I and II. London: Kegan, Paul Trench and Co. (Freeman, S. Dak: Pine H11 Press Inc. Reprint). Rogers, Joel (1942, 43, 44). Sex and Race, Volume I: Negro and Caucasian Mixing in All Ages and All Lands. Sex and Race, Volume II: A History of White , Negro , and India miscegenation in Two Americas. Sex and Race, Volume III: When White and Black Mix in Spite of Opposition. New York: Helga M. Rogers (1270 5th Avenue, New York, New York, 10029). Van Sertima, Ivan (1992) Golden Age of the Moor. New Brunswick: Transaction. Return
Zwigenhaft, Richard L. and Domhoff, William G. (1991) Blacks in the White Establishment?: A Study of Race and Class in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, p.10. Return
Jackson, Richard L. (1976). The Black Image in Latin American Literature. Albuquerque: University of new Mexico Press. Return
Jorge, Angela (1976) "The Black Puerto Rican Woman in Contemporary American Society." in The Puerto Rican Woman: Perspectives on Cultures, history and Society. New York: Preager Press, p. 185. Return
Meintel, Deirdre (1984). Race Class Portuguese Colonialism in Cape Verde. New York: Syracuse University, p. 102. Return
Meintel, Deirdre (1984). Race Class Portuguese Colonialism in Cape Verde. New York: Syracuse University, p. 111. Return
Fanon, Frantz ( 1967). Black Skin White Mask. New York: Grove Press, p. 48. Return
Hilliard, Asa G. III (1995). The Maroon Within Us: Essays in African Community Socialization. Baltimore: Black Classic Press. Return
Warfield-Coppock, Nsenga and Coppock, Bertram Atiba (1992). Afrocentric Theory and Applications, Volume II: Advances in Adolescent Rites of Passage. Washington, D. C.: Baobab Associates, Inc. Return

Additional References

Carruthers, Jacob H. (1995). MDW NTR, Divine Speech: A Historical Reflection of African Deep Though From The Time of Pharaohs to the Present. Karnak House
Clarke, John H. (1995) Notes for an African World Revolution: Africans at the Crossroads. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press

Young, Gifted, and Black

Theresa Perry, Claude Steele,
and Asa Hilliard

Promoting High Achievement among African-American Students

Three African-American intellectuals on a crucial educational issue of our time
A huge portion of the school reform debate in America-explicitly and implicitly—is framed around the success and failure of African-American children in school. The test-score "achievement gap" between white and black students, especially, is a driving and divisive issue. Yet the voices of prominent African-American intellectuals have been conspicuously left out of the debate about black children.
Young, Gifted, and Black sets out to reframe the terms of that debate. The authors argue that understanding how children experience the struggle of being black in America is essential to improving how schools serve them.
Taking on liberals and conservatives alike, Theresa Perry argues that all kinds of contemporary school settings systematically undermine motivation and achievement for black students. She draws on history, narrative, and research to outline an African-American tradition of education for liberation and to suggest what kinds of settings black children need most. Claude Steele reports stunningly clear empirical psychological evidence that when black students believe they are being judged as members of a stereotyped group rather than as individuals, they do worse on tests. He calls the mechanism at work "stereotype threat," and reflects on its broad implications for schools. Asa Hilliard ends the book with an essay on actual schools around the country where African-American students achieve at high levels.
Theresa Perry is professor of education at Wheelock College in Boston and coeditor of The Real Ebonics Debate (Beacon / 3145-3 / $14.00 pb). Claude Steele is professor of psychology at Stanford University in Palo Alto California. Asa Hilliard is professor of education at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

What Do We Need to Know Now?

"Race," Identity, Hegemony, and Education

by Asa G. Hilliard Ill

The following is condensed from a speech last spring to a conference on Race, Research and Education, held in Chicago at an African-American symposium sponsored by the Chicago Urban League and the Spencer Foundation.

Dr. Mostafa Hefny, to whom the following letter is addressed, has begun to learn about the global system of classifying human beings and about its links to education. The letter is as follows:

October 2, 1987
Mostafa Hefny
5130 Neckel
Dearborn, MI 48126

Dear Mr. Hefny:

Be advised that the Michigan Department of Education collects racial and ethnic data as prescribed in Directive No. 15, "Race and Ethnic Standards for Federal Statistics and Administrative Reporting." This directive provides standard classification for record keeping, collection, and presentations of data on race and ethnicity in Federal program administrative reporting and statistical activities.

According to this Directive a white person is a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, North Africa or the Middle East. Since you come from Egypt (a North African and Middle Eastern country) you are white, not black.

You are directed to change your classification on the Race/Ethnic Identification Card. Be advised that failure to do so will have serious repercussions for your career, and will constitute insubordination, which may result in suspension and discharge.

Sincerely,

Mrs. Teresa D. Myers
Director, Human Resources

Dr. Hefny, a very dark-skinned Nubian Egyptian native, descendant of a people who have lived at Aswan for thousands of years, wrote a four-page, single-spaced response on January 14, 1988. Among other things, he said:

I am a black man at five levels, the biological, social, psychological, political and ideological levels. I want to reconcile my strong black identity with my classification. ... As a black man and as an African, I am proud of this [my African] heritage. My classification as a white man takes away my black pride and my black heritage.

This issue had not been resolved legally for Dr. Hefny the last time I spoke with him, a year ago. Unfortunately, this nightmarish ex-change is no more irrational than hundreds of thousands of other exchanges every day.
Some say that the contemporary concept of "race" is grounded in Nazi Germany. Adolph Hitler was surely aware of the "race" matter and was the person who most clearly saw its full political potential. Scholar Max Weinreich quotes Hitler as admitting to an associate that "in the scientific sense, there is no such thing as race." But Hitler goes on to note that as a politician he needs a conception "which enables the order which has hitherto existed on [an] historic basis to be abolished and an entirely new and anti-historical order enforced and given such an intellectual basis. ... With [the] conception of race, national socialism will carry its revolution abroad and recast the world." (Italics added.)
Hitler was very clear about "race" as a fabrication, as anti-historical, and as a tool of political power.
In preparing for this assignment on race, education, and research, I found that it is premature to discuss research needs until the "race" dialogue is clarified. Otherwise, we could spin our wheels by using the same popular language, definitions, constructs, paradigms, and problem definitions that have been typical of past work.
Most important, we must tie together the issues of "race," identity, hegemony, and education. Fundamentally, the question of "race" is not a matter of skin color, anatomy, or phenotype, but a matter of the domination of one group of people by another. Any consideration of "race" is useless unless it also considers racism, white supremacy, and any other form of racial supremacy - and considers them as a hegemonic system. The real problem is hegemony, not "race!"

NAMING AFRICANS

During my lifetime, I have witnessed several transitions in the ethnic group name used by people of African ancestry. I was born during the time when it was popular to use "colored" when referring to African people. "Negro" was also used. During the 1960s, many people felt a major shift had been made when "black" became popular, with the predictable addition that the "b" in black be capitalized, just as the Spanish version of the word for black (negro), had gradually evolved to the status of capitalization. We even became "Black and proud," i.e. we made black a positive instead of a negative name.
These changes represented struggles within the African community to take control of our naming and self definition from our oppressors, and to imbue our collective ethnic name with positive meaning. Yet we wrestled with the ascribed terms, "colored," "negro," and "black," as if we had no other choices.
Yet historically, "African" was often the preferred term, especially up until the early 1900s. The term was also used by some in the 1960s, following the publication of the book by Richard Moore, The Name "Negro": Its Origin and Evil Use. In the last decade, at a national conference in New Orleans led by Rev. Jesse Jackson and Dr. Ramona Edlin Hodge, the name "African American" was advocated - followed by widespread acceptance of that designation within the African community. This happened even as many Europeans opposed the action, as if they had any right to enter dialogue about an African family matter.
In my opinion, few of us in the 1980s were prepared to deal properly with this matter of naming, because few of us were well-informed about the history of our people before our enslavement by Europeans. We did not understand our history as a whole and healthy ethnic people, as not merely a pigmented people. We did not understand how and why we were coerced by Europeans to change our ethnic names to names that caused us to become preoccupied with aspects of our phenotype, mainly our skin color, hair texture, and facial features. The Europeans were looking for names that dehumanized and subordinated us, that contained us in our physical being, separating us from our minds, souls, and spirits. We did not understand how they, the authors of this specious system, were using their "race" construction in irrational and pseudoscientific but calculated political ways.
The names "colored," "negro," "black, "African," "African American," are more or less terms that have been accepted within the African family. My own strong preference is for African. Nationality and ethnicity are not always the same. The term "African" fits our actual historical, cultural, and even political circumstances more precisely than any other name. As Sterling Stuckey has shown, the Western experience has fused Africans from all over the diaspora into a new family that still shares the African root culture at the core, in the same way that diverse ethnic groups from Europe are tending toward a common European ethnic identity after having spent so many years believing that they had no ethnicity or that they were just Americans. The African continental name reflects that reality of a common cultural heritage and a common political need. Naturally, we recognize that the influences in the diaspora among other ethnic groups are reciprocal. We also recognize that cultural change in response to new environments will continue to happen.
External to the African community, other terms have been used as euphemistic designators to refer primarily to people of African ancestry. Non-ethnic terms, such as "minority," "the disadvantaged," "culturally deprived," "culturally disadvantaged," "inner-city," and "at-risk," are ascribed, fostering amorphous identities that detach Africans from time, space, and the flow of human history. Note that these terms emphasize numerical status, social class, and political status, e.g., how many we are, how wealthy we are, how powerful we are. But they do not denote ethnic identity; they do not tell us who we are. In fact, these names apply easily, potentially, to any ethnic group.
Almost without exception, the group names ascribed by Europeans to Africans are adjectives, never proper nouns as names. Significantly, they are adjectives that suggest no respect for who we are or for our uniqueness as an ethnic family. In fact, they suggest nothing but something of minimal or even negative import. In the case of African people, this demeaning language was part of a strategy to commit "cultural genocide," a strategy to destroy ethnic family solidarity, a strategy to place emphasis on individual rather than family behavior, a strategy to confuse Africans about their ethnic identity, to destroy our consciousness. Why? As Dr. John Henrik Clarke has so often said, "It is impossible to continue to oppress a consciously historical people."
I do not believe that there can be a resolution of this matter of ethnic designation or group identity until the question of identity is situated in its historical, cultural, and socio-political context. We must understand how the idea of "race" emerged. We must also admit that the poison of "race" and hegemony, or white supremacy, is now a part of global ideology and structure. And our response to the problem ultimately must be to target ideology and structure, not merely everyday individual behavior.
The ideology of "race" drives much of what happens in the world and in education. It is like a computer software program that "runs in the background," invisible and inaudible. However, our silent and invisible "racial" software is not benign. It is linked to issues of power and hegemony, the domination of a given group by another. "Race" thinking has no reason for being except for the establishment of hegemony.
We must look beyond "race" as our criteria for identity. We need to ask questions such as: What was the historical nature of group identity when "race" was not in the picture? What is the normal basis for group identity in world history? What were the criteria for ethnic family identity prior to the invention of the race construct?

THE HISTORY OF "RACE" AND HEGEMONY

Color prejudice associated with white supremacy appears to be quite old, as old as several thousands of years ago in India, resulting in the dehumanizing caste system. However, "race" as a "scientific" construct or concept is quite recent. (By "race" I mean the allegedly scientific view that the human race can be divided into varieties distinguished by physical traits such as color, hair type, body shape, etc.) This concept of "race" is the product of Europe's colonization of Africa and other parts of the world, of its enslavement of Africans, and of the development of apartheid, segregation and the supporting ideology of white supremacy. Other ethnic groups such as Indians and Asians, indeed groups of color around the whole world, came under the umbrella of the construct of "race" and experienced the dehumanizing colonial treatment.
Hegemony was also at the root of the creation and adoption of the construct as it was applied to these other groups. Even European ethnic groups were divided into "races" and ranked, to establish domination of the "superior European race." In Germany the ultimate realization was the fabrication of the "Master Race."
It's important to realize that the concepts of race and racism are a Western idea. But it's more important to understand that, more specifically, race and racism are tools that Western civilization used to split and dominate the world. A society's racism is not defined by its degree of racial segregation or how racially prejudiced the population may be. These are manifestations of racism. The racism itself is the tendency of a society to degrade and do violence to people on the basis of race, and by whatever mediations may exist for this purpose.
Ashley Montague, who has written extensively on the problem of the validity of the concept of "race," notes:

The modern conception of 'race' owes its widespread diffusion to the white man. Wherever he has gone, he has carried it with him. ... This is not to say that discrimination against (personal) groups on the basis of skin color or difference did not exist in the ancient world; there is plenty of evidence that it did. But it is to say that such views never became the officially established doctrine, upon any large scale, of any ancient society. ...

While the concept of race can be described as both an oversimplified theory and an outmoded methodological approach to the solution of a highly complex problem, it has become these things only for a small number of thinkers, and when the history of the concept of race finally comes to be written, it is unlikely that it will figure prominently, if at all, among the fruitful (ideas). The probabilities are high that the concept will be afforded a status similar to that now occupied by the nonexistent substance known as "phlogiston."

Race is the phlogiston of our time. (Montague, 1970 p. xii.)

According to Montague, phlogiston was a substance supposed to be present in all materials given off by burning. Phlogiston was advanced in the late 17th century by the chemist J. J. Beecher, and was accepted as a demonstrable reality by all intellectuals until the true nature of combustion was experimentally demonstrated by Lavoisier a hundred years later. It is an illuminating commentary on the obfuscating effect of erroneous ideas that Joseph Priestley, who stoutly defended the phlogiston theory all his life, was unable to perceive that he had discovered a new gas in 1774, which according to the (Fall) theory he thought to be "dephlogisticated air," but which Lavoisier correctly recognized and named "oxygen."
"Race" must also be situated in its global political context. As Mills notes:

One could say that the Racial Contract creates a transnational white polity, a virtual community of people linked by their citizenship in Europe, at home and abroad (Europe Proper, the Colonial Greater Europe, and the "fragments" of Euro-America, Euro-Australia, etc.), and constituted an opposition to their indigenous subjects (p.29). ...

Economic structures have been set in place, causal processes established, whose outcome is to pump wealth from one side of the globe to another, and which will continue to work largely independently of the ill will/good will, racist/anti-racist feelings of particular individuals. This globally color-coded distribution of wealth and poverty has been produced by the racial contract and in turn reinforces adherence to it in its signatories and beneficiaries (p. 36).

Kotkin and Huntington make a similar point. They argue that while large parts of the world's population are becoming more diffused, a few ethnic groups rule the world, groups they refer to as "global tribes or civilizations." According to Kotkin and Huntington, these tribes or civilizations are able to dominate because they preserve a strong sense of ethnic identity. This is the basis of the trust within that permits collaboration in economic and political arenas.
Some scholars, I among them, argue that greed and/or fear are the elemental sources of the drive to dominate others. Scholars such as Hodge, Struckmann, and Trost further argue that the greedy and fearful actions lead to the creation of definitions, assumptions, and paradigms which are embedded in the belief system, which then dictates domination or hegemonic behavior. They write:

A common Western notion, occasionally expressed, usually implied, is that Western culture is superior to other cultures. Western culture is generally considered to be identical with 'civilization,' and the non-Western world is considered to be in varying states of development, moving toward civilization. "Primitive" and "uncivilized" are terms frequently used by Westerners to refer to people in cultures which are unlike the West.

That the people of a culture should view themselves as culturally superior is certainly common. But not so common is the feature contained in Western cultural thinking, that the superior should control the inferior. It is this kind of thinking which emphasizes the value placed on control, that produces the missionary imperialism. The notion of "white man's burden" is also derived from this type of thinking. Western control over non-Western people is thereby often considered morally defensible. (Hodge, Struckmann, and Trost, 1975, p. 3)

