Report Urges Feds to Focus on Why Black Teenage Boys are Failing in School

The Council of the Great City Schools is calling on the  federal government to do something about the academic and social achievement gap between black and white kids. “Black males continue to perform lower than their peers throughout the country on almost every indicator,” says the groundbreaking report A Call for Change: The Social and Educational Factors Contributing to the Outcomes of Black Males in Urban Schools. The study focuses on six areas in black kids' lives, including readiness to learn, in-school experience and college/career preparation. Here are a few things the report found:

One out of every three black children lived in poverty compared with one out of every ten white children in 2007. Black or poor students attending public school were more likely to be held back during their K-8 school career than their classmates.