In Sacramento, literacy is still a giant hurdle to achieving equality for all | Opinion
After celebrating the 159th anniversary of Juneteenth, I cannot help but think about how far Black communities still have to go to reach a level of equity in America. In Sacramento, Black people account for just 11.9% of the population, but they have the highest poverty rate of any racial or ethnic group at 20%, according to the Census Bureau.
One of the most important levers of equity we have is the ability to read. The cornerstone of slavery was illiteracy among enslaved populations — slave owners did everything they could to keep slaves ignorant and illiterate. In California in 1739, teaching enslaved Africans to read or write was punishable with prison sentences and fines. Knowledge means power, and maintaining slavery required policies and laws that promoted high rates of illiteracy among enslaved populations throughout America.
Opinion
The dark legacy of slavery continues to negatively impact the education of Black children. Recently, the Black Parallel School Board, a community organization developed to work parallel to the Sacramento City Unified District Board of Education, partnered with the American Civil Liberties Union California Action and the Black Organizing Project to support a State of Black Education California event. There, we introduced a report card outlining 24 ways Black students are still treated unequally in California 70 years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court .
Current statistics continue to paint a stark picture of literacy proficiency among California’s Black third-grade students. Today, only 27% are meeting or exceeding the English language arts state standards across the state. Sacramento County is no exception. In fact, only 25% of Black third-grade students are proficient in English Language arts (compared to 50% of their white classmates).
In the fourth grade, children shift from learning to read to reading to learn. That means the inability to read in elementary school continues to impact a child’s academic achievement across all subjects through middle school, high school and beyond. If high schools graduated highly literate Black students, graduation day would be a jubilant celebration akin to Juneteenth. Instead, in the Sacramento City Unified School District, three in 10 Black students did not graduate with their cohort in 2023, and only 22% of Black students who did graduate met requirements to be eligible to apply for a public four-year university in California.
The Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment provided access to civil rights, but literacy empowers individuals to fully exercise these rights. Literacy opens doors to voting, fair trials, government employment, public facility access, housing, freedom of religion and public education — transforming these rights from mere words into tangible opportunities.
Achieving high literacy rates is a modern emancipation, granting students the tools to realize the full promise of their civil rights. Across 37 states, legislation and policies have passed to embrace evidence-based principles supported by the National Reading Panel and other literacy experts.
Now, California stands poised to follow suit. The Black Parallel School Board fully supported Assembly Bill 2222, authored by Blanca Rubio, D-Baldwin Park, which requires all California public elementary schools to use evidence-based reading instructional materials and train educators on providing evidence-based early literacy instruction. Unfortunately, the 2024 version of the bill died in the assembly without a hearing, but we will once again support the 2025 version of the bill because the cause is just too important.
Just as the Emancipation Proclamation freed enslaved individuals, evidence-based early literacy instruction will free Black, Indigenous and people of color from the historical and cultural enslavement of lower-class citizenship and liberate students from educational inequity, empowering them to fully participate in society and achieve their full potential. This is how we break the cycle of poverty for Sacramento’s Black children and begin to repair generational harm.
Darryl White Sr. is a former teacher, administrator, curriculum specialist and race/human relations/equity trainer. He currently advocates for parents seeking educational equity for their children as chair of the Black Parallel School Board, a community organization developed to work parallel to Sacramento area school district boards.
