BLACK STUDENTS CONSISTENTLY EXCEL AT GARVEY SCHOOL.

Byline: EARL O. HUTCHINSON

SOME months ago, I spent an amazing afternoon at the all-black Marcus Garvey School in South Central Los Angeles. I visited several preschool classes and watched bright, alert, well-mannered youngsters work complex multiplication and division problems, recite complete English verses and proudly display their essays on various American history subjects.

Marcus Garvey School was founded some 20 years ago by Dr. Anyiam Palmer, a former teacher in the Los Angeles city schools. Fed up with what he calls the high failure rate of African-American students, Palmer had a burning desire to prove that predominantly or exclusively black schools are not inferior and that students can get a quality education in these schools.

Palmer certainly has proved his point. Many of Garvey's graduates go on to college and to stellar careers in business and other professions. Over the years, many business leaders and educators have paraded to Garvey to study its curriculum and teaching methods.

I thought of Garvey School during the recent ceremonies commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Little Rock school-desegregation battles. President Clinton took the occasion to make another well-publicized ``race initiative'' speech, praising the progress of school integration in America.

But what Clinton brushed over is that, despite a sea of civil-rights laws and equal-opportunity programs that have been on the books for three decades, the black poor are greater in number, and many of their children are forced to attend schools that look disturbingly like the segregated schools their parents were forced to attend in the era when they had no legal choice.

Yet, as the Garvey School success story shows, it is a gross distortion to believe that when black students fail, it's because they attend all-black schools. They fail because these schools generally are poorer, lack the best texts and learning equipment, and in far too many cases employ teachers who don't think black students can learn as white students do.

Predominantly or exclusively black schools do not have to be monuments to failure. Many in fact are not. In 1996, more than 80 percent of blacks graduated from high school, and nearly 35 percent were enrolled in college. Most attended predominantly or exclusively black schools. Their dropout rates were marginally no different from those of white students. More than 300,000 black high schoolers competed nationwide in the NAACP's Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics.

There are countless examples of outstanding educational achievement in all-black public schools in Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Brooklyn, Oakland, Detroit, Kansas City, St. Louis and numerous other cities. There has been a major growth in the number of privately-funded and community-supported mentoring and rites of passage programs, learning centers and alternative schools in black communities nationwide. Though mostly ignored or ridiculed by much of the media, the academic success of these institutions has been praised by many educators, parents and students.

Some even make the voguish claim that black students are so culturally deprived, or socially stunted, they can't master standard English and achieve high standards of learning excellence. This claim has been proved a fraud by educators who have devised the Accelerated Schools Program, the Comer School Development Program, the Higher Order Thinking Skills Program, the IBM Writing to Read Program, the National Urban Alliance's Cognition and Comprehensive Program, Reading Recovery, the Based Instructional Leadership Program and Success for All.

But much more must still be done to boost the academic performance in mostly black schools. Black educators, businesspersons and professionals can sponsor conferences in which they provide parents with learning tips and materials to help them improve the study habits of their children.

Meanwhile, black leaders, educators and parents should demand quality education, lobby politically for greater funding for teacher-training programs, insist that teachers and school administrators recognize, accept and respect cultural diversity among students, and adhere to the highest educational standards in predominantly or exclusively black schools.

To argue or imply that most, many or even all black students in segregated schools can't learn, master standard English or achieve excellence in studies, prepare properly for college and attain success in business and professions, without being bused to a suburban school, is educational defeatism at best and racial denial at worst.

Even in the worst days of segregation, few blacks deluded themselves that educational self-help programs alone could magically cure poverty, end racial violence or eliminate legal segregation. Black leaders and organizations never slackened their battle for full civil rights. Now that the visible racial barriers have crumbled, poverty and subtle racism still consign large numbers of blacks to separate and unequal communities, and that almost always means that their children will go to separate and unequal schools.

Yet, just as there is no reason why blacks can't make their communities models of success and achievement, as they did in the days when they had no choice, there is no reason why, 40 years after the Little Rock school desegregation fight, resegregated black schools can't be models of success, too. The Garvey School in Los Angeles certainly is.