A reflection on what our children's test scores are really telling us, and what it costs all of us when we refuse to listen.
I want to start by saying something clearly: I am not discouraged by our children. Not even a little. Every time I walk through the halls of a school and sit with young people, I see brilliance. I see curiosity. I see humor, depth, resilience, and a kind of wisdom that no test has ever been built to measure. What discourages me is what we keep doing to them in the name of helping them.
In 2025, the Nation’s Report Card released national test results showing that only 31% of 4th graders and 30% of 8th graders are reading at proficiency across the country. In Philadelphia, only 17% of 4th graders are reading at proficiency, and only 15% of 8th graders are meeting the math standard. These numbers are
not new. They have been trending this direction for years. And every year, the response is the same: a new program, a new framework, a new initiative with a new name. Then we do it all again.
That is not a solution. That is a loop. And it is a loop that is making people sick.
A LIBERATED SOUL PERSPECTIVE
When we talk about the wellness of Black and brown communities, we have to include what happens inside schools. The chronic stress of being measured, sorted, and labeled by systems that were never designed to see your genius is not just an educational problem. It is a body problem. It is a spirit problem. It is a community problem. Healing and liberation cannot happen outside of this conversation.
!e Problem Is Not the Children
Here is the question we are not asking: what if the test itself is the problem? What if the way we are measuring intelligence was never designed with Black and brown children in mind? Because it was not. The scholar Joyce King calls this dysconscious racism, which simply means the way we accept certain things
as normal and neutral without ever stopping to ask who built them and who they were built for. (King, 1991) When we hand a child a standardized test and call the result a measure of their worth or potential, we are not being objective. We are participating in a system that was designed to produce exactly these outcomes.
Carter G. Woodson wrote about this almost a hundred years ago. In The Mis-Education of the Negro, he argued that the greatest damage done to Black people through American schooling was not exclusion. It was inclusion on the wrong terms. Being brought inside a system that taught you that your own history, your own culture, your own ways of knowing were inferior. (Woodson, 1933) We are still living inside that. Every time a Black child sits in a classroom where their community is invisible in the curriculum, where their language is corrected instead of honored, where their family’s knowledge is treated as something to be overcome rather than built upon, Woodson’s warning is happening in real time. The educator and scholar Carl Grant has continued that tradition, calling us back to Woodson’s vision and asking us to do more than reform this system. He is asking us to reimagine it. (Grant, 2012)
The psychologist and scholar Amos Wilson made this even more explicit. In Awakening the Natural Genius of Black Children, he argued that Black children are naturally gifted and begin life with
what he called a natural head start, but that their genius is too frequently underdeveloped and misdirected because the racist status quo politically mandates their intellectual
underachievement. (Wilson, 1992) Read that again. Politically mandates. Wilson is not describing a side effect. He is describing a design. The low scores on those tests are not evidence that something is wrong with our children. They are evidence that the system is doing exactly what it was built to do.
And W.E.B. Du Bois, over a century ago, said that the purpose of education is the full development of a human being. Not producing a worker. Not scoring well on a test. Not fitting into someone else’s idea of what an educated person looks like. The full development of a human being. (Du Bois, 1903) By that measure, we are failing. Not the children. We are failing.
What It Costs When We Get It's Wrong
Anna Julia Cooper, one of the most brilliant Black women intellectuals this country has ever produced, wrote in 1892 that you cannot claim to be educating a people when you are marginalizing half of them. She was talking specifically about Black women and girls, and she insisted that their intellectual dignity, their voice, their leadership belonged at the very center of education, not at its edges. (Cooper, 1892) Over 130 years later, we are still asking Black girls to make themselves smaller to
survive school. We are still telling them, through curriculum and discipline and silence, that their fullness is too much.
That has a cost. Not just academically. In the body. In the nervous system. In the way a child learns to shrink themselves before they ever reach adulthood. The educator bell hooks wrote that genuine learning cannot occur in a space where students must fragment themselves to survive. (hooks, 1994) When we ask children to leave their culture, their language, their community, and their identity at the door before they enter the classroom, we are not creating conditions for learning. We are creating conditions for survival. And survival is exhausting. It produces exactly the kind of disengagement we then pathologize as an achievement gap.
Wilson named the psychological consequence of this directly. He wrote that when you are filled with self-hate, your mind is reversed, meaning you will love the things that destroy you and hate the things that advance your growth. (Wilson, 1993) When a child spends years inside a school that tells them their culture is irrelevant, their language is incorrect, and their history began in chains, that is not a neutral educational experience. That is the slow construction of self-rejection. And self-rejection does not show up only in test scores. It shows up in the body, in relationships, in the stories we tell ourselves about what we deserve and what we are capable of. That is why this
conversation belongs inside a wellness framework. It has always been a wellness issue.
A LIBERATED SOUL PERSPECTIVE
Liberation is not a destination. It is a daily practice. And it starts with the question: whose definition of success are we asking our children to chase? Whose idea of intelligence are we using to measure their worth? Liberation asks us to return to ourselves. To know that the genius was never missing. It was always there, waiting for the right conditions to emerge.
