By William Spriggs

NEWS ANALYSIS

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its latest report on the job market on Aug. 2. It had some good news for African-Americans: The Black unemployment rate in July dipped to 12.6 percent, its lowest level since January 2009.

The BLS also reported that since August 2012 the unemployment rate for adult Black men (those older than 20) remains below its 14.4 percent level in January 2009 and was reported at 12.5 percent in July. More importantly, the share of Black men holding jobs continues to rebound from its record low of 56.5 percent in 2011 to 59.2 percent, almost equal its level of 60.4 percent in January 2009. That was the good news.

The bad news was that the unemployment rate for adult Black women (those older than 20) remained above its January 2009 level (though it did fall to 10.5 percent) and the share of adult Black women holding jobs, at 55.5 percent, is not showing much movement to return to its January 2009 level of 57.9 percent. Since more than half the Black workforce is female, it means the labor market news was mixed at best.

A big puzzle in looking at the changes in the Black unemployment rate is the fact the Black labor force is older now than during past major downturns in the mid-1970s and early 1980s. In 1975, the Black unemployment rate spiked to 15.4 percent. In 1982 and 1983, the Black unemployment rate skyrocketed to above 20 percent for a nine-month period starting in October 1982.

In terms of the overall unemployment rate rise and the drop in the size of the economy, the Great Recession downturn of 2008 was much more severe than both the 1975 and 1982 downturns, and the Black unemployment rate reached 16.8 percent in March 2010. But the Black labor force was much younger in the 1970s and 1980s, and younger workers have the highest unemployment rates (in July the unemployment rate for Black teenagers was 41.6 percent).

Today, the labor force participation of young Black workers is very low, so they do not influence the overall Black unemployment rate as much today. Only 37 percent of Black teens were employed or actively looking for work in July-that is, "in the labor force" and counted in the unemployment rate.

Among Black men, in 1975 and 1983, about one in four of those in the labor force was between 16 and 24. Today, that age group represents about one in six. So, the group with the highest unemployment rate is a smaller factor in today's data. This downturn has driven the labor force participation of young people to all-time lows. Many have dropped out of the labor force for school (almost one in five African- Americans 16 to 24 is not in the labor force but enrolled in school), but many have just dropped out.

A little more than one in four African-Americans 16 to 24 is neither in school nor employed or looking for work). In 1975, 48 percent of the Black men in the labor force were older than 35. The 1983 downturn chased older workers out of the labor force-many choosing to retire or file Social Security disability claims-so the share of Black men in the labor force older than 35 fell to 45 percent. Today, 60 percent of Black men in the labor force (those employed or actively looking for work) are older than 35. This is the group with the lowest unemployment rate, suggesting the rate today is lower than would have been the case in 1972 and 1983 when younger workers remained a bigger share of the Black labor force. So this complicates comparing unemployment rates across time, making it a paradox that Black unemployment is high with such a high share of older workers.

Part of the resolution of this paradox is that while older workers have low unemployment rates, they get stuck in the unemployment rut. Almost 40 percent of the 2.5 million unemployed African-Americans in July have been unemployed longer than six months. This is another marked feature of the Great Recession. In 1975, the share of long-term unemployed among unemployed workers peaked at 21percent. In the 1982-83 downturn, the long-term unemployed got up to 26 percent of the unemployed. In this downturn, the share of long-term unemployed reached 44.9 percent.

Each month, the BLS also reports on the flow of workers into, and out of, unemployment. The employed can become unemployed or retire, and the unemployed can get a job, or quit and drop out of the labor force, or remain stuck looking for work another month. July continued the pattern that the unemployed were more likely to drop out of the labor force than to land a job, and the majority remained stuck looking for work. Of the almost 12.5 million unemployed Americans in June, 55 percent remained unemployed in July.

People are getting stuck because the hiring rate in the economy-the share of jobs that are from new hires-remains stuck at a low near 3.1percent. So, new opportunities are not being created to clear the backlog of people stuck in the unemployment line. Basically, the employment market is now like a still pond rather than a flowing river. Each month, few people who are employed are quitting and getting another job, and few firms are hiring new workers. In a normal market, things are more dynamic, with firms hiring and workers switching jobs. That "rolling" of the job market creates lots of hiring opportunities.

So while there was some good news in the numbers for African-Americans in the July report, the labor market remains underperforming. At the current rate of job creation, we are still more than six years away from making up the backlog of unemployed and underemployed workers. For young people, that is six years too long.

Members of Congress are back at home in their districts. Republicans appear prepared to return to Washington in September so they can hold up any discussion of generating jobs in favor of cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps), and continuing the sequestration and its cuts to Head Start, housing assistance and extended unemployment benefits-programs that put money into the pockets of American workers struggling to survive the worse labor market since the Great Depression.

