Name of Author and Text
Lisa Delpit, The Silenced Dialogue:
Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children



     "There comes a moment in every class where we have to discuss " The Black Issue" and what's appropriate education for black children". That is what a black male graduate student told Lisa Delpit.
It is very disappointing that there is even a "Black Issue" when it comes to the education of black children. It is disappointing  that there is still a black issue of any kind in this country. Slavery ended 149 years ago in the United States of America. Yes this country has progressed a great deal form then but as Secretary of State William Seward stated "we still have a long ways to go". 
     As far as the educational system and the way it handles black students there are to many walls put up that are blocking the progress of the students. I do not think that it is a coincidence that most of the worst  schools across the nation are found in the poor urban areas where the students are prominently African American.  The students are set up to fail with the lack of proper updated materials. My daughter went to Newsome Park Elementary located in Newport News, Virginia two years ago for 5th grade. The school was had the lowest test scores in the entire Hampton Roads area. Newsome Park was located in of-course the worst part in the Hampton Roads area. the two go hand-in-hand, bad neighborhood equals bad school which produces poorly educated students. When she started school we were told that they did not have enough books for all the students in her class so they would be shearing books until they received more funding. Her school cut out science because most of the fifth graders could not read pass a second grade level. Theses are students that were never taught properly in their previous grades and were pushed on to be the next teachers problem. This epidemic has been going on for years and years. 
     Most of the Black students that are in school now do not understand the importance of education. How could they when their parents and grand parents also do not understand it. My mother for example did not understand. She would always tell me that she wanted me and my siblings to be a lawyer or doctor or a teacher. But she had no idea how to help us reach those goals. She believed as with many parents in poverty that the schools would teach us all we needed to know and that it was the schools job to teach us anything we wanted to know. I know parents that think that if their child can not read that it is all the schools fault because that is what their child goes to school for. Delpit discuss how she has heard that poor parents are "uncaring" about their child's education. It is not that they are uncaring it is how ever that they do not understand the importance or the impact that an education will have on their child now and in the future. With that said it only makes matters worse when the school system in America who knows the importance of education allows for the lack of a good education to happen in too many schools.