If you’re in the habit of spewing negative statistics about the education of Black students in the United States, expect to draw the ire of Dr. Ivory A. Toldson.
In fact, you can expect Toldson to call “BS” – his acronym for “bad statistics” – if you create, cite or repeat a negative statistic about Black students without taking a broader look at whether the statistic is based on accurate data or fails to take into account contributing factors and conditions.
That much is clear from No BS (Bad Stats): Black People Need People Who Believe in Black People Enough Not to Believe Every Bad Thing They Hear about Black People, a new book in which Toldson tackles a range of misconceptions and myths related to Black educational progress. The topics range from whether or not enrollments at HBCUs are declining to how Black students are not actually “underrepresented” in higher education as a whole – thanks in large part to their enrollment in community colleges, online universities and for-profit colleges – although they are underrepresented when it comes to competitive universities.
Above all else, the book is a clarion call to “humanize” the data in the public discourse about Black students in order to remove the stigmatic effect of negative reports, which Toldson says can lead educators – and Black students themselves – to expect failure instead of searching for their strengths.
“The purpose of education should be to reveal talents, not to expose weaknesses,” Toldson writes. “Unfortunately, many Black students only go to school to learn what they do not do well. They learn that they are bad test takers, slow readers, not a ‘math person,’ or have a short attention span.”
Toldson seeks to uproot the “paradigm of the achievement gap, which conditions us to separate high achievers from low achievers on a uniform measure.”
“Reconditioning educators and educational researchers to discover diverse talents among diverse students would not simply ‘close’ the achievement gap,” Toldson writes. “It would render the nomenclature of the achievement gap irrelevant and obsolete.”
