icapped by competition from immigrants who, lacking education and skills,
have flooded the job market. According to the Public Policy Institute, in 2003
more than 40% of all service sector jobs in California were filled by Hispanics,
most of them illegal, nearly all from Mexico (Baldassare & Katz, 2003). Other
states are currently undergoing a similar experience.
A shrinking middle class meant that upward mobility quickly required more
and better education. Competition increased. Between 1960 and 1990, Amer-
ica’s population doubled, without a corresponding increase in the number of
colleges and universities. As Herrnstein and Murray (1994) noted, our schools
became very efficient at identifying the “cognitive elite,” children with the po-
tential to excel academically. The problem is that a disproportionate number of
successful students come from white and Asian families. In spite of our best ef-
forts and vast expenditures, black and Hispanic children historically have
lagged behind their white and Asian counterparts, as reflected not only in SAT
scores and high school grades but also in dropout rates. Census Bureau data in-
dicate that in 2000, the black dropout rate nationwide was 13.1%—double the
rate for whites—whereas the Hispanic rate was 27.8%. In states like California,
Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, with large Hispanic populations, the dropout
rate is higher, in some districts a staggering 50% (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000).
The future for those who cannot compete academically is grim. By the
1980s, rather than viewing education as the key to upward mobility, many in
the black and Hispanic communities came to see the sorting inherent in edu-
cation as a process of labeling that ensureddownward mobility. The hope of
desegregation—that attending predominantly white schools would lead to
improved performance—faded in the face of persistent low grades, poor read-
ing and writing skills, and low SAT scores. The many individual successes
among black and Hispanic students were overshadowed by the pervasive lack
of group success.^8
The reaction in many quarters was to withdraw, to return to the community
in both spirit and body through a process of indigenization in which group
identity becomes more important than national identity and certainly more
important than mainstream education and adherence to a linguistic standard.
By the early 1990s, tens of thousands of black parents were choosing to reseg-
regate their children, some enrolling them in the multitude of Afrocentric pri-
vate schools that were opening their doors nationwide, others demanding that
their local (and predominantly black) public schools shift to an Afrocentric
curriculum—and getting it. In this context, any language arts curriculum that
34 CHAPTER 2
(^8) The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 was developed specifically to improve academic perfor-
mance among blacks and Hispanics and provided $53.1 billion in federal funding for FY 2003.