We Already Have the Answers
This is the part I need you to hear. The knowledge of how to educate Black children well is not missing. It has never been missing. Black scholars have been producing it for generations, and it sits largely uncited in most school district professional development plans.
Gloria Ladson-Billings, one of the most important education researchers alive, has spent her career documenting exactly what happens when teachers believe in Black children fully and build their teaching around who those children actually are. Her research shows that the teachers who produce the most
powerful outcomes for Black students are not the ones with the most techniques. They are the ones with the deepest belief. A belief that the child in front of them is brilliant right now, not potentially brilliant, not brilliant given the right intervention, but brilliant as they walk through the door. (Ladson-Billings, 1995) She also gave us a crucial reframe: what we call an achievement gap is actually an education debt, the accumulated result of centuries of under-resourcing, exclusion, and intentional miseducation directed at Black communities. The scores are not the problem. The scores are the receipt. (Ladson-Billings, 1998)
Gholdy Muhammad offers a framework that asks five questions about every single lesson taught to every single child: Does this help them know who they are? Does it build real skill? Does it develop their intellect? Does it ask them to think critically about the world they live in? And does it produce joy? (Muhammad, 2020) Not one of those questions is on a standardized test. And yet every one of them is essential to a human being’s development. When we strip those questions out of education in favor of test preparation, we are not being rigorous. We are being reductive. And our children’s bodies, spirits, and futures are paying the price.
Richard Milner asks us to be honest about race in our schools, not to use it as a whisper word, not to avoid it in the name of being neutral, but to name it clearly because pretending a
curriculum is race-neutral when it centers European knowledge and erases Black knowledge is not neutrality. It is a choice. And it has consequences. (Milner, 2010) Tyrone Howard puts it plainly: the problem is not in our children. The problem is in our systems. And systems can be changed when people are willing to demand it. (Howard, 2010)
The scores are not the problem. The scores are the receipt. What we are seeing on those test results is the accumulated cost of a system that was never designed to honor Black children in the first place.
What Liberation Actually Looks Like Here
Bettina Love says that it is not enough to help children survive a broken system. We have to be willing to change the system itself. She calls this abolitionist teaching, and it is not just for educators. It is for every parent, every community member, every person who has ever loved a Black or brown child and watched that child be diminished by an institution that should have been lifting them up. (Love, 2019)
So what does that actually look like? It looks like asking, at every school board meeting, every curriculum night, every parent-teacher conference: whose knowledge is being taught in this building? It looks like demanding that the people who teach our children believe in them, not as a slogan on a wall but as a lived, daily, non-negotiable practice. It looks like insisting that joy, identity, and culture are not extras to be added when there is time. They are the foundation. It looks like trusting what Christopher Emdin calls reality pedagogy: the idea that when teachers come to students with genuine curiosity about who they are and what they know, rather than showing up with a script, something transformative becomes possible. (Emdin, 2016) And it looks like Lisa Delpit’s reminder that good intentions are not enough. What matters is whether we actually build on what our children bring rather than spending our energy erasing it. (Delpit, 1995)
A LIBERATED SOUL PERSPECTIVE
Wellness for Black and brown communities is
inseparable from educational justice. You cannot have a liberated soul in a body that has been taught from childhood that its mind is less than. Healing that wound requires more than therapy and self-care practices, though those matter. It requires changing the conditions that create the wound in the first place. That is the work. That is what liberation demands.
I Am Not Giving Up. I Am Demanding More.
I have spent 29 years in Philadelphia schools. I have watched children arrive brilliant and leave diminished. I have also watched them arrive carrying everything their communities gave them and watched teachers transform their classrooms into places where that everything was the starting point, not the obstacle. I know what is possible. I have seen it.
Wilson gave us the foundation for all of it when he wrote that intelligence is not fixed at birth, and that its continual actualization throughout the life span and its effective application to the life problems of the individual and the people must be cultivated and attended to with care and sensitivity. (Wilson, 1992) That is not a description of a test score. That is a description of a life. And it is the standard we should be holding our schools to.
What I am saying is that we cannot keep calling a repackaged version of the same approach a solution. We cannot keep measuring Black children with tools designed for someone else and then blaming them for the results. And we cannot keep treating the emotional and spiritual toll of that process as something separate from the educational conversation. It is not separate. The exhaustion that comes from spending years being told your genius does not count is a wellness issue. The anger
that builds up when you are smart and curious and the system treats you as a problem is a wellness issue. The disconnection that happens when a child learns to be invisible in order to survive school is a wellness issue. And we will not address it by adding another intervention tier.
We address it by doing what Du Bois said over a century ago. By building education that serves the full development of a human being. By centering the knowledge, the voices, the intellectual traditions, and the lived wisdom of Black communities, not as a special program but as the foundation. By believing, without condition or caveat, in the genius that walks through our doors every single day.
This is not just an education argument. It is a liberation argument. It is a wellness argument. It is an argument about what it means to truly see another human being and build something worthy of who they are.
The genius is already there. It always has been. Our job is to build schools worthy of it.