Despite a reversal in trend from the huge and ballooning deficits that the tax cuts to America's richest 5 percent from the Republican tax agenda of 2001 and two unfunded wars and the greatest loss of jobs and American household income since the Great Depression, Republicans appear prepared to hold the government and the American people ransom to their fixations on "Obamacare" and the long-run cost implications of Medicare.

The president has been out to rally America so we can focus instead on the immediacy of the lack of jobs and income. Let's hope Republicans hear the concerns of people outside Washington, not the wealthy lobbyists who want to avoid paying their fair share to clean up the mess of the economy.

William Spriggs serves as Chief Economist to the AFL-CIO and is a professor in, and former chair of the Department of Economics at Howard University.  Bill is also former assistant secretary for the Office of Policy at the United States Department of Labor.

August 7, 2013

Article IV of  an 11-Part Series on Race in America - Past and Present

Kevin Carey

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Affirmative action as we know it is dying. A growing number of states have moved to prohibit public universities from considering race in admissions, and the U.S. Supreme Court recently made a decision in an anti-affirmative action lawsuit that left little doubt about where the Court's conservative majority stands. Less than a decade after the Court upheld racial admissions preferences in Grutter v. Bollinger, newer jurists like Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts seem ready to call into question and refuse to reaffirm a policy that has helped generations of minority students grab a rung on the ladder of opportunity.

The Court's decision to remand the case - Fisher v. University of Texas - to the U. S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit is apparently a temporary victory. It is particularly odious given the college admissions apparatus it could leave in place if ever struck down. Elite colleges warp and corrupt the meritocratic admissions process in a wide variety of ways. Academically substandard athletes, for example, are allowed in so they can play for the amusement of alumni and help shore up the fund-raising base. While some men's football and basketball players come from low-income and minority households, many athletes at the highly selective colleges where affirmative action really matters engage in sports like crew and lacrosse that are associated with White, privileged backgrounds. Colleges also give preference to the children of legacies, professors, celebrities, politicians, and people who write large checks to the general fund. All of these groups are also disproportionately wealthy and White.

In other words, the Supreme Court is poised to uphold affirmative action for everyone except Minority students. We've come to this point in part because the Court has been packed with people like Roberts, who once struck down a plan to integrate public schools on the grounds that he saw no distinction between race-conscious policies that increased integration and the kind of brutal discrimination outlawed by Brown v. Board of Education. Apparently, John Roberts doesn't see race, so neither should anyone else.

But affirmative action is also dying because it has strayed far from its original purpose. The justification for affirmative action the Court used in Grutter is that schools have a compelling interest in increasing racial diversity because students benefit from learning among people from disparate backgrounds. Affirmative action, once a pillar of the nation's work on behalf of the historically oppressed, is now allowable only on the grounds that it's good for White people.

This allowed Roberts to harangue lawyers defending the University of Texas's affirmative action policies by asking them how much diversity, exactly, they were shooting for, knowing that any specific answer could be struck down as an illegal quota. Perpetual swing vote and de facto King of America Anthony Kennedy, meanwhile, made the sensible critique that UT was giving preference to wealthy minority students, since the university presumably gets more than enough of the poor kind through a state law granting automatic admission to students who graduate in the top 10 percent of their high school class.

Regardless of how the Court ultimately rules, it's time to return affirmative action to its original purpose: leveling the college playing field for students who have been unjustly denied a fair chance at success. And the most important part of that project is expanding this idea far beyond elite colleges and universities.

While Brown is the iconic twentieth-century decision on race and educational justice, the 1954 decision was presaged by a number of crucial legal actions in higher education. Unsurprisingly, states with racist elementary and secondary school policies also discriminated against Black students in their universities. In 1950, future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argued and won Sweatt v. Painter, which prohibited UT from forcing Black students into a separate law school.

And like Brown, the promise of those early victories has been substantially unfulfilled. More than half a century after states were instructed to desegregate with "all deliberate speed," the Justice Department still maintains a division of lawyers tasked with monitoring racial discrimination in public schools. (A DOJ headline from November 2012: "Justice Department Reaches Settlement with Georgia School District to Ensure All Students Can Enroll in and Attend School.") And while public schools are no longer officially segregated, they are still governed by thousands of independent school districts that are substantially funded by local property taxes. Long-term residential and economic trends have made many of those districts impoverished and racially homogenous. As a result, minority students go to schools that on average receive less funding than those serving predominantly White students and are more likely to be staffed by unqualified teachers.

