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BLAME THE NEGRO CHILD!
WILKERSON

creation. The median educational level attained by this group is less than third grade. One-half of the group are unemployed; and, with one exception, those employed are on menial jobs.
Among the thirteen who were placed in foster homes, all are self-supporting as adults; none is a ward of any institution, public or private. Eleven of the thirteen are married, and nine of them have children. The median grade completed by this group is grade twelve; four have completed one or more years in college; and one boy received the A.B. degree from a university. One girl in this group who had an initial IQ of 35 has graduated from high school and taken one semester of college work. She is married and has two boys--one with an IQ of 128 and the other with an IQ of 107.5
Further illustrative of the educability of the poor are the results achieved by Smilansky and his associates working with Middle Eastern Jews in Israel. Their "social disadvantages" and associated academic retardation are strikingly similar to those of children in our urban ghettos. Smilansky and his co-workers operate on the premise that poor children, too, can learn; and through imaginative educational programs they commonly raise these children's IQ's by twenty points on the preschool level, and by ten points in adolescence.6 Such results, incidentally, are frequently achieved in experimental programs in our own country, especially among preschool children.
It is generally found in our schools-as in Deutsch's work at the Institute for Developmental Studies7-that the achievement differences between lower-class Negro children and middle-class white children are minimal at grade one, but increase progressively as children move through the grades. Thus, the Negro children become more and more retarded while they are in school. Could it be that what happens to them there has some causal relationship to their increasing retardation?
I have examined the cumulative records of children in ghetto schools, noting what teachers recorded about the same children in successive grades; and a striking pattern tends to emerge. In a substantial majority of cases, youngsters who were characterized as
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5Harold M. Skeels, Adult Status of Children with Contrasting Early Life Experiences, Society for Research in Child Development, University of Chicago Press, 1966
6Moshe Smilansky, "Fighting Deprivation in the Promised Land," Saturday Review, 49: 82+, October 15, 1966.
7Martin Deutsch, The Disadvantaged Child, New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1967, 400pp.

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