Despite what some viewed as the `ideal' Black leadership team, education gains were limited during Wilder administration

The 1989 election of L. Douglas Wilder as governor of Virginia proved exciting to the nation. When Wilder became the first African American governor in the commonwealth, and the first in the nation since Reconstruction, many Black Virginians had high hopes for his administration. Those hopes were especially high for expected improvement in educational opportunities for minorities.

Wilder served as governor from 1990 to 1994. In the arena of education, Wilder appointed Jim Dyke, an African American attorney, to serve as the commonwealth's secretary of education -- a move that signaled, to many, the governor's concern for ensuring educational access for all Virginians.

"The push for affirmative action and access was greater then than at any other time in Virginia history," Dyke claims.

Dyke, who is chair of the advisory committee for the Miles To Go report by the Southern Education Foundation (SEF), says that despite the commonwealth's plunge into a deep recession in the early 1990s, the Wilder administration should be remembered for policy developments that laid the "framework" for making Virginia's public colleges and universities more accessible to African Americans.

For example, even as state officials approved deep cuts in the state's budget, they managed to increase funding for need-based student financial aid during Wilder's tenure as governor, according to Dyke.

Recommendations for making public higher education systems more accessible to African Americans that were included in Redeeming the American Promise, the 1995 report by SEF, grew out of Dyke's experiences as education secretary in Virginia.

One such change resulted when a commission charged with advising Dyke and Virginia officials on ways to ensure higher education access was restructured to include representatives from the Virginia's K-12 system. Dyke says it's critical that more planning occur between K-12 systems and higher education systems to ensure access for all students.