The rap on rap Harvard researcher sees correlation between drop in reading scores and the rise of hip-hop music. by Daniel Gray-Kontar April, 2005


Over the 17-year-span between 1971 and 1988, literacy improved among African-American youth nationwide so dramatically that the reading achievement gap between 17-year old black and white students was reduced by nearly two-thirds of what it had been in the late 1960s.
But in 1989, reading scores of African Americans dropped and haven't recovered. Ronald Ferguson, a senior research associate at Harvard University's Wiener Center for Social Policy , offers one explanation for the drop off: The rise of rap music as a consumer good.
Ferguson contends that there is some evidence of a correlation between the decline in black students' academic achievement and the rise of rap music as a product of popular culture. Both occurred in 1988.
Ferguson has done the math.
Although hip-hop artists began recording songs as early as the late 1970s, it was in 1988 that rap music record sales began to increase. From 1979 to 1987, only three rap albums sold more than 500,000 copies, attaining "gold" status. But in 1988 alone, 17 hit gold-level status. Four years later, in 1992, the number was 134 .
Ferguson compares these sales figures to the reading achievement drop-off that occurred in 1989.
He studied the reading achievement rates of two different groups of African-American students: those who graduated in 1988 and those who graduated in 1992. Following both groups of students from their freshman years through graduation, Ferguson noted that reading scores for 17-year-olds who graduated in 1988 rose steadily the four years prior to their graduation, as per the norm. But when Ferguson looked at the degree of improvement in reading scores for students graduating in 1992, the growth in reading scores declined by a 2 to 1 ratio, when compared to the 1988 graduates.
"I want to be clear that I don't know for sure if there's any connection between hip hop and achievement," notes Ferguson, "but there is a coincidence in time where the turn down in academic gains for black teens happens at the same time that hip hop took off commercially."
These patterns have implications on how we should work with young people," he suggests.
Ferguson says parents and teachers should instruct students on media literacy — how to question and analyze the messages in popular mass media. And lessons in media literacy should be combined with lessons in time management. Youth must be taught to thoughtfully fit an interest in hip-hop music and culture into their everyday lives, while still managing to find time to read, Ferguson says.
"It's definitely an issue of time management," says Ferguson. "It would be silly to launch an attack on hip hop, but at the same time, I've heard rappers say that the music is the CNN for youth. Hip hop is an important cultural form, but it shouldn't be our CNN."
The fact that many youth view rap as their CNN is a large part of the problem, says Ferguson. It's evidence that more youth are listening to rap but aren't reading for pleasure.
In 1988, 35 percent of 17-year-old African-American students nationwide reported that they read in their leisure time, which was higher than the 30 percent reported by their white counterparts, according to a study by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. But by 1992, only 14.7 percent of African-American students read in their leisure time.
The drop in leisure time reading, combined with an increase in the number of students cutting class between 1988 and 1992, are the two factors that figure most decidedly in declining reading achievement scores for African-American children, Ferguson says. These two milestones also happen to occur at the beginning of hip-hop's mass influence, he notes.