CHANGING ETHNICITY TO PHENOTYPE

Prior to the 1700s, identity was fundamentally an ethnic identity based upon cultural traditions, linguistic traditions, historical traditions, and so forth. This does not mean that physical features or phenotypical diversity went unnoticed. It simply means that phenotype was not the core of ethnic identity!
"Race," or phenotypical diversity, did not become the core of ethnic identity, or more accurately, a substitute for ethnic identity, until there was a political necessity to make it so. Why? Because one of the most significant forces for the expansion of racism and white supremacy was the successful attempt by Europeans to shift the basis of group designation from its traditional cultural and ethnic base to an exclusively physiological one. They treated phenotype as if it were "race," and they treated "race" as if it were the primary explanatory factor in human social behavior.
What is the purpose of the use of this invalid construct of "race"? What are the consequences of the use of the construct? How is society structured to project and to legitimize the construct? These are the fundamental questions that we should be following with research
Unfortunately, we have been following the detour of "race" rather than the ideology which propels it. Some of my most respected friends have made the study of "racial identity" a core of their academic work. Implicit in the study of "black racial identity" is the idea that "race" is real, that it is valid and meaningful, and that we should strive to have a "healthy 'racial' identity." Of course, when this work is conducted as an anti-hegemonic exercise, in other words to counter European defamation, I would be the first to defend it. I also suspect that these scholars tend to use "racial" categories as if they were ethnic categories.
However, I do not believe that the appropriate response to the use of invalid "racial categories" is to reify the categories by having the victims create a better use of the categories. I believe that the search for a "racial identity" leads us in the wrong direction. It is not a matter of research methodology, of assessment instruments, of educational theory. It is simply the wrong question! The right question is: "How do we restore a healthy ethnic identity?"
This does not mean that problems with respect to our perception of our phenotypical characteristics do not exist. The centuries of propaganda and defamation have definitely taken their toll. The continuing brisk sales of Nadinola and Porcelana skin lightening or bleaching creams in the United States and even in Africa itself tell us that something is wrong.
I believe that our goal should not be to search for "racial identity," but to decolonize our minds and purge them of images of white supremacy - and to restore the African family. This must include a move to restore our ethnic base and nurture a healthy ethnic identity. Then the question of our obvious phenotype will take care of itself.
We do not need an oppositional ethnic identity. We are not a "civil rights" people, even though we have fought to the death in heroic struggles for our rights. We do not exist merely because we are oppressed. The essence of our identity does not depend upon our oppressors. Who would we be if they did not exist? Our condition may find disproportionate numbers of us in poverty; however, our identity is not "the poor." Genuine identity is based upon collective culture and traditions, not on opposition to white supremacy, no matter how necessary that struggle is.

THE CURRENT AGENDA IN EDUCATION

Where does this bring us in terms of research and education? I believe that we must know the history, purposes, consequences, and structure of the racial paradigm. And we must dismantle that evil paradigm brick by brick. Then it is our obligation to go about the process of healing ourselves.
We cannot make ourselves whole merely by studying problems of "human relations," "stereotypes," "prejudice," "bigotry," and so forth. That vocabulary tends to trivialize the hegemony problem, to misdirect attention from the root problem. The real problem will never be remedied by capitalizing the word "black," making Africans the only group in the world's list of ethnic groups which is an adjective instead of a proper noun.
We need to do whatever is necessary so that our children and our people accept themselves, with all our magnificent phenotypes, as people of beauty. But to stop there is a gross mistake. To use phenotypical features as the essence of identity is literally to remove the bearer, or the bearer's ethnic family, from time and space, from the human historical and cultural process. That is the ultimate in dehumanization and cultural genocide.
Ethnicity implies history, culture, location, creativity. Color does not. To become pathologically preoccupied with phenotype, to the exclusion of an understanding of one's place in the cosmos, to an understanding of the evolution of the ethnic family, to creating stronger bonds among ethnic family members, will lead our people down the wrong path.
After serious study and debate, the Harlem scholars led by Richard B. Moore concluded that we should be referred to as African Americans. They understood the cultural criteria for designating family membership. But it is the family that the hegemonic oppressor sought to destroy! They wanted to destroy any bond, any unity, any solidarity. It is family that the current systems of neo-white supremacy still seek to destroy. And, therefore, it is family and its preservation that is the issue, not phenotype. Family, independent and conscious, is the opposite of hegemonic victim.
The fundamental question, as I have stated elsewhere, for people of African ancestry, is: "To be African or not to be?"
In my work, I have looked at common elements in structures of domination throughout history. Specifically, dominating populations suppress the history of their victims, destroy the practice of the culture of their victims, prevent the victims from coming to understand themselves as a part of a cultural family, teach systematically the ideology of white supremacy, control the socialization process, control the accumulation of wealth, and perform segregation and apartheid.
It is very important to realize that these are matters of structure, and matters of systematic practices founded upon ideology. No attempt to remedy problems in education can occur apart from an understanding of these things. In fact, one of the reasons that we have been so unsuccessful in producing educational equity is that our understanding of the structure of hegemony was focused on a single element, that of segregation of "the races." This left the other elements largely untouched since they were not prominent in our understanding of segregation.

RACE, IDENTITY, AND HEGEMONY IN EDUCATION

Education, like "race," is situated in a context. There should be no need to go into great detail about the history of the education of Africans under slavery, colonization, apartheid, and white supremacy ideology. The record is clear. The treatment of Africans was not a matter of negligence or accident. It was not benign. Massive and strategic attempts were made to use educational structures to destroy "critical consciousness," to alienate Africans from tradition and from each other, to teach African inferiority and European superiority.
We have two major concerns. First, there is the need to access and to dismantle a tremendous array of aggressive negative beliefs, behaviors, and strategies. Second, there is the need to construct normal nurturing.
Appropriate research will contribute to our understanding of what is going on with race, hegemony, and education. Except for simple and overt factors, much of what we need to know is now "silent and invisible." Obviously, there are thousands of studies that could be done, producing interesting information, even useful information. However, I will limit myself here to examples of categories of needed research. The following brief list is suggestive only.

Abandoning the Race Construct.

The continued use of the race construct is an issue. Racial comparisons, especially biological aspects, are prominent in educational research and in public policy. For example, I have pointed out to the American Psychological Association that our field of psychology is saturated with studies of racial comparisons in spite of the absence of construct validity for race. And yet there is a dearth of information on hegemony. For example, the words racism and white supremacy do not appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual that defines mental illness, yet I believe they both belong there.

What might be the consequences if we continue to focus on "race" rather than hegemony?
Interestingly, the policy chapter in the popular Bell Curve book, which appears to seek to scientifically bolster the white supremacist view that the African "race" is genetically and intellectually inferior, speaks about those in the bottom 25% of IQ test scores as being "expendable." In the authors' own words:

What happens to the child of low intelligence who survives childhood and reaches adulthood trying to do his best to be a productive citizen? Out of the many problems we have just sketched this is the one we have chosen to italicize. All of the problems that these children experience will become worse rather than better as they grow older, for the labor market they will confront a few decades down the road is going to be much harder for them to cope with than the labor market is now. ... People in the bottom quartile of intelligence are becoming not just increasingly expendable in economic terms: they will sometime in the not-to-distant future become a net drag. In economic terms and barring a profound change in direction for our society, many people will be unable to perform that function so basic to human dignity: putting more into the world than they take out ... For many people, there is nothing they can learn that will repay the cost of the teaching. (Murray and Herrnstein, 1994, pp. 519-520.)

Equitable Treatment.

One of the most common errors in educational research is to operate on the assumption that when children fail to perform, the problem is with the child, the family, the community - in short the child or the child's non-school environment. Furthermore, within the child's environment, we emphasize the problems of poverty, crime, gangs, and so forth. While these and other potent forces are important and may impact teaching and learning, it is also true that the school's treatment of the child is potent, and under some circumstances more potent than almost anything else. Therefore, we must have detailed and valid information about how the child is treated in school. These are intervening variables. Rarely do we control for them, especially in comparative studies involving "race."

The absence of sufficient studies on these factors within school foster the belief that African children tend to fail in school primarily because of internal and non-school factors. This belief system is a part of the structure of domination.

Alien and/or Invalid Curriculum.

African children are subjected to massive doses of misinformation and neglect in the school curriculum. Many of these messages are "silent and invisible." Studies must be done to reveal more precisely what goes on under the name of curriculum. Anthropologist Sheila Walker, for example, did a study of library holdings in the Oakland Unified School District. Her study showed vast gaps between the content offered about African people and what is true, valid, and important. We may also wish to do research on the beneficial effects on students when valid and affirming curriculum is offered.

Schools and African Academic Excellence Without Excuse.

Few things are more important than to document that not only can all children learn, but that children are learning in many schools with ordinary teachers and no special programs. Yet most of these schools, or classes, are "silent and invisible." As a result, educators and policymakers become unsure about what we can "expect" from poor African children.

The Effects of Special Treatment.

The structure of services, such as special education, more often stratify students rather than benefit them. Tracking and "special" services, in the main, label and stigmatize students, disproportionately by "race," with minimal to negative benefits. We need many sophisticated studies on the alleged benefits of such services, especially when there is disproportionate impact by "race."

Culture as Context.

The great error in behavioral research, now acknowledged by prestigious scholars, is that in most cases there has been a failure to take context into account. Research tends to proceed as if constructs, methods, instruments, and interpretations in culturally embedded studies are universal. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most researchers are ill prepared to do research in a culturally plural environment or to deal with hegemony as it relates to culture.

So what needs to be done in terms of research and education? What do we need to know now?
We have an enormous task before us. We must forego our preoccupation with the false construct of "race" and focus instead on our African ethnic identity. We must support a healing process for damaged ethnic families. And we must focus the spotlight on hegemony so that we can take actions against it.
Scholarship is a double-edged sword. It can cut two ways, for good or for evil.

Asa Hilliard is professor of urban education at Georgia State University and the author of numerous books and articles on education, particularly the education of African-American children.

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Winter 1999

The State of African Education

By Asa G. Hilliard III
Fuller E. Callaway Professor of Education
Georgia State University, Atlanta Georgia

American Educational Research Association Plenary Presentation
Commission on Research in Black Education
April, 2000
New Orleans, LA

It took Lerone Bennett several decades to write his newest book, Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, meticulously documenting Abraham Lincoln’s white supremacy beliefs. Bennett shows that Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation” was a conscious and necessary deception that did not free a single enslaved African. Bennett then shows the carelessness of historians, and even the cover-up of the record by some, in order to let the myth survive. How ironic that many tears have been shed by those who choose the Lincoln Memorial as a symbolic site to celebrate African liberation, while oblivious to those who truly sought to free Africans, not the least of whom were Africans themselves. Instead we honor an opponent of equality who openly espoused white supremacy views until his death. Then we accept a myth that is the opposite of the truth.

In many ways, the persistence of the myth of Abraham Lincoln as a liberator of Africans is a symbol of the contemporary response to the state of education of African Americans and of African people worldwide. So much of what we believe about our state is false. How do we account for this myth of the “Emancipator” and of “emancipation.” It is in the curriculum and in the culture at large, a belief in the face of all evidence to the contrary. And so, until this very time, we have a whole nation in deep denial.

For the record, it was really the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution that outlawed slavery or involuntary servitude, except, except as punishment for a crime. In view of the current escalation of criminalization of African men in particular, and of privatization of prisons and the use of prison labor in private businesses, we can see that there are apparent limits to event the protection of the 13^th Amendment. We actually have virtual slavery for some existing today. Moreover, it took the 14^th Amendment to guarantee equal protection of the laws to all citizens. So how can so many of us join in the perpetuation of such a curriculum myth about Lincoln freeing Africans from slavery and also believing in the political equality of “the races,” and still be certain that we can be real when we approach the design of education/socialization for our children? Are we habituated to myths? Can we see the true condition of our people, the masses of them? Can we see, as Carter G. Woodson saw, the miseducated though highly schooled among us, whose orientation is “alien self” or even “anti-self” as Dr. Na'im Akbar has said? What is the state of African education?

There are also some potent common myths about African learners, myths about low ability, cultural deprivation, myths about poverty causing learning problems, and myths that school treatments are equitable for all children. These myths persist and are even adopted by many members of the African community, even though we are a community with a long history of creating powerful transforming educational and socialization institutions, both in Africa and in the diaspora. We above all ought to be able to detect myths right away. To grasp the real state of education of African people everywhere, including in America, we must examine the intersection of culture and power. A global system of power distribution has dictated and continues to dictate the nature of the education and socialization processes. Slavery, colonization, apartheid/segregation and the rationalizing ideology of white supremacy are centuries old challenges, really aspects of a global hegemonic system. That system interrupted and largely destroyed the flow of thousand of years of powerful and independent African education/socialization excellence, about which most of us are totally uninformed.

Above all, we must understand that the structure of society and the embedded structure of education/socialization systems in hegemonic societies are designed to maintain hegemony. It is the structure, including especially its ideological foundation that controls possibilities for African education/socialization, even today. Hegemonic structures and ideologies cannot acknowledge or respect our traditions in education/socialization, profound though they are. Moreover they shape the beliefs and the behaviors that guide miseducation, while blaming victims. No matter how much progress we appear to have made, more degrees and higher paying jobs for a few of us, there has been no shift in the power structure at all, anywhere in the African world. Even “liberated” and “independent” African nations, lack control over real economic and military power. Few even have more than minimal control over their education institutions. These institutions still mimic those of former colonial masters in most cases. Some still have governance of education in the hands of former colonial masters. While African people globally are entitled to justice, including of course reparations, if any people were ever entitled to them, and while we may have friends and allies, there will be no saviors for us by others from these structural conditions. Nothing in history suggests that non-African benefactors will rescue us. Purely and simply we must emancipate ourselves from hegemonic structures; including especially the foundation beliefs that support those structures. We must challenge these things at every turn. We must pose and construct alternatives to them. We will definitely get those things that we construct! We also will definitely get those things that others construct for us in the absence of our own efforts to construct our future. So, the state of “black education” cannot be separated from the state of African people generally. It is a fundamental error of major proportions to limit our analysis of this matter to Africans in America. Africans all over the world were controlled by the same hegemonic structures, and still are. Globally, our position remains on the bottom of virtually all meaningful indices, even as other ethnic families, including new ones to the United States, one after the other, lift themselves up, without saviors. Even former colonial nations, not African, have entered the competition as producers in the international mainstream.

Recently, I was forced to consolidate some of my thinking on the nature of the problem of African people, within which the problems of education/socialization are situated. I was invited to present a paper at the Interdenominational Theological Seminary in Atlanta on the topic, “The Spiritual State of Black American.” I identified “12 Challenges for African People” in my response to this theme. The big picture for Africans is the same everywhere in the world, because hegemonic structures are global.

Even now, enormous power is being consolidated everywhere, with no priority on African development, e.g., The European Community (EC), North Atlantic Free Trade Association (NAFTA) and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) (GATT). Equally important is globalization in the business arena.

1. We are unconscious, with no global view of African people and no global view of successful ethnic groups. We experience ourselves as local people in a global world. Some of us experience ourselves only as individuals without any connection even to a local African community.

2. We have acute amnesia, with no valid memories or awareness of ourselves as a historical people evolving through time and spreading throughout the world. We are episodic in our experience of ourselves.

3. We are disintegrating as a people and disorganized. We have lost our solidarity. Many of us feel no bond of identity with our people.

4. We are not raising our own children. We have no systematic socialization structures for the masses of our children. They are raising themselves or they are being raised by others. We have forfeited one of the most vital functions of a people, the responsibility for intergenerational cultural transmission.

5. We have a growing loss of independent faith communities, becoming more subordinate in institutions that we do not control.

6. We have no long-range strategic goals, plans and mobilization. Without these things nothing positive will happen for us.

7. We do not have an adequate comprehension of wealth production and accumulation. Many of us make money. Few of us make wealth. Our consumption appetites make us prime sources for exploitation by others.

8. We do not have an adequate comprehension of how to nurture health and prevent illness. We do not have healthy diets. We do not monitor and control our environment. We do not have a critical orientation about these things.

9. We have no major independent, self-funded think tanks to help us to define and to resolve our problems. We do not see how successful group fund and rely upon ideas based upon research and reflection (Edwards, 1998).

10. We do not have an adequate African Centered Higher Education. Definitions, assumptions, priorities and above all our worldviews must reflect us.

11. We do not have sufficient cultural centers, movements, monuments, and celebrations to highlight important experiences and to shape directions. These things offer us the opportunity to be reflective and to develop a more firm vision of the future.

12. We have no regular independent communication capabilities, such as serious national and international periodicals to address our serious and continuing problems. This is shameful. It is not really a matter of resources. It is a matter of consciousness. Appropriate socialization will produce an appetite among the masses of our people for appropriate information.

I cannot amplify these points in the time available here. However, it should be clear that if we begin with these challenges while reflecting on our geo-political status as a people, they call for very special approaches to education/socialization, approaches that can only come from us. It should also be evident that something far beyond the common school experience is required for our children, even though most of our children will continue to attend common schools. Moreover, we must insure that this common school experience taps the genius of our children and stops disabling them through structured miseducation. Many of us rely totally on the common school experience. That will not meet our complete needs. The socialization of the masses of our children can only be done through structures that we develop and control.

Most of the 12 Challenges mentioned above are tied directly to our task of education/socialization, affecting directly the aim, methods and content of education/socialization. However, out of all of these high priority challenges, the first, becoming conscious, and the fourth, the matter of control over the education/socialization of our children are critical. Hegemonic structures were created to mis-educate enslaved and colonized people, and people who were victims of white supremacy influenced structures of domination. Indigenous and independent systems were destroyed. Colonial and slave structures as well as apartheid and general white supremacy structures, were created, including boarding schools, to separate children from parents and communities and cultures, and especially mission schools to destroy the worldviews and to stigmatize colonized and enslaved people as savages, primitives, and pagans. The recent “culture wars” over the school curriculum is a continuation in a newer form of ideological structures of hegemony that follow the old path of separating children and communities from their traditions. (Schlesinger, 1998) (Bloom, 1987) (Ravitch, 1996) (Hirsch, 1987).

