Gary Imhoff and Dorothy Brizill of DC Watch produce a periodic Email titled “The Mail.” They sent out an Email today. The first item focuses upon Dunbar High School in the Bates area.
I have copied in Gary Imhoff’s comments about Dunbar below.
High Expectations
Dear Scholars:
Thomas Sowell wrote a powerful article about Dunbar High School, “The Fate of Dunbar High: Selective Schools Help Those Students Eager to Learn,” that was published in the May 1 issue of National Review, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/376916/fate-dunbar-high-thomas-sowell. “There has not been much controversy about Dunbar High School for a long time. Since sometime in the late 1950s, it has been just one more ghetto school with an abysmal academic record — and that has been too common to be controversial,” Sowell wrote. “What is different about the history of Dunbar is that, from its founding in 1870 as the first public high school in the country for black students, until the mid 1950s, it was an outstanding academic success.”
What doomed Dunbar’s success was exactly what had created its success. Its selectivity, its high demands on its students and faculty, tainted it with the curse of “elitism,” and it had to be brought down and leveled to make sure that no school and no student was thought to be any better than any other. We have been trying ever since to rediscover the secret that made Dunbar an extraordinary school and made its students so very capable and successful. Perhaps, we have thought, if we spent more and more money on schools, if we made class sizes smaller, if we tested students more frequently with standardized tests, then education for black students in Washington could be improved back to the standard that we achieved back in the first decade after slavery in America was abolished.
We have tried everything except what Dunbar started with — high expectations on students’ behavior and learning, high expectations enforced not just by teachers, but also by parents and by their fellow students.
Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com
Bates Area Civic Association 