By Dianne Anderson

Whether sheer economics or what others see as repression by design, black students remain disproportionately tracked toward special education classes, even when they don’t belong there, while their numbers in careers of math, science and medicine dwindle.

Blacks comprise roughly 13.5 percent of the general population, about 40 million Americans, but even with 1.2 million advanced educational degrees in medical or legal fields is a drop in the bucket to the greater academic world.

As a rule, the kinds of educational skills needed to get black kids into medical school starts around third and fourth grade. Perhaps not coincidentally, about the same time as special education tracking begins.

The area of research focus is also a pet peeve for Dr. Brandon Gamble, assistant professor at the CSU Long Beach department of Advanced Studies in Education and Counseling Office.

“Skills about the memory and the study process begin around third or fourth grade, and students are not stimulated, such as in special education, to memorize or learn large sets of information,” he said.

Dr. Gamble assesses students in the Long Beach city school district, and is especially curious about their exposure to print media, to dictionaries, and how they’ve learned to research or look things up at early grade levels.

He says that a large number of black students could have a fair chance at education if they could get proper study skills intact early on, and the support they need to be successful.

“If you make it out of middle school, and you’re not familiar with an index, you’re on a trajectory not to be considering medical school,” he said.

The demanding fields of math and science are all about memorization. In those first critical years of development, students get weeded out of the process. But for kids that hang in for the longer term up the academic ladder, it’s a lonely at the top.

Even the good students often drop out without resources before they reach graduation, usually for isolation.

In his own experience, attending Oakwood College in Huntsville Alabama offered a great support system through the Historically Black College.

“Oakwood is very good at preparing and sending students to graduate school, specifically medical school,” he said. “I was very fortunate to have a couple of mentors.”

From there, he went on to get his master’s at Cal State University San Diego, and Ed.D. in Educational Psychology at the University of Southern California. Even still, it was isolated.

Gamble theorizes that some of the answer to the sorry numbers is that black students who are the brightest end up going after fast money careers like MBAs.

According to a recent study out of the University of Virginia, as of 2005, “blacks made up slightly more than 8 percent of first-year medical students in the United States – roughly half of their share of the U.S. population (15.4 percent in 2007), and just 1 percent more than their share of first-year medical students in 1975.”

Today, black students are barely visible in Dr. Gamble’s classes, even in Long Beach, considered one of the most diverse cities in the nation. They also face great odds to graduation.

One hurdle is that admissions came to a grinding halt post-Proposition 209.  Within the school psychology program, there were “zero” African Americans to begin the program this year, he said. Only one was admitted, but now she is gone.

“My sense was that she felt she was all alone, and she dropped the program,” he said, adding that the financial squeeze never helps. “Going to med school, you’re not going to see a lot of money for five to eight years. You’re buried in debt without return on investment.”

Gamble, a “Generation X-er,” said that his parents could hardly have predicted the outcome of the civil rights movement. Like most of their generation, they underestimated the challenge of integration. His mother went to segregated schools in Texas. His father, a foster child, worked two to three jobs to make his family life better.

“They figured their kids would have an easier path, that their son would go to white institutions,” he said. “Even now as a professor, at most I’ve only had two, maybe three, African American students in the room at one time.”

While white kids usually tap funding from relatives with some generational wealth built in from decades of land ownership, black kids don’t have that luxury. Much of the wealth acquired during the nation’s early wars came from whites’ access to GI Bills; the same bills were banned for blacks who served in the military without benefits.

Generational poverty is the result.

Most black students that he knows who have been able to compete at medical school usually have good resources. One student he knows comes from five generations of doctors and lawyers, and now studying from a trust fund established long ago. But that student is the rare exception.

Despite it all, Dr. Gamble said that he remains optimistic about this generation of African American students.

“There’s been quite a few folks moving forward,” he said. “I think we’re going to figure it out, how to be upwardly mobile to some degree as a larger society and more specifically, African Americans.”