So we see the denial of African culture, the denial of the significance of African culture, the assertion of the supremacy of western culture and the containment of teaching about African culture, even the distortion and destruction of African history and cultures. Perhaps the worst of all is the recent accelerating drift in the control of the education/socialization structures, making our communities even more remote from the power centers in education which follow their own agenda. The grip of others who control our young people is becoming tighter. Among the obvious controls are as follows:

1. There are trends toward removing control of schools from local elected school boards, to mayors, governors, state departments of education and even judges. Urban schools no longer tend to have Superintendents who are close to the communities served. Corporate CEO’s, generals from the military, business managers, and even prosecuting attorneys, without roots in the culture or the community, are placed in charge of the large urban schools where most of our children are. Whatever the weaknesses of local control at the board level, there was at least a modicum of potential for community influence. As our children are being managed and even exploited for profit, our communities are more alien than ever from the process.

2. Privatization is growing in the public sector through standardized curriculum using cyber technology. There is a corresponding loss of community control over what is generally minimum competency, non-culturally responsive curriculum and methodology. Private for profit corporations have discovered the lucrative urban market. They are bringing industry practices to the creation of “education maintenance organizations” (EMO’s). We have no control over them with their minimum competency efforts. In fact some of us are selling these things to our own community.

3. More and more we see publicly funded, large scale off the shelf, cookie-cutter standardized programs for public schools, mainly urban, mainly minimum competence, mainly non-culturally responsive. They see the Title I dollars and other funds in urban education. Policy makers increasingly have abandoned the belief in regular teachers and schools. They now shop for large-scale “research based” programs. We have virtually no control over these services. Some of our best educators look to these programs as saviors for our children, even though the programs do not have excellence track records. They are minimum competency at best. We are truly at risk.

4. The control over more than one million men in the prisons and jails is appalling. Prisons are also places for “teaching and learning,” mostly the wrong lessons. We do not control them. Many of them have virtually abandoned the self-improvement courses and have become torture chambers, or sources of below minimum wage cheap labor. Of what value to our communities will young men be when they return?

When we combine the formal system trends with the control of informal socialization through movies, videos, audios, advertising and television, where is the space and time for our community to carry out its responsibility for intergenerational cultural transmission? Our whole community is in virtual lockdown. I do not expect anyone outside of our community to see these matters as critical problems. Certainly we have heard nothing about this threat so far. It is not on the radar screen, not even for many Africans. However, so many within the African community itself, perhaps because of their own alien socialization and mis-education, are not alert to this problem. Therefore they do not see it as a priority for action. Therefore, we are not mobilized to deal with these matters. Moreover, many of us have become experts at implementing the most damaging parts of systems of structural inequity. For example:

1. We assist in the non-beneficial use of mental measurement and assessments that falsely label our children as impaired.

2. We manage tracking systems that result in the disproportionate placement of our children in low tracks.

3. We teach non-culturally responsive curricula that leave our children ignorant of themselves.

4. We sell privatized services and schools to public schools, mainly in urban areas that enrich entrepreneurs with no real benefits to our children.

It is clear to me that a major effort is required to make any substantial meaningful and positive change in the education/socialization of African children. However, no such change is even remotely possible until we can effect a fundamental change in the dialogue about education/socialization. This is first and foremost an internal dialogue within the African community. After that we can address both the common school experience with others and the African community’s responsibility for the broader socialization approaches.

Currently the heaviest emphasis in the education research community in general is on children, how “intelligent” they are, which “intelligences” they have, how “motivated” they are, and on “special methods,” etc. I think that the emphases are misplaced. By now it should be clear that, for the most part, our children are geniuses with capacities to go far beyond any current school requirements. They respond very well to quite a variety of well-executed methods and techniques. There is no mystery about how to teach any of them. The priority that needs more emphasis is the deep study of the quality of services that we offer to students, the unequal distribution of those services and the structures of inequity such as tracking and inappropriate special education, still existing in the school.

Why do our children fail to get access to the many educators who are not puzzled about how to teach them?

Our children’s manifest problems in public education virtually all have to do with opportunity to learn. The evidence for this conclusion is overwhelming, if we only raise and try to answer the right questions. There is a growing body of powerful conclusions from literature focusing on high poverty, high achieving students. Results by Schmoker (1996), Closing the Gap by Kati Haycock (1998) and Value Added Evaluation by Saunders and Rivers (1998) are but three of the newer citations adding to what Ron Edmonds and his associates showed us long ago. It is clear that ordinary public school teachers, with unselected regular classrooms, serving poor children, without specialized standardized programs, can move students to the highest academic levels in a short period of time. It is not the children or their parents, poverty, culture or bilingual status (correlates that explain little or nothing) that determine academic success. It is good teaching.1

It is also clear that poor and minority ethnic groups tend to get a lower quality of instruction for many reasons, including high teacher turnover, experienced teachers choosing more desirable neighborhoods, high rates of substitute teachers, high rates of teachers teaching out of their fields and a host of other factors that combine to produce what Kozol documented and called Savage Inequalities (1991), also documented by other researchers. These are realities not myths. This suggests to me where the education researchers’ focus should be, primarily on the quality of service and its distribution.

Our preoccupation with the analysis of the victims of savage inequalities in the schools exhausts our resources and our energies and may well impede progress toward valid teaching. Because African children’s academic performance averages are usually low, our attention turns to “multiple intelligences.” “whole language or phonics,” “site based or central management,” off the shelf “cookie cutter programs,” etc. However, these things do not address our basic problems, given the state of African people with respect to opportunity. We do not have to wait for new discoveries on how to teach. As Ron Edmonds has said: “We already know more than we need to know.” At least some do.

In my opinion, the basic problems are elsewhere. I believe that there is a prerequisite to any approach that would attempt to address the problems that are basic. Most of the 12 Challenges that I cited earlier are challenges that have education/socialization components. Almost none of the 12 Challenges influence the aims in schools that serve our children. But worse, even if they did, the ideas about education/socialization that should serve as a foundation for our work have been well articulated over the years, even centuries, yet these ideas that come from deep thinkers of the African community are unknown or marginalized. Therefore, the prerequisite for problem solving is to do the homework that is necessary to understand the works of those who have already done much homework for us. These ideas are fundamental conceptions about problems and solutions.

Some examples of the indispensable works that must be considered as the starting point for change in education/socialization of African people are as follows:

Carter G. Woodson - The Miseducation of the Negro

W. E. B. DuBois - The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques

Marimba Ani - Yurugu: An African Centered Critique of European Thought and Behavior

Mwalimu Shujaa - Too Much Schooling: Too Little Education – A Paradox of Black Life in White Societies

Molefi Asante - The Afrocentric Idea

Jacob Carruthers - Intellectual Warfare

John H. Clarke - Africans at the Crossroads: Notes for an African World Revolution

Amos Wilson - Blueprint for Black Power: A Moral, Political, and Economic Imperative

Kwame and Akia Akoto - The Sankofa Movement: ReAfrikanization and the Reality of War

Chinweizu - The Decolonization of the African Mind

Ayi Kwei Armah - Two Thousand Seasons

Matthew Arnold - Steve Biko: Black Consciousness in South Africa

Ben-Jochannan - Cultural Genocide in the Black and African Studies Curriculum

Of course, there are other important better known references. However, these are writers who call upon our community to develop an independent vision, a vision that is grounded in our cultural and historical reality as well as in our present political and economic condition, a vision that is based upon an understanding of hegemony and education in its direct and indirect forms and the structure that it creates, a vision that is rooted in our excellence tradition of education/socialization, one of the most awesome traditions in the world. (Hilliard, 1998)

Our problems persist because we are not asking the right questions and are being diverted and consumed by the wrong ones. The state of education for African people will remain at its low level, in a rut, unless and until there is a return to an independent consciousness among our leadership in general and our educational leadership in particular. By this I mean that African leadership, guided by a deep grounding in our cultural heritage and guided by a sense of destiny, must frame courses of action and must design the essential education/socialization direction for our people. Having done that, we can then determine what must be done in our communities and what can be done in common schools, as well as how to make common schools culturally responsive.

I am not calling for something strange. In fact, I have outlined the very thing that successful global ethnic groups do now. Such groups take responsibility to define and control the core education/socialization processes for their ethnic families, with cultural transmission held as the prerogative of the family. They may be and most often are enrolled in public schools with other groups. They know that no one outside their families will place the highest priorities on highest quality socialization. Our problem is that our oppressors prefer to see us as individuals, not as an ethnic family. Worse, many of us have fallen victim to this way of seeing ourselves.

One thing should be crystal clear by now. There is no sense of crisis and no high priority being placed on the problem of education/socialization for African people. There is no major mobilization in place or being planned to get us out of the hole that we are in.

Nothing in place or publicly contemplated offers any prospect that our general position in the global society will improve. Yes there are a few who claim that African students have been emancipated, who claim to be able to serve them well. They have tricks galore, standardized, mass marketed, minimum competency, public and private businesses; mainly plying the urban market. Our children and others are their commodities. They stuff the children with advertising. Schools buy “teacher proof” software and “programs” for them. Our children are still a part of the giant shell game, bussing them from one place to another, chasing reluctant whites, moving from outside segregation to inside segregation through tracking and special education. We do not have efficacious processes in place, even for the common school requirements.

The 400-year struggle for African people has been for a legitimate education for the children, a high quality, culturally appropriate, truthful education/socialization for our children. (Hamilton, 1968) It has been a struggle against hegemony and for control over socialization of our own children. We begin the new millennium with the same issues that we have always had, just new faces and new forms. Who can be pleased with what we see as we observe our people all over the world?

We know that at its base, our problem is a simple one. Can we place our children in the care of well-prepared wise educators who love them and who have the will to teach them? We need educators and leaders who are oriented towards our destiny because they are rooted in a deep understanding of our culture and traditions, educators who identify with and are a part of us, educators who see our children as their own. Those who love our children and who have the will to teach them will make whatever sacrifices are necessary to raise our children up where they belong. Now is the time for the real liberators to come forward. Some educational researchers already serve in this role; more can by destroying myths. There is heroic work for educational researchers as a part of this process.

1. Document and disseminate information about the many educators who are not at all puzzled about how to raise achievement of all children to high levels, educators who get excellent achievement now!

2. Evaluate the efficacy of tracking and special education services, especially in the high incidence categories, services that hold so many of our able students in custody, with little if any benefits, and sometimes with harm. (Heller, Holtzman and Messick, 1982) (Skyrtic, 1991).

3. Document and disseminate information about savage inequalities in services.

4. Study the availability of appropriate African ethnic specific materials to enhance our understanding of all curriculum areas.

We must destroy myth and illuminate reality. We cannot call oppressors liberators and cry with gratitude at their tombs.

Contrary to some popular opinion and even some professional opinion, educators and systems are extremely powerful. We can choose either powerful positive or powerful negative effects, and we can bring either into being. The futures of children truly are in our hands.

What will we do?

Selected Bibliography

Akoto, Kwame Agyei and Akoto, Akua Ison (1999). The Sankofa movement: ReAfrikanilization and the reality of war. Hyattsville, MD.: Oyoko Info Com Inc.

Ani, Marimba (1994) Yurugu: an African-centered critique of European cultural thought and behavior. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

Armah, Ayei Kwei (1979). Two thousand seasons. Chicago: Third World Press.

Asante, Molefi Kete (1987). The Afrocentric Idea. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Ben-Jochannan, Y. (1972). Cultural genocide in the black and African studies curriculum. New York: Alkebu-Lan.

Bennett, Lerone Jr. (1999). Forced into glory: Abraham Lincoln’s white dream. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company.

Bloom, A. D. (1987) The closing of the American mind. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Cabral, Amilcar (1973). Return to the source: selected speeches by Amilcar Cabral. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Carruthers, Jacob H. (1999). Intellectual Warfare. Chicago: Third World Press.

Carruthers, Jacob H. (1997). African world history project: the preliminary challenge. Los Angeles: The Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations.

Chinweizu (1987). Decolonizing the African mind. London: Sundoor, BCM Box 4658, London WCIN 3XX, England.

Chinweizu (1987). The west and the rest of us. London: Sundoor, BCM Box 4658, London WCIN 3XX, England.

Clarke, John Henrik (1991). Notes for an African world revolution: Africans at the crossroads. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press Inc.

Cruse, Harold (1967). The crisis of the Negro Intellectual. New York: William Morrow.

Edwards, L. (1998). The power of ideas: The Heritage Foundation at 25 years. Ottawa, IL: Jameson Books.

Hamilton, C. V. (1968). Race and education: A search for legitimacy. Harvard Educational Review, 38(4), 669-684.

Hilliard, A. G., III (1999). “Race,” identity, hegemony, and education: What do we need to know now? Presented to: Chicago Urban League, University of Illinois Chicago (1999). In Rethinking Schools: Winter, 1999/2000 (pp. 4-6).

Hilliard, A. G., III (1998). SBA: The reawakening of the African mind. Gainesville, FL: Makare Publishing Company.

Heller, K., Holtzman, W., & Messick, S., Eds. (1982). Placing children in special education: a strategy for equity. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Hirsch, E. D., Jr. (1987). Cultural literacy: What every American needs to know. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Huntington, S. P. (1996) The clash of civilizations and the making of world order. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Kotkin, J. (1993) Tribes: How race, religion, and identity determine success in the new global economy. New York: Academic Press.

Kozol, J. (1991). Savage inequalities: children in America’s schools. New York: Crown.

Nacimento, A. D. and Nacimento, E. L. (1992). Africans in Brazil: a Pan-African perspective. P.O. Box 1892 Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

Sanders, W. I. & Rivers, J. C. (1998). Cumulative and Residual Effects of Teachers on Future Students Academic Achievement.

Schlesinger, A. M. (1998). The disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. New York: W. W. Norton.

Ravitch, D. (1996) The last word on Afrocentrism? In Hot Topics: June 1996

(On-line), Available: http://www.edexcellence.net/hottopic/afrocent.htm

Schmoker, M. (1996). Results: the key to continuous school improvement.

Alexandria, Virginia: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Shujaa, Mwalima J. (1995). Too much schooling, too little education: a paradox of black life in white societies. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

Skyrtic, T. M. (1991). The special education paradox: Equity as the way to excellence. Harvard Educational Review, 61(2), 148-206.

Wilson, Amos R. (1998). Blueprint for black power: a moral, political and economic imperative for the twenty-first century. New York: Afrikan World Info Systems.

Woodson, Carter G. (1977). The Miseducation of the Negro. New York: AMS Press Inc. (First published 1933)

The Standards Movement: Quality Control or Decoy?

The following is condensed from a speech by Asa Hilliard, professor of urban education at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Hilliard is the author of numerous books and articles on education, particularly the education of African-American children, and his most recent book is SBA: The Reawakening of The African Mind, Gainesville, FL: Makare Publishers. Hilliard gave the speech at a conference last fall at Howard University on "Moving Beyond Standards To Provide Excellence and Equity in the African-American Community."

by Asa Hilliard
Is the standards movement a quality control movement, as it is advertised, or is it a decoy for something else?
We have been here before, with the standards movement. In fact, we reach a standards movement almost every three or four years. Some governor wants to manipulate the test score requirements or get a new test. Some president wants to manipulate test score requirements or get a new test. Somebody wants to change the standards of education, presumably as a way of raising the quality of schools and schooling and the achievement of children. I say presumably because I don't think that I can remember a time when that was really the reason for having a standards movement. If you want to raise quality, then standards manipulation is probably the last place that you would start.
Let me say at the outset that no one fears high standards, at least no Africans that I know. We do not fear clear standards. We do not fear uniform standards. We do not fear public standards. In fact, we have been at the forefront of standards of the highest order. [Asa Hilliard, Barbara Sizemore, et al, Saving the African American Child. Washington, DC: National Alliance of Black School Educators, 1984].
But what we need is honest school improvement that acknowledges both high standards and high quality of school input. The standards movement as it is now progressing at the national and state level is half the solution to the problem. To establish the standards of output without having standards of input is a travesty. To hold children responsible for outcomes without giving the same level of sophisticated attention to guaranteeing the standards of exposure is an abandonment of the responsibility of adults for the education and socialization of children.
That's why I used the title that I did: "Standards as Quality Control or Decoy?" I believe that the standards movement is generally a decoy. I don't care whether it's a Democrat or a Republican who calls for it. Usually, when people put so much emphasis on standards as a school reform tool, it means that they want to look like they're performing a reform effort, but they're actually moonwalking. They look like they're going forward but they're going backwards.
What most of us fear is that we will be held responsible for achievement without being given the same quality of treatment on the front end. We're not afraid of standards. We're afraid of hurdles, of obstacles.

