Abstract
Excerpted From: Victoria M. Beatty, Pedagogy of the Marginalized: A Libertarian Solution for Black Academic Achievement, 26 Journal of Law in Society 137 (Winter 2026) (404 Footnotes) (Full Document Requested)
Very soon after I went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Auld, she very kindly commenced to teach me the A, B, C. After I had learned this, she assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters. Just at this point of my progress, Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read. To use his own words, further, he said, “If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master--to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now,” said he, “if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.” These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought. It was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things, with which my youthful understanding had struggled, but struggled in vain. I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty--to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.-- Frederick Douglass (1845)
Frederick Douglass’ slave master, Mr. Auld, described the power of education as something that aroused feelings of discontentment. The educated, as he put it, are “unmanageable” and therefore “unfit to be a slave.” After observing this discourse between Mr. Auld and his wife, the young Frederick Douglass immediately understood that for Black people in America, education was the key to liberation.
For Frederick Douglass in 1845, the pursuit of freedom through learning took on a very practical meaning, as he used the ability to read and write to free himself from the bondage of slavery. But in 2026, the benefit of education for Black people in America is more robust than breaking chains. At its core, education is how one enters and contributes to society.
In Brown v. Board of Education, Chief Justice Warren discussed the interconnectedness between education and citizenship. Justice Warren referred to an aspect of citizenship that presses beyond its understood definition as a legal status or the right to vote, to include a social component reflected in how well adjusted a person is to the cultural norms of society. In his assessment that education and civil freedom are inextricably linked, attorney Thurgood Marshall argued before the Supreme Court in Brown:
[t]he right to education is a genuine social right of citizenship, because the aim of education during childhood is to shape the future adult. Fundamentally it should be regarded, not as the right of the child to go to school, but as the right of the adult citizen to have been educated.
The critical union between education and citizenship explains why the American classroom often mirrors the American government. In 1935, Dr. W.E.B. DuBois published Black Reconstruction in America, where he defined the racial caste system in America as the paradigm that places race as the key determinant of economic attainment. DuBois argued, the American racial caste system first developed within the colonial-plantation period as a means to secure the labor necessary to meet the growing demands of an expanding capitalist economic system.
Building on DuBois’ work on the American racial caste system, in 2020, Isabel Wilkerson asserted, in Caste, that the racial caste system is a paradigm so ingrained in American society that it is perpetuated generation after generation practically subconsciously. As she phrased it, in America the color of one’s skin defining one’s caste or rank in society has “been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.”
After slavery was abolished, Du Bois argued, the American racial caste system entered its second iteration that secured Black labor to meet economic demand, not through slavery, but through education, specifically, “caste education.” According to DuBois, 'caste education,’ is “a system designed to extract economic value from the African American population and enforce their political status as second-class, biologically inferior citizens.” Caste education, he argued, originated as the government’s biopolitical strategy to preserve the newly freed ex-slaves as an agricultural labor force to continue fueling what had become a global, trillion-dollar cotton industry.
According to DuBois, American education uses a “network of caste technologies of control,” like “curriculum, funding sources, industrial reform strategies, vocational mandates, [and] control of teacher training” to produce “caste psychologies that preserve and reconstitute competitive relations between the white and dark worlds.” In other words, DuBois believed American education is designed as a socio-political strategy to ensure Black children become poorly educated, low-income, working class adults, or simpler, the lower caste of America.
The racial achievement gap that has persisted between Black and White school-age children is evidence that DuBois’ contention remains true. The racial achievement gap is defined as the disparity that occurs when groups of students with comparative ability do not achieve at the same level. In American education, achievement gaps between Black students and their White peers exist in every state for which data are available. In the K-12 sector, Black and White male students have the largest and most persistent racial achievement gap compared to all other races.
In 1971, the Nation’s Report Card released its National Assessment of Educational Progress (“NAEP”) testing results, finding White nine-year-old children scored 44 points higher than Black nine-year-old children in reading, 39 points higher amongst thirteen-year-olds, and 53 points higher amongst seventeen-year-olds. In 2015, Black students scored lower than any other racial group on the NAEP with an average reading score 26 points lower than White students, a difference of about two grade levels. The racial achievement gap persists even among the highest-performing students. In 2003, the percentage of Black students scoring at the advanced level in reading was 1% while the percentage of White students scoring at the advanced level in reading was 4%. Twenty-one years later, in 2022, Black students were the only race to show 0% increase remaining at 1%, while the percentage of advanced level White students rose to 5%.
