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Benedict College, Columbia, South Carolina enforces an academic policy that defies belief. Say I'm a freshman taking your class in biology. I learn little from your lectures, assigned readings and homework. I do attend class every day; take notes and manage to average 40 percent on the graded work for the semester. What grade might you give me? I'm betting that all but the academic elite would say, "Sorry, Williams, but no cigar," and I'd earn an F for the course. But, if you're a professor at Benedict College, you'd be fired.
That's exactly what happened to Professors Milwood Motley, Chairman of Benedict's Biological and Physical Sciences Department and Larry Williams of the same department, both of whom refused to go along with the college's Success Equals Effort (SEE) policy. SEE is a policy where 60 percent of a freshman's grade is based on effort and the rest on academic performance. In their sophomore year, the formula drops to 50-50 and isn't used at all for junior and senior years. In defense of his policy, Benedict's president, Dr. David H. Swinton said that the students "have to get an A in effort to guarantee that if they fail the subject matter, they can get the minimum passing grade. I don't think that's a bad thing."
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Today there are a few predominantly black public schools with fine achievement records, such as New York's Frederick Douglass Academy and private schools such as Marva Collins Preparatory School in Cincinnati, Marcus Garvey School in Los Angeles, and Ivy Leaf School in Philadelphia. If you simply walked around a failing school and then walked around one of these achieving schools, what would be some of the most notable characteristics? First, you wouldn't see students entering through metal detectors. You wouldn't see loitering in the hallways. You wouldn't hear foul language being spoken among the students and to the teachers and staff.
Upon further investigation, you'd learn that parents are supportive of the teachers and involved in their children's schooling - making sure they do homework, get to school on time and behave once there. The teachers are competent and demanding. None of these ingredients are budget-busters, but if they're not present, no matter how high the budget education won't occur.
The cruelest hoax of it all is the fraud perpetrated on black students and their parents. This was forcefully brought home to me over the holidays in a conversation with an in-law who boasted about how his son, a senior, was on his school's honor roll at one of Philadelphia's inner city high schools. While it was not thrilling, honesty compelled me to inform him that the average black high school graduate has an academic achievement level on par with that of an average white seventh-grader. His son's A's and B's would probably translate into C's, D's and F's at most other high schools.
