Balance (1965 - 1990)
Equality and Excellence (a 1985 report on black education)
While the scope of projects directly assisting minority access to higher education could be limiting, the College Board did pursue other initiatives that disseminated the ideas about educational access more broadly.
In 1985 the College Board produced and published Equality and Excellence: The Educational Status of Black Americans. Written by Linda Darling-Hammond, the report examined three areas as they related to the education of African-American students: school funding, graduation requirements, and changes in the teaching force.
The report noted that while the legal barriers to higher education were eliminated, blacks still received a separate and unequal education. Black students generally were tracked into less-challenging courses in K-12 schooling and had less opportunity for engaging in higher order thinking. Darling-Hammond stated that it was morally right to extend equal educational opportunities to all people. Further, the changing demographics lent an economic urgency to addressing the educational opportunities of minorities and low-income students.
Equality and Excellence reported a wealth of significant data on demographics and black education. It also reported that while graduation rates of black students had improved from the 1960s, that college attendance by blacks dropped since 1975. Blacks were also seriously underrepresented in graduate and professional schools, the report noted. This participation in post-graduate study declined from the mid-1970s as well.
Equality and Excellence concluded that the policy trends of the 1980s threatened to erode further the gains that had been made in extending educational equality to black Americans. The report argued for enriched K-12 curricular opportunities for blacks, financial assistance to pursue higher education, and instruction from well-qualified teachers. Darling-Hammond suggested that questions about resource allocation, curricular equality, and pedagogy must be asked so that blacks can receive, not better compensatory education, but simply more equal education.