In 1965, the average Black 12th grader was 1.1 standard deviations behind the average White 12th grader in both mathematics and reading. In other words, 87% of White 12th graders placed ahead of the average Black 12th grader. Forty-eight years later in 2013, the average Black 12th grader was .9 standard deviations behind the average White 12th grader in math, and .8 standard deviations behind the average White 12th grader in reading. If improvements continue at the current rate, it will be two and a half centuries until the racial achievement gap closes in mathematics and over one and a half centuries before it closes in reading. In America, at every level of the educational experience, a racial disparity exists.
But these statistics are not new. They simply raise no alarm because the treatment of the Black child is an extension of the treatment of his Black parents, who have never been considered fully human. The socio-political construct of race and racism have always been the tools used to authenticate the original justification: the inherent inferiority of the Black man. The original justification that eased the consciousness of White Christians while enslaving millions of Black people to build what would become the richest nation in the world.
Although the original justification was ingrained in the customs of colonial America, it was not formally named until the early 20th Century when eugenic pedagogy pervaded public education policy. In 1916, Professor Lewis Terman of Stanford University, developed the Stanford-Binet I.Q. test to identify “the 'feeble-minded’ and 'borderline feeble-minded’ and hopefully to discourage them from breeding.” Terman argued, that the borderline feebleminded “represent the level of intelligence which is very, very common among Spanish-Indian and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among negroes.”
The Stanford-Binet I.Q. test was identified by name in the class action lawsuit filed by Black children in California against San Francisco for the state’s reliance on standardized intelligence tests to enroll 27% of the 9% of Black students in the California school population, in classes for the “educable mentally retarded” (EMR):
Further, the curriculum [of EMR classes] was not and is not designed to help students learn the skills necessary to return to the regular instructional program ... [quoting the state handbook] The primary instructional goals for the mentally retarded are set forth in Education Code Section 6902 as “social adjustment” and “economic usefulness.”
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, a best-selling book written in 1994 by Charles Murray, a political scientist, and Richard Hernstein, a Harvard University professor, modernized the original justification, in its argument that socioeconomic status and IQ are heritable. The book identified a “scientifically verifiable link between race, genes, and intelligence.” The authors concluded education policy should not commit resources to low-achieving students since race, instead of environment, controlled intellect. The genetic link between race and intelligence as a justification to keep nonwhite children uneducated, is weaved throughout U.S. educational policy despite clear scientific evidence to the contrary. In 1996, the American Psychological Association (“APA”), in its report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns, rebuffed the findings of The Bell Curve concluding there existed no single scientific explanation for the differential between the IQ scores of Black and White students, but “there is certainly no such support for a genetic interpretation.”
The original justification for caste education shifted in the late 1990s and 2000s away from the genetic intellect of the student to the quality of the institution. Researchers posited the cause of the gap was due to “stereotype threats,” the cultural mismatch, the school curriculum, the school itself, and teacher pedagogical practices. This led to the era of “test-based accountability” in education policy, where the allocation of resources and academic success are based on a student’s ability to perform on a standardized test.
In truth, predominately Black schools are insufficient and unequal in comparison to the resources available in predominately White schools, so school accountability is important. It is also true that family history directly impacts the academic achievement of children. But neither explanation is sufficient to explain how, after the desegregation of schools and the rise in economic attainment of Black Americans nationwide, does the racial achievement gap, discovered in 1966, persists 60 years later.
Gloria Ladson-Billings in From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt, viewed the racial achievement gap as a mere reflection of America’s fundamental issue-the education debt. In her metaphorical analysis, Ladson-Billings argues that Congress may pass a national budget with no deficit, such that spending does not exceed income in a single fiscal year. But, the national debt, defined as the total amount of money the federal government owes its creditors, has persisted since 1791. Ladson-Billings asserts that even in the years when the United Stated had a balanced budget (with no deficits), the national debt continued to grow, although at a slower rate.
In quoting economist Robert Haveman, Ladson-Billings emphasizes the education debt owed by the United States accrues due to the historic and systemic withholding of resources that should have been invested in children from low income households. She concludes, America cannot close the racial achievement gap until it pays its education debt owed to Black children, a historically accruing liability.
The education debt does not exist in a single moment of time, but instead, over the course of American history. For Black Americans, the education debt has accrued slowly, systematically, and methodically. It is the amalgamation of four centuries of expressly racist and race-neutral laws, policies, practices, biased curricula, strategic school closures, racist schoolboards, dilution of equity programming, racist teachers and administrators, all with the aid of state and federal politicians.
This legacy of educational inequity is a part of the history of America, and is a history that requires acknowledgement, contrition, and restitution. The systemic and legal divestment from the education of Black children by federal and state governments has played a critical role in the generational subjugation of Blacks to one end: preserving the racial caste system in America. For this reason alone, this author argues, redress is owed.
Section II of this Article is a tribute to the souls lost in this 400-year pursuit of true citizenship. The section begins with the history of American education and methodically outlines how both state and federal laws continue to divest from the development and education of Black children. Section III explores how the presumed solution of 'equality’ as mandated by Brown and later weaponized, perpetuates this historic divestment and further serves to protect the unmerited privilege of White children. This Article concludes with Section IV, a form of reparations in education for marginalized children. The type of educational setting that builds a holistic self-identity with true academic rigor grounded in the pursuit of knowledge, and administered by the original mavericks of Black education.
Most reports on reparations for Black Americans in education focus on funding the very institutions and state governments that have historically hated Black children or asks these children to attend primarily White institutions through tuition scholarships. This Article offers an alternative that places the responsibility of Black academic achievement back in the hands of Black educators and away from the systems that have perpetuated this violent, unconstitutional harm.
[ . . . ]
The function of the Negro college, then, is clear: it must maintain the standards of popular education, it must seek the social regeneration of the Negro, and it must help in the solution of problems of race contact and co-operation. And finally, beyond all this, it must develop men. Above our modern socialism, and out of the worship of the mass, must persist and evolve that higher individualism which the centres of culture protect; there must come a loftier respect for the sovereign human soul that seeks to know itself and the world about it; that seeks a freedom for expansion and self-development; that will love and hate labor in its own way, untrammeled alike by old and new. Such souls aforetime have inspired and guided worlds, and if we be not wholly bewitched by our Rhine-gold, they shall again. -- W. E. B. Du Bois (1903)
Dunbar High School, formerly M Street School, was founded in the 1870s as a private school for freed Blacks, and became the first Black public high school in the United States. In 1899, four Washington public school students took a test, three white schools and Dunbar. Dunbar students scored higher than two of the three White schools. Despite being overcrowded and underfunded, Dunbar was known for academic excellence:
The classical or college preparatory curriculum at M Street was superior to that of the first two years of some colleges and universities, regardless of geographical location, in 1912. It included, for instance, two years of Greek, three years of French, four years of Latin: grammar the first year, Caesar’s Gallic Wars the second year, Cicero’s Orations the third year, and Virgil’s Aeneid the fourth year. Our courses in mathematics included geometry, trigonometry, and higher algebra. In the English classes we read not only Silas Marner and some of the Plays and Sonnets of Shakespeare but also William H. Prescott’s The Conquest of Mexico and The Conquest of Peru, Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, for instance. One of my most cherished possessions is a copy of Handbook of Composition: A Compendium of Rules Regarding Good English, Grammar, Sentence Structure, Paragraphing, Manuscript Arrangement, Punctuation, Spelling, Essay Writing, and Letter Writing by E. C. Wooley, published in 1909.
Dunbar’s academic rigor was so intense, the school was reported to the board of education due to the overbearing student workload. Students were counseled on what to eat, wear, and how to behave. What made Dunbar’s education exceptional was largely due to their faculty: “In the early 1900’s the school had thirty teachers, twenty with degrees from Harvard, Yale, Oberlin, Amherst, Dartmouth, and Bowdoin; and five with degrees from Howard University.” Dunbar attracted the best Black educators because in Washington D.C. federal standards required equal pay for all teachers.
Dunbar graduates built the Black middle class in Washington D.C. Despite Jim Crow, Dunbar had an 80% graduation rate, sending students to Harvard, Yale, Brown, Syracuse, Amherst, Dartmouth, Boston College, Rutgers, Morgan, University of Southern California, University of Michigan and Colgate. By 1965, Dunbar had nearly 35 Phi Beta Kappa students.
The academic achievement at Dunbar proves that the racial achievement gap is not a product of circumstance or genetics: it is the intentional and natural consequence of a systemic design. Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator and philosopher, understood this. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire discussed how oppressors use the banking concept of education, where the teacher deposits information and students collect or catalogue that information, to dehumanize the oppressed. Freire’s book revealed to educators worldwide that the pedagogical purpose of banking education is to “chang[e] the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them; for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated.” Freire argued the hindering of a human’s “pursuit of self-affirmation” is a form of violence because “it interferes with the individual’s ontological and historical vocation to be more fully human.”
Freire proposed a pedagogy of freedom through libertarian education, a problem-posing pedagogy that creates an interchangeable relationship of teacher-as-student and student-as-teacher where the classroom becomes a space for dialogue by critical thinkers. Libertarian education is a pedagogy that places “authentic thinking,” thinking based on “reality” as the top priority. When this type of education is applied to historically oppressed groups, libertarian education becomes a praxis, a term Freire defined as “the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it.” Freire argued, libertarian education shifts the purpose of education from being a tool of subjugation to a process of developing a critical consciousness that empowers the student to “perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform.
