Somewhere in Heaven, Booker T. Washington weeps

With the arrival of freedom, Washington's family journeyed to West Virginia, where his stepfather arranged a job for him in a salt-furnace. It was there that his education began.

"The first thing I ever learned in the way of book knowledge was while working in this salt-furnace," he wrote years later. Each salt-packer's barrel was marked with a specific number, and young Booker saw the same number — "18" — chalked on his stepfather's barrel each day. "I soon learned to recognize that figure wherever I saw it, and after a while got to the point where I could make that figure, though I knew nothing about any other figures or letters."

That first taste of learning, negligible though it was, ignited in Washington a burning hunger for more. In time he would become one of the nation's great educators, but his own education could not have begun more humbly: Soon after we got settled in some manner in our new cabin in West Virginia, I induced my mother to get hold of a book for me. How or where she got it I do not know, but in some way she procured an old copy of Webster's "blue-back" spelling-book, which contained the alphabet, followed by such meaningless words as "ab," "ba," "ca," "da." I began at once to devour this book, and I think that it was the first one I ever had in my hands. I had learned from somebody that the way to begin to read was to learn the alphabet, so I tried in all the ways I could think of to learn it — all of course without a teacher, for I could find no one to teach me. At that time there was not a single member of my race anywhere near us who could read, and I was too timid to approach any of the white people. In some way, within a few weeks, I mastered the greater portion of the alphabet.

"Up From Slavery" is an inspiring memoir, justly ranked among the greatest nonfiction books of the 20th century. It is replete with stirring and eloquent passages, above all those that recount the desperate longing by Washington and so many other newly liberated Black people to acquire the ability to read, write, and calculate. Today, more than 12 decades after it was published, Washington's account of his extraordinary life remains a classic every American should read.

For children in too many failing school districts, however, reading this or any book would be a cruelly daunting challenge.

In Illinois, it was reported this month, dozens of public schools are so dysfunctional that none of their students — not one — has achieved proficiency in reading or math. According to Wirepoints, a nonprofit news service that covers government, public policy, and economic developments in Illinois, data from the state board of education indicate 30 public schools (22 of them in Chicago) "where not a single student can read at grade level." When it comes to math, the failure is even more comprehensive: In 53 schools, not one student of the thousands enrolled can do math at the level expected for their grade.

"Many of these schools are rated 'commendable' by the Illinois State Board of Education," Wirepoints observes. "That's the second-highest of four 'accountability' ratings a school can receive."

The amount of money taxpayers spend to operate these schools is astronomical. At Chicago's Spry Community Links High School, annual per-pupil spending has grown to more than $35,000. Yet none of its students can read or do math at grade level.

Similar findings emerged this month from the public school system in Baltimore. Analyzing the scores from the most recent statewide math test, reporters at WBFF-TV found that in the state's largest school district, "just 7 percent of third- through eighth-graders tested proficient in math, which means 93 percent could not do math at grade level. . . . [I]n 23 Baltimore City schools, there were zero students who tested proficient in math."

The picture is no brighter when it comes to reading. According to the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress — known as the "Nation's Report Card" — 77 percent of Baltimore high school students read at the elementary school level. At Patterson High in the city's Hopkins-Bayview neighborhood, for example, 628 students were tested. Of those, 159 students could read at only a kindergarten or first-grade level.

Baltimore taxpayers spent $1.6 billion on its schools in 2022. That averages to more than $21,000 per student. The derisory results speak for themselves. A mind is a terrible thing to waste, to quote the slogan of the venerable United Negro College Fund. But in far too many schools in far too many cities like Baltimore and Chicago, minds are being wasted on an industrial scale. A disproportionate number of those minds — 90 percent in Baltimore's public schools, 82 percent in Chicago's — belong to kids who are Black or Hispanic.

I don't hold with those who decry America as a land of irredeemably systemic racism. But racial injustices do exist and none is more heartbreaking than the years-long failure of so many public schools in largely nonwhite neighborhoods to do their job — a failure for which untouchable urban politicians, powerful teachers unions, and an entrenched educational bureaucracy deserve most of the blame. It is heartbreaking to contrast the institutional neglect of Black students in 21st-century America with the ravenous passion for education that consumed formerly enslaved African Americans in the years after the Civil War.

"There was never a time in my youth, no matter how dark and discouraging the days might be, when one resolve did not continually remain with me, and that was a determination to secure an education at any cost," wrote Booker T. Washington. While he was clearly blessed with exceptional intellectual gifts, the craving to learn was widely shared in Black society.

Those who didn't live through that period can hardly grasp "the intense desire which the people of my race showed for an education," he remarked in his autobiography. "Few were too young, and none too old, to make the attempt to learn. . . . The great ambition of the older people was to try to learn to read the Bible before they died. . . . Day-school, night-school, Sunday school, were always crowded, and often many had to be turned away for want of room."

Imagine what those newly freed Americans, so hungrily taking advantage of any chance to acquire knowledge, would have thought had they known that their descendants a century and a half later would attend well-funded schools yet learn next to nothing. What a betrayal. What a disgrace.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission."