State of the Black Male

[Wonderful1908]

This article was featured in todays Houston Chronicle, I know much of this as an inner city public school teacher but the numbers are still alarming especially the unemployment rates of the dropouts compared to Hispanics and Whites. I really sometimes wonder as en educator is there any way to reverse this dire trend. Thoughts?

March 20, 2006, 12:10AM
Alarm sounded on the plight of black men in U.S.
They are falling further behind in employment and education, new studies show

By ERIK ECKHOLM
New York Times

BALTIMORE - The plight of U.S. black men is far more dire than is portrayed by employment and education statistics, a flurry of new studies warn, and it has kept worsening even as an economic boom and welfare reforms brought gains to black women and many other groups.

New studies by experts at Columbia, Princeton, Harvard and other institutions show that the huge pool of poorly educated black males is becoming ever more disconnected from the mainstream society and to a far greater degree than white or Hispanic males.

Especially in the inner cities, the studies show, finishing high school is the exception and prison is almost routine, with incarceration rates climbing for blacks even as urban crime rates decline. The new data paint an alarming picture of ravaged lives and, the scholars say, of a deepening national calamity that has received too little attention.

"There's something very different happening with young black men, and it's something we can no longer ignore," said Ronald Mincy, a professor of social work at Columbia University and editor of Black Males Left Behind. "Over the last two decades, the economy did great," Mincy said, "and low-skilled women, helped by public policy, latched onto it. But young black men were falling farther back."

Many of the new studies go beyond the traditional approaches to looking at the plight of black men, especially in determining unemployment. Official unemployment rates can be misleading, because they do not include those not seeking work or incarcerated.

"If you look at the numbers, the 1990s was a bad decade for young black men, even though it had the best labor market in 30 years," said Harry Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University and a coauthor of Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men.

•The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990s. In 2000, 65 percent of high school dropouts in their 20s were jobless. By 2004, the share had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent of white dropouts and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts.
•In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20s who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their mid-30s, six in 10 black men who have dropped out of school have spent time in prison.
•In the inner cities, more than half of all black men never finish high school.