Local educators have been urged to consider setting up a Bermuda chapter of an American based association for black educators.

Addressing an audience of teachers and education officials on the topic ?Reclaiming the Children of African Descent? Deloris Saunders, President of the National Alliance of Black School Educators said that black children in the United States were under-performing relative to non African American students and her organisation had chosen to focus on the issues of black students for the next two years.

?We have some issues we have to address. Chief among those issues is the disparity of performance between youngsters of African descent and youngsters of non African American descent.?

She added that America?s Hispanic community also faced the same problem. ?The two groups fall way below the European population and the Asian population in schools across America,? she said.

?What we?ve recognised in this whole new focus of reclaiming our children is that we?ve had this gap and we?ve talked about this disparity of performance for so long that many of the children who were of school age when we started to talk about it are now grown and there?s still this gap. And so we said ?listen it?s time to stop talking,? we must now do something about it. And we have to go beyond closing the gap because closing the gap could still mean we are lagging in performance. And so what we must be about is aggressively eradicating the gap.?

She told her audience that the performance disparity was at one time statistically insignificant after the Brown vs Board of Education Supreme Court decision which reversed the ?separate but equal? doctrine and unravelled segregation in public schools. ?These are children of colour poor some, middle class some, upper class some, but they were performing and rising to the top of the performance scale.?

But she said that ended with the advent of Ronald Reagan?s administration which proceeded to roll back progress.?Schools started to resist having their children sit in classrooms with children of colour. The courts went soft, they argued for neighbourhood schools and what ended up happening was kids went back to their communities,? she said.

?So in America now more than 60 percent of America?s children of colour sit in classrooms where 95 to 98 percent of them look alike. So the schools are now almost as segregated as they were before Brown.?

She said that the history and performance statistics proved that economics, race and colour had nothing to do with the ability to learn.

Dr. Saunders said that successful schools had been shown to have common characteristics, and cited as model examples two schools in Pittsburgh and Florida. ?The colour of the principal and the teachers has nothing to do with whether students succeed. What matters is whether those teachers and principals care, are confident, will take no excuses and are determined to hold students accountable for what they came to the school for. You must do it.?

She quoted a principal of a successful school as saying ?We can override the environment because we spend more concentrated time with these kids than the parents do.?

And Dr. Saunders said that ?emotional confidence? and ?cultural confidence? were also key traits of successful teachers and students but had been neglected in teacher development - a situation that NABSE was beginning to address in America?s historically black colleges.

She defined emotional confidence as genuine caring about a student?s needs and circumstances in life.

?It means I don?t get bent out of shape because you asked me a question. I don?t get upset because you come to school upset, because some of the things I know you had to deal with last night I, your teacher has never had to deal with.?

And on cultural confidence she said : ?Culture is as strong as values - they drive what people believe, what they do, the ceremonies they have, the places that they choose to go and what they want to be.?

The 6,500 member NABSE, she explained, was created as a resource for parents and educators at all levels.

The Bermuda Union of teachers co-hosted the session with the Association of School Principals, Phi Delta Kappa, and the Bermuda National Education Council.

Dr. Saunders is an Associate Professor of Education at the University of Maryland, Baltimore county. She is also Chief of Professional Development and Education Equity for the Department of Defence Dependent Schools. Dr. Saunders began her career as a teacher in Atlanta Public Schools. She was awarded a doctoral fellowship by the University of Michigan and earned both Ph.D. and Masters degrees in 1971.