The same patterns persist in higher education. But here's where the two parts of our education system sharply diverge. Both K-12 and higher education continue to suffer from a legacy of racism. There is enormous awareness of the elementary and secondary side of the problem. George W. Bush's signature domestic policy achievement, the No Child Left Behind Act, was designed to erase the "achievement gap" between White and minority students, while the Obama administration's Race to the Top school initiative was touted by both candidates in the recent presidential debates. There is currently a roiling national argument about K-12 school reform, with partisans and advocates arguing for and against standardized testing, charter schools, teacher merit pay, school closings, and many other policies aimed at fixing low-performing schools.

People may vehemently disagree about how to help minority students in K-12 education, but nearly all agree that the students need help in the first place. Yet in every big city with a headline-making, underperforming school district, there's a public higher education system receiving not 1/100th of the scrutiny. Detroit, for example, is widely seen to have the worst public school system in America-so bad that U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said he "lose[s] sleep over" the plight of the city's 50,000 students. But how many people know that Wayne State, Detroit's main public university, has an 8 percent-yes, 8 percent-graduation rate for Black students? Who's losing sleep over them?

Detroit is, no surprise, a worst case. But it's hardly the only city with a pervasive and largely ignored higher education problem. In Duncan's hometown, 19 percent of Black students who enroll full-time at Chicago State University graduate within six years. At California State University, Los Angeles, it's 22 percent. The University of the District of Columbia matches Wayne State for futility, with an 8 percent graduation rate for Black students. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee? 19 percent.

Texas Southern University in Houston was once the Texas State University for Negroes-the separate, unequal institution that the state created to avoid integration, leading to Sweatt. Today, it hosts the Thurgood Marshall School of Law and graduates 12 percent of its Black undergraduates on time.

Nationwide, the majority of all Black and Latino college students fail to graduate within six years. Even those who do finish may not be getting much benefit. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's blockbuster 2011 study Academically Adrift, which found "limited or no learning" taking place among a substantial percentage of all college graduates, also found significant racial disparities, with Black students learning less than their White peers. Studies of literacy among college graduates have found similar patterns.

Black students are also more likely than other groups to default on student loans that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, leaving financial ruin in their wake, and minority students are targeted by for-profit colleges peddling sketchy degrees and inflated student loans. State governments, meanwhile, give far more money per student to flagship universities enrolling a disproportionately White, wealthy student body than to the regional universities and community colleges where most minority students are educated.

America's higher education system is comprehensively failing to give minority students what they need, and this has little to do with elite college admissions. Including community colleges, fewer than one in 10 undergraduates attend colleges with admissions rates below 50 percent. By definition, affirmative action only affects the small percentage of students who are qualified to attend elite schools. Many of the minority students washing out of public universities in droves are the survivors of our infamously substandard K-12 schools, attending local, open-admissions institutions. Their problem isn't getting into college-it's getting out with a quality degree in hand and no terrible loans on their backs.

So the end of affirmative action, absurd though it is, may be an opportunity to change the way people think about race and higher education. Affirmative action is one of a relatively small number of high-profile issues, like climate change, school vouchers, and abortion, that people form strongly held opinions about based largely on broad ideological affiliation. To be liberal is to favor admissions preferences in college; to be conservative is to oppose them. That's a powerful dynamic, but it has also had the effect of training generations of progressives to believe that they're doing their part to further the cause of racial justice in college by supporting affirmative action-and nothing else.

In reality, minority students need a much broader reform agenda, one that focuses on giving the colleges they attend a fair share of public resources and then holding them accountable for results. Not all colleges that enroll large numbers of Black students have catastrophic graduation rates. Some, like Elizabeth City State University, a historically Black public institution in North Carolina, get nearly half of their students through on time. Like many minority-serving institutions, Elizabeth City enrolls students whose academic preparation reflects the dysfunction of our K-12 schools. That's a tough job, and a university with real academic standards shouldn't necessarily let 100 percent of students earn a degree. But there's a huge difference between 8 percent and 50 percent, and the things universities like ECSU do to help students graduate aren't revolutionary: they bring new students to campus over the summer to help them acclimate, they carefully track their academic progress to look for warning signs of dropping out, and they focus hard on academics. But many unsuccessful colleges don't do these things-or don't do them well-because nobody outside the institution is paying attention.

States need to start practicing financial affirmative action by devoting more public resources to colleges that enroll students with the greatest academic needs. Along with the federal government, they should also penalize institutions with terrible graduation rates, student loan repayment rates, and post-graduation employment and earning rates, compared to peers with similar student populations. Those who set the national education agenda need to look past the handful of universities that graduate the ruling class and focus on improving the neglected institutions that educate future minority school teachers, scientists, doctors, and engineers. It will require the work of generations, but that's what minority college students-blinkered jurists notwithstanding-truly need.