Dunbar High School-Washington DC

[Fireballer 2,642]

I was reading an article about Thomas Sowell, and it mentioned his writings about Dunbar/M St High School in DC. I had never heard of it, so I researched and I found out some interesting things.

Dunbar is an almost all black school.  Pre-Brown vs Board, it was all black due to segregation, but was astonishinly successful. It pulled students city wide.  Pre 1955, 80% of the students went on to college, including Ivy League. They routinely outperfomed white schools acedemically. The faculty was full of black teachers with advanced degrees. They valued a ademic excellence, self accountbility, and discipline.  

Ironicallly, when Brown vs Board desegregated schools, Dunbar became a neighborhood school.  Here is Sowells assessment of what happened: 

Virtually overnight, Dunbar became a typical ghetto school. As unmotivated, unruly and disruptive students flooded in, Dunbar teachers began moving out and many retired. More than 80 years of academic excellence simply vanished into thin air.

Today, its still a run-of-the-mill urban school with almost zero competency.  It gets $$$ dumped into it, and only has a 13:1 teacher/student ratio. Also, a new state of the art building was built recently.  Its a sad story really.  

But what was it that made Dunbar great?  Why, even in the 50s, did a great school just implode overnight?  Heres another very good read about Dunbar from a professor at Bowie State Univ.   

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.aabri.com/manuscripts/162549.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiDxsLyjOLqAhXtj3IEHdv1Ats4ChAWMAZ6BAgEEAE&usg=AOvVaw2gzHyBhQI3f1vDlyYWDOFN

For a period of 85 years, the M Street/Dunbar High School was an academically elite, all-black public high school in Washington, D.C. As far back as 1899, its students came in first in citywide tests given in both black and white schools. Over this 85-year span, approximately 80 percent of M Street/Dunbar's graduates went on to college, even though most Americans, white or black, did not attend college at all. Faculty and students were mutually respectful to one another and disruptions in the classroom were not tolerated. Yet, in this era of best practices, this public high school has received virtually no attention in the literature or in policy considerations for inner-city education. The Dunbar High School, of today, with its new building and athletic facilities is just another ghetto school with abysmal standards and low test score results despite the District of Columbia's record of having some of the country's highest levels of money spent per pupil. The purpose of this study is to explore the history of a high school that was successful in teaching black children from low-income families and to determine if the learning model employed there could be successful in a modern inner-city public education environment

____________________

Black neighborhoods are no longer socio-economically diverse and children are not likely to see adults in a variety of positive roles. Today, the dominant value system of black culture is one of low expectations dominated by more single parent families, less discipline, and 
more incarceration of black males. Consequently, black students are less prepared academically in the elementary and middle schools for entrance into high school. Entering students do not 
have family support for education, lack self-discipline, and have little desire to learn. Finally, teachers are not as well qualified and committed as the past M Street/Dunbar faculty and good teachers have economic alternatives to teaching. To match that academic environment, a 
minimum requirement for teaching in a comparable education institution today would be a master’s degree in the field a faculty member is teaching, with preference given to a doctorate or 
A.B.D. (all but dissertation). The subculture of poverty is becoming institutionalized through expanded welfare assistance and government dependency. The new entitlement beneficiaries do not work and, 
instead, receive Food Stamps, welfare checks, Section 8 vouchers, and Medicaid. In this age of 
neo-slavery, the old M Street/Dunbar is passé. The interaction of current social, political, and cultural phenomena observed in the empirical evidence of the research data cannot be replicated 
with different participants with the same results.

 

[Hardcore troubadour 15,441]

Good read. Sowell is such a great man, with his own great life story.