Source
Summary
“Black Minds Matter 2025: Building Bright Black Futures continues the work that launched in 2015 with the Black Minds Matter campaign. This comprehensive report explores whether or not California is truly doing right by Black students, combining data on dozens of metrics with stories of change agents, and recommendations. Our intention with Black Minds Matter 2025 continues our rallying cry from ten years ago: we urgently need bold action from our state’s leaders. The pace of progress on student outcomes is alarming enough that we need a new entity to reimagine what supporting Black students in our state means: a State Commission on Black Education Transformation.
In TK-12, segregated opportunities continue to create unequal outcomes for Black students.
California’s education systems create opportunity gaps by:
• Fostering low levels of inclusion and engagement for Black students and their families.
• Failing to create affirming, joyful learning environments for Black students.
• Depriving Black students of access to Black teachers, fully prepared teachers, and teachers with the most experience.
• Operating with inadequate resources and ineffectively targeting existing funding toward improving educational quality for Black students.
These systemic barriers hold Black students back from achieving their aspirations by creating outcome gaps. Black students are:
• Not supported to consistently meet grade-level standards in core subjects.
• Supported to learn less material over the course of a school year than every other student group.
• Too often pushed out of school, causing Black students to graduate from high school at the lowest rates of any racial group.
In higher education, segregated access and supports derail students’ dreams of attaining a degree.
California’s high schools, colleges, and universities all have a role to play in supporting college access and success. High schools currently contribute to opportunity gaps for Black students by:
• Limiting students’ access to colleges and universities by supporting too few Black students to participate and succeed in college preparatory coursework.
• Neglecting to support half of all Black high school seniors to apply for financial aid.
And colleges and universities create additional opportunity gaps by:
• Enrolling Black students at disproportionately low rates.
• Lacking sufficient holistic supports to meet students’ basic needs and enable them to persist through degree completion.
These inequities in college participation, affordability, and supports contribute to outcome gaps that have long-term effects on Black Californians’ educational attainment, professional prospects, earnings potential, and overall well-being, including:
• Only a third of Black Californians hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, and gendered gaps in completion have widened.
• Across all three of California’s public higher education systems, Black Californians stop out of college at higher rates than other groups and are supported to earn their degrees at some of the lowest rates.
• Black Californians are forced to take on more college debt than any other group.”
Related: Q&A — Black kids overdiagnosed with ‘Oppositional Defiant Disorder
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