Standards, Assessment, and Instruction

There are several things to deconstruct here, because they're all tied together. When we say standards, you can talk about setting standards. You can also talk about the instruments to measure the standards, whether they're valid, invalid, biased, or unbiased. And you can talk about the quality of instruction to enable people to meet the standards. All of that is tied together. But we generally break these apart. As a result, we usually make mistakes in our analysis. If you're talking about using standards to get the achievement level of Americans up to snuff, then you're going to have to talk more broadly and deeply than we've been talking so far.
I'm a little bit tired of people getting credit for improving education by doing the cheapest thing they can do, which is to call for the manipulation of test scores or to create new standards. These new standards are not going to be any better than the ones the College Board developed in the College Board's Green Book: What Students Need to Know and Do in Order to Graduate from College. They're not going to be any higher or better than the standards of the National Alliance of Black School Educators, [Hilliard and Sizemore, et al, Saving the African American Child. Washington, DC: National Alliance of Black School Educators, 1984]. In fact, I'll take any standards that you come up with as long as they're high enough. If you get a consensus of a group of thinking people, I don't think you can write a set of standards that won't make sense.
Are you going to say "no" to calculus as a standard for the high school level? I think calculus is a reasonable standard. All children are brilliant enough to learn calculus, if you want to offer it to them. But if you want to teach calculus, you have to know calculus. And most teachers don't. So why blame the child for the inability to achieve when the deficiency is in the other place? Obviously, if you want the child to achieve in calculus and teachers don't know calculus, then now you've got to prepare the teachers. Now you're talking about staff development. See how it's all connected?
If someone really wants to raise the achievement of children, you've got to recognize reality in the classroom. Once you do so, you'll know that we'll have to do what we did in the 1960s. When this country thought that the Russians were ahead in the space race, when they put up Sputnik, the next thing that happened was that the U.S. massively mobilized for science education. It was science, science everywhere. We had a National Defense Education Act. Look at the language: education became a matter of national defense. When the rubber met the road, they knew they had to do something and they funded the process of doing it.
What's happening now? The budget is bankrupt on social welfare issues and nobody wants to do anything about it. So you manipulate the standards to make it look as if you're doing something. But you cannot fix the problems that are wrong in the public sector without providing resources.
If you want to reform schools, don't do it with testing. We used to say, "If you want elephants to grow, you don't weigh the elephants. You feed the elephants." Children will not grow unless they get quality instruction.
In some ways, I see the standards movement as Trivial Pursuit. We know it's not a reform tool and yet we move ahead as if it's a reform tool. I know why we ended up with national standards. After the Republicans gutted the social services budget, the politicians still wanted to look good to the people, so they could say they were making the best effort they could under the circumstances. In other words, they had to address the question, "What can I do with no money?" Basically, nothing but showboat.

IQ Is a Scam

I also want to say something about irrationality and mental measurement, because part of this job is to find tests that tell us the truth. The mental measurement movement is typified by irrationality.
IQ is the biggest scam in the history of education. Nobody needs IQ testing. Nobody benefits when you do it. I'm in a very different position than most of you; I don't want an IQ test for Black kids, and one for green kids, and one for yellow kids, and one for red kids. I don't want any for anybody, because it offers no benefits to anyone. The issue is not bias. Sometimes, people get up here to discuss bias, when we should be asking, "Why is this foolish question about IQ being asked? Who said that a teacher has to know a child's ultimate capability before they start to teach?"
I have friends who are abandoning IQ because they know it's hot water right now, at least the old IQ test. Now they're all running to the Seven Intelligences measurement, so that we can have seven ways to rank kids instead of one. The problem is, the purpose of testing does not change when you shift from the one-dimensional intelligence to the seven-dimensional intelligence. If your purpose is to rank, rather than to diagnose and to fix, then you never shifted paradigms. You just changed the language. Maybe you changed some of the activity.
I was on a panel with Howard Gardner, author of Multiple Intelligences, and I asked him, "Do you know what people are doing with your tests? They say, 'Well, you don't have mathematical intelligence but maybe you have artistic intelligence, maybe a little musical intelligence.'" He said, "Well, I didn't mean that by that." I said, "I know. I didn't think you did. I think your constructs have much more to do with curriculum than they do with 'intelligence.'"
We have got to learn to ask new questions and not simply give a Black version of the white question. So intelligence testing should go out the window, as far as I'm concerned. Now if you want to know how we know it's irrational, get the book edited by Helga Rowe, Intelligence: Reconceptualization and Measurement, which are papers from a summit meeting of psychologists in mental measurement in Melbourne, Australia, in 1988. They were trying to figure out what was the state of the art in measurement, especially intelligence measurement, and they came away with three conclusions. Actually, there were probably more conclusions, but these are the three that interested me:

They couldn't agree on what intelligence was. That's what you might call a construct validity problem. It's a little hard to measure precisely when you don't have agreement on the construct.
There's no predictive validity to IQ tests unless you use low-level thinking as your achievement criteria. If you use high-level, complex, conceptually-oriented problem solving, then there's no correlation between IQ scores and achievement outcomes. This is serious, because that's where the IQ test is supposed to be making its contribution, in predictive validity. But it's not there unless you measure something that somebody has already had time to process.
If they can ever agree on what intelligence is, and if they can ever measure it, they will have to take context into account. That's what the Black psychologists have been arguing for before I was born: that the context is what gives meaning to a response. You can't universalize a dialogue, linguistically or culturally. It's scientific idiocy to do so. So you have to understand whose IQ is being tested -- those who make the irrational IQ tests. IQ testing doesn't do any good for anybody other than people who need work. It's a professional welfare program.

The disproportionate placement of African-American males in classes for the mentally retarded should have taught a prudent person that something is wrong with intelligence testing. When you get 25% of African-American males in Mississippi public schools in classes for the mentally retarded -- and no other group has a proportion like that -- maybe there's something with the tests that we ought to look at. But if you're irrational, you don't. You go ahead as if it couldn't be your test.
IQ tests, universally, are invalid. You cannot measure in absence of understanding of the context of the person. That means their culture, that means the political situation, that means their exposure to curriculum -- all of that adds up to context.

Standards and Curriculum

I'm often called on to testify in court cases. In one case in Florida, the judge asked me, very impatiently, "Well, just give me an example of a biased item!" I said, "Well, Judge, all of them are biased." And he said, "No, no, no. I don't want to hear that; I want to hear a specific example!" I said, "Well, OK."
The transgressions are so gross in these tests, it's so easy. That's a softball question for me. So I said, "You know, let's take this section here of this test. This is about geography, the section on geography." He said, "Well, what's wrong with it?" I said, "Florida doesn't teach geography."
Wouldn't you think that would be a content validity problem? He reluctantly had to rule in favor of the plaintiffs. Afterwards, officials actually had to go back and institute a statewide curriculum in Florida. So now Florida has a curriculum, supposedly. They went through a process and now they say, "We have a curriculum, so we can have a test, and we can make measurement." But all they really have is a standard measure with no match between the standard and what is actually taught in school.
We're going to run the risk of the same thing at the national level. Why? I sat on a subcommittee of the Goals 2000 national goals panel when they were talking about national standards. One of the biggest problems they had was political, because the states don't want to be dictated to. Each state will set its own standards, if it wants to set standards. This potentially means 50 standards. But you're going to have one test, at the national level, to measure the 50 different standards? That's irrational. That means you can't be serious about what you said you were wanting to do.
I could go on. But the issue is, when we finally get down to the end of this standard dialogue, where will we stand on national assessment? What kind of assessment, achievement or otherwise? Will the assessment be rational? Will it be true content validity? Will there be an empirical way to test it or will we still fool ourselves on mental measurement?
There's also the question of a common national curriculum. If you're not ready for a national curriculum, you're not going to have national standards. And you certainly won't have national, standardized assessment, because there'll be a mismatch between the assessment and the sets of standards that go with each state, and maybe even substandards within each state.