An indispensable part of the education of Black youth in the United States must focus on deconstructing how racism has historically and systemically dehumanized their Black bodies and their Black minds. There is a well-researched relationship between a student having a positive ethnic racial identity and positive academic outcomes. It follows, therefore, that educators of Black children must facilitate that child’s academic confidence and construction of a healthy, moral, and critically thinking identity - the “pursuit of self-affirmation.” Academic achievement for the historically marginalized will require a new pedagogy that combines academic excellence with a transformative pursuit of self and knowledge.
Andrew Arroyo and Marybeth Gazman conducted research on a HBCU-based educational approach as an attempt to present the HBCU experience as a scalable theoretical framework. The authors argue HBCUs offer a unique space that for centuries has fostered academic achievement in Black students of all socioeconomic backgrounds. The foundation of the HBCU-based educational model is to provide first a supportive environment. The authors referred to a supportive environment as one that gives students many opportunities to form friendships with peers, faculty, staff, and counselors beyond the classroom; opportunities for students to actively engage in a robust extracurricular campus life and assume leadership roles. And finally, the supportive academic environment encourages students to believe they can improve.
The second foundation of the HBCU model is institutional accessibility and affordability. Many HBCU students are highly talented and affluent and many come from disadvantaged background with few other educational opportunities, making HBCUs an example for educating a variety of students alongside each other.” The authors also noted the relatively low cost of an HBCU education when compared to non-HBCUs.
The third foundation of the HBCU model is both the individual and interactive, institutionally led process of prioritizing each student’s achievement, identity formation, and values cultivation. As for achievement, the authors noted HBCUs offer “competitive learning opportunities,” with some researchers finding HBCU students do as well or significantly higher than their peers at PWIs. The authors posit the cultural relevance of the curricula plus the opportunity for early interventions from caring faculty contribute to HBCUs’ unique ability to foster academic achievement.
In reference to identity development, the authors argue HBCUs have a three-pronged approach: racial and ethnic identity formation, intellectual identity formation, and leadership identity formation. Black instructors, who often serve as academic mentors and tutors, do not have a racial bias toward Black students. Students are free to learn in an environment removed of negative stereotypes and White privilege. Knowledge is the priority, and its dogged pursuit is the only acceptable process.
As far as values, HBCU campuses are steeped in traditions that are designed “to cultivate a set of traditional African American moral principles and norms with the goal of developing citizens of competence and character.” Holistic success is the outcome for fostering academic achievement plus the intangible of “developing moral persons and engaged citizens.
The HBCU-based educational approach to Black academic achievement works despite the fact HBCUs have received about $12.6 billion less in state funding than other land-grant institutions. During the 2021-2022 school year, HBCUs conferred 13% of bachelor’s degrees, 5% of master’s degrees, and 10% of doctoral degrees. Of those degrees, 73% were conferred on Black students. In the 2019-2020 school year, 90% of HBCU undergraduate students received financial aid of some kind, including 82% who received federal aid. Every day, HBCUs prove the color of a student’s skin nor his socioeconomic status is greater than an institution’s commitment to academic achievement.
In 2024, Black students were 30% more likely to graduate from an HBCU than a comparable Black student at a PWI. HBCU students had higher degree attainment in students with SAT scores below the median. Black HBCU students were more likely to graduate with degrees in STEM, with 27% of America’s Black STEM undergraduates attending an HBCU. It is the contention of this Article that the HBCU framework must be replicated in the K-12 classroom.
The path forward is clear -- to stop the harm and reverse the effects of systemic racism in U.S. education, the Black child must be removed from America’s violent classrooms and placed in the type of institution committed to his holistic success. Such removal is even more critical for Black children living near or under the poverty line. I argue that the key to Black student achievement is bringing the academic rigor of Dunbar High School to the HBCU theoretical framework. Black children will be educated in specialized, boarding schools that adhere to rigorous, yearlong academic and identity-forming curricula while maintaining a vertically integrated, self-sustaining business model, ensuring financial independence.
Someday, the United States will have no choice but to acknowledge what it has done and is presently doing to its Black citizenry. But freedom requires immediate action. If the federal government refuses to pay restorative reparations to Black children, if states continue to divest from the resources that Black children need, and if state and federal governments continue to pass laws to stifle Black achievement, the responsibility for transformation is a burden those few who survived the American classroom must boldly and courageously bear.
-Signed, an American Classroom Survivor & Black Educator.
Associate Professor of Law, Barry University School of Law; B.A., Spelman College; M.Ed., University of Miami College of Education; J.D., Howard University School of Law.