Opportunity to Learn

The real issue is one of common treatment, that is, opportunity to learn. One of the things we find is that there are a lot of people that don't want all children to learn at the highest level. I read Lisa Delpit's book, Other People's Children, and it's clear there are a lot of people that don't want to teach other people's children, that don't want to pay for other people's children's education. [Alfie Kohn in the April 1998 Phi Delta Kappan]
Let me give you the bottom line on vouchers. The voucher movement is a movement of greedy people who don't want to pay for other people's children. They're trying to get money into their pockets so they can pay for the private schools they're already paying for. They give my child $1,800 in a voucher, let him show up at the Moon Glow Private School that's charging $12,000 a year tuition with his $1,800 voucher, and say, "I would come to school over here, but I don't have transportation either, and all I got is this voucher." Do you think that's a solution to the educational needs of the masses of our children, Black or white? It isn't.
It's disingenuous of those people who support vouchers to say what they're trying to do is school reform. What they're trying to do is get their greedy paws on another couple bucks to reduce their private school tuition. That's what it's about. I told you I was going to tell it to you exactly the way it is.
What I want to talk about is the common treatment opportunity, that is, opportunity to learn. You can't hold children to the standards unless you give them a chance to master those standards. You have to check to see if the opportunities are there. We are a country typified by savage inequalities -- I love the title of Jonathan Kozol's work, Savage Inequalities -- and it's not the children who are savages, it's the people who savagely distribute the resources inequitably. Here's what Kozol finds out: $10,000 per year per child at New Trier Township High School. $5,000 per year per child at DuSable High School. Where you live determines what level of resources you get. That's a policy issue that is not being addressed by the standards movement. They're not even looking at the inequality. They're looking only at the output, not the input.
Content validity of achievement tests, and the standards, and the curriculum -- all three must be aligned with each other. But I see no hope that that's going to happen in this country any time soon. Too many vested interests have reason not to see that happen.

Quality Teaching

Another problem is that many of the people who are talking standards have no idea of the importance of quality teaching and leadership. I was senior advisor on a video series with Dr. Barbara Sizemore [Every Child Can Succeed, Agency for Instructional Technology, Bloomington, IN] looking mainly at public schools where the children from the lowest quartile in economics are performing in the top quartile and higher in academics. How often do you think that happens? Well, I can tell you it happens a lot. We started with some of the schools that Barbara had been working with in the Hill District in Pittsburgh. The kids are all coming out of the housing projects, through the crack-infested neighborhoods, through the gang-banging neighborhoods. The Vann school and Madison school in that neighborhood are number one and number two. They have good leadership and good teaching, which accounts for their quality output. Unless we accept that good teaching is efficacious, that it can move kids in a profound way, then all the discussion about standards will have no meaning whatsoever.
We also need to locate and destroy what I call "doubt production." As an academic, I'm interested in origin of doubt, especially the doubt that all children can learn. I got a chance to speak at the American Psychological Association last August on the racism in psychology. One of the things that I charged was that the association itself contained members who for years have been manufacturers of doubt. The ideology of the absence of intelligence of African people was constructed by several of the most prestigious psychologists that we know.
If you want to do something, instead of manipulating the standards, go into the programs that teach the genetic inferiority of people of color, in psychology programs, in sociology programs. Go into those places and undo what is being done. For example, there's a book by Mark Snyderman and Stanley Rothman, The IQ Controversy [1990]. In the book, over 1,000 prestigious psychologists were surveyed and over half of them agreed with the conclusion of The Bell Curve with respect to the difference between Black and white IQ. In other words, they believe that the IQ test is valid, which means that the gap in intelligence is real and it's not just a gap in test scores. Now when the elite of the profession still profess this publicly, you've got a problem of the manufacture of doubt. How are you going to fix the school if on the one end people are talking about how all children can learn, and on the other end they're talking about how Black children aren't as intelligent as white kids?
So where do we go from here? As I said, we need to connect standards with instruction so that the standards themselves are content-valid, and then we need to connect the assessment instrument to the standards. If that happens, then maybe we can make some moves forward.
I have no expectation that that's going to happen, however. Therefore, I think the standards movement is going to be abandoned and we'll be doing this again in another five years when somebody else has the problem of how to raise achievement with no money.
But if we can turn the discussion around so that it focuses on the quality of service rather than on the analysis of children and their families, then maybe, just maybe, we might be one step ahead when the topic comes up again.

Cultural Pluralism in Education

Now and then we hear these wonderful stories about the little old lady who weighs no more than 135 pounds who finds that a large truck has fallen off a jack and is crushing her husband to death. With what appears to be miraculous strength, she moves in and actually lifts the truck, enabling the husband to be rescued. Apparently, she always had the strength; all that was needed was to focus the energies in a determined effort to succeed.

Learning ought to be like that; in fact, in many cases, it is precisely like that. For many years, I have been concerned that we do not see it this way. There is rather a brutal pessimism which permeates the expectations of too many of us; those on the front lines, and those in more remote policy positions - perhaps even those in the general public at large. We have adjusted to very low levels of performance from children in the schools; now it takes very little to satisfy us.

For the past two decades, my writing and research has been focused on pedagogical success in two areas. On the one hand, I continue to be intrigued and exhilarated by educators who are winning magnificently. That is, educators who are able to teach so that the masses of students that they teach have excellent performance. At the same time, I am fascinated and exhilarated when I have the opportunity to observe those magnificent teacher educators, who like excellent teachers, are able to transfer their knowledge of excellent teaching to raw recruits.

In spite of the changes in perception among educators that have come about because of the Effective Schools movement, I believe that we have yet to be captured by a vision of an excellent school movement. For too many, such a goal seems closer to fantasy than reality. As a result, I have tried to highlight many examples of excellence in teaching and teacher education in the hope that they would be noticed by a broad audience, and where possible, that they would be imitated. Teaching and research should begin in most instances from an examination of power teaching.

I have also been concerned about what children are taught. Of course, the way children are taught and the content of their lessons are integral to each other. The content of school course work is never neutral. It has an effect on children, one way or the other. Much of my career, I have been concerned with the problem of low performance of African-American, Hispanic-American, and American Indian students, as well as poor European students. I have had the opportunity to review many types of curricula and materials that support the curriculum. In spite of the fact that the issue of cultural pluralism in the curriculum has been raised as a problem for many years now, fundamental changes have yet to be made. When I think of pluralism in the curriculum, I think first and foremost of a truthful curriculum that paints an accurate picture of the total human experience, no matter what events we choose to examine. A truthful portrayal of human events will force a pluralization of the curriculum instantly.

Children, no matter what their racial or ethnic background, should be presented with pictures of the real world. That is how we can support accurate perception. In addition, this is how we assure that children from every group will find themselves at the center of materials that they study. Motivation and self-esteem are deeply affected by the topics that we choose to present and by the coverage we choose to give those topics from a pluralistic perspective. As it is true that there are many models of teaching that result in excellence in student achievement, there are also many models of excellence in pluralistic curriculum. However, as with pedagogical success, curricular success tends to be out of the awareness of the majority of our educators.

Educational reform must address these two issues. The "miracle" that I cited at the beginning of this article has its counterpart in education. Excellent performance by students and excellence in the curriculum is not a matter of miracles, however; it only appears to be so. There are many living examples of the fact that hard work and clear focus can transform the educational condition of our students, and even the condition of educators that serve them.

About: Asa Hilliard III

In a recent article, Dr. Asa Hilliard notes that for many years he has been "fortunate enough to see first hand individual teachers and whole schools that were consistently successful in producing the highest level of academic excellence with those students who are regarded as the most likely candidates for failure." He notes that African-American, Hispanic, American Indian, and poor children can and do blossom academically and socially under the right school conditions. "These successes destroy forever the whole inventory of excuses for our failure to educate all children at the level that we now call 'excellence'."

Devoting his life to helping all children to learn, he has served on innumerable advisory boards for national, state, and community organizations focused on the education of minority students, young children, and children with special needs, as well as on boards dealing with assessment, teacher education, and mental health.

He has been director for numerous research projects, including Research on Multiethnic Curriculum Issues for New York College Boards, a national research project for the National Education Association on the subject of the declining numbers of black teachers, and a Toddlers and Infants Evaluation Study for Oakland, California.

At the present time, Dr. Hilliard is Fuller E. Callaway Professor of Urban Education, Department of Educational Foundations, Counseling and Psychological Services, and Early Childhood Education at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. He served as Editorial Consultant for John Garrity's The Story of America, and produced a video program, with Listervelt Middelton, Master Keys to Ancient Kemet.

He was given the Outstanding Scholarship Award by the National Association of Black Psychologists and the Marcus A. Foster Distinguished Educator Award by the National Alliance of Black School Educators.

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29 August 2012

WISDOM OF ASA HILLIARD