On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I issue a call to black men of character everywhere to stem the dropout crisis among our young black men. A look at new data — including a new report from the Council of the Great City Schools — paints a picture of despair and opportunities to rebuild Black America by reforming American public education and our communities.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, Zune, MP3 player or smartphone. Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley, the Education Podcast Network,  Zune Marketplace and PodBean. And the podcast on Viigo, if you have a BlackBerry, iPhone or Android phone.

Photo courtesy of needsfoundation.org

As you continue flipping through the Schott Foundation’s new report on the low graduation rates of black males (and the educational crisis threatening the futures of our young black men), listen to this rebroadcast of April’s Dropout Nation Podcast on what black men must do to help their sons and the younger men around them. Older black men, raised by fathers and successful in life, must take on the roles of father figures (and champions in improving America’s education system) that these young men lack at home. These lessons also apply to white and Latino communities.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, MP3 player or smartphone. Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley, the Education Podcast Network,  Zune Marketplace and PodBean. Also, add the podcast on Viigo, if you have a BlackBerry, iPhone or Android phone. On Friday, I’ll have more to say about the Schott report and the black male achievement gap.

Tackling youth violence and educational decline all at once.

When Phillip Jackson founded the Black Star Project in 1996, few school reformers had fully focused on the crisis of low educational attainment among young black men. Fourteen years — and numerous reports on racial and gender achievement gaps — later, the former Chicago Public Schools Chief of Staff’s grassroots efforts have fostered organizations focused on improving education for young black men such as UCLA’s Black Male Institute and Success for Black Boys. But Jackson still sees plenty of ground uncovered — especially among inside-the-Beltway school reform types and major education reform philanthropies — on addressing the black-white achievement gap.

In this week’s Three Questions, Jackson offers some of his own thoughts on achievement gaps, school reform, and the role of families in improving education and stemming youth violence. Read, think and consider.

Why should African-Americans care about achievement gaps and the quality of education in their schools?

The educational achievement gap is predictive of the social and economic achievement gaps in life.  If Black children are not trained, equipped and empowered to do well in school, their chances of doing well in life are severely limited.  The educational achievement gap is a precursor to a generational curse of failure, cultural destruction and genocide.

What is the one thing school reform activists inside the Beltway seem to ignore when it comes to addressing education and youth issues and why?

The number one solution ignored by theorist inside the Beltway is the role of parents in producing successful students.  Schools cannot produce successful students without the support of caring, nurturing and demanding parents, guardians, families and communities.  Until Washington realizes this and invests in this, the United States will never be a 21^st century global educational power.

Given your experiences working on youth violence and educational issues, what are the three solutions you offer for dealing with youth violence?

Rebuild the family.  The current epidemic youth violence, mostly in Black communities, can be traced back to the degeneration of the Black family.  The police have no ability to stop youth violence. They have arresting powers and can disperse mobs, but they cannot eliminate the source of youth violence.  Failed families is the source of youth violence.  The family is the most important social unit in human society.  Without strong families, education, economics, spirituality, physical health, emotional health, morality, etc. are all in jeopardy.

Provide positive mentors and role models for youth, especially young Black males.  Children become what they see.  They are going to adopt a model of behavior and a value system that is available.  If we don’t have positive role models and a constructive value system for them, they will adopt negative models and the destructive system.  In fact, negative role models and a destructive value system is heavily marketed to our children. Without a counter-marketing strategy, we have little chance of reaching, impressing and persuading our children not to be violent.

We must provide an education that prepares our youth to become viable parts of our society.  They must have economic alternatives and practical reasons not to engage in negative, destructive behaviors.  We have not helped most young Black men to obtain the necessary skills to be successful in the 21^st century.  We should not be surprised at the hyper-violence as their response to our failure to create a viable world in which they can live.

As U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan has taken on one of the nation’s most-pressing challenges: Improving the quality of public education — especially for the poorest students. And so far, through the Race to the Top effort and the proposed revamp of the No Child Left Behind Act, he has (imperfectly) forced many Americans to finally pay attention to the reasons why the overhauls are needed.

In this video excerpt from his speech earlier this year, the former Chicago Public Schools chief executive offers another reason why reform is so important: Fulfilling the dream of the Civil Rights Movement to assure that all children have equal opportunity to a high-quality education. Listen, think, consider, then take action.

Also, read my report in The American Spectator on how Duncan’s efforts are also complicating the political choices (and career) of Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who must now decide whether to support or veto a teacher quality reform (and tenure elimination) measure.

For the Bryant Hollinses of the world and their children, we should strive to improve our communities. They deserve better and so do we. (Photo courtesy of the Boston Globe)

Observations to live by, be it education or life:

1. Ad hominem statements by defenders of trad. public ed that involve the words “profiteer” instantly render their arguments as mush. This applies to all forms of ad hominem statements.
2. Insisting the status quo should remain “ante” even in the face of hard numbers, statistics, facts, isn’t a good idea. Anecdotes and citing Diane Ravitch as a source doesn’t work either.
3. Nothing is more pathetic than telling a 6-year-old that his family is to blame for low quality of education at a failing school.
4. Check that. Nothing is more pathetic than declaring that poor children must attend woeful schools and shouldn’t escape them. Period. End of story.
5. Chances are that dropout you see came from a home in which mom or dad were also stuck with attending dropout factories. Expecting these parents to value education when they didn’t get one that was valuable in the first place makes no sense.
6. Hillary Rodham Clinton was right about this: It takes a village to raise a child. This was true of me. Same for you. And them too.
7. Somewhere, everywhere, there are burned-out teachers, abusive parents, neglectful adults. And no one to rescue the kids from them. This is why even those children must be our concern.
8. There’s nothing wrong with calling yourself a school reformer. Or a defender of lives of kids. It’s inaction that is deplorable. So get up, get out and do the right thing.
9. Public sector workers who declare their hatred of the “corporate” forget that without them, they would be homeless and jobless. After all, the taxes private sector employees pay (dearly) sustain the very schools and governments for which they work.
10. Without outsiders offering challenge, the rot within anything, be it education or corporation, would not be recognized and solved. Half of the insiders know what the problems, but have no interest in afflicting their comfort. The rest have no experience with anything else, so everything is fine to them.
11. As it turns out, in life, you don’t always need the right answer or the correct faith, just the best, most-honorable idea.
12. And believe. Yes, believe. Not to the point of ignoring reality, but enough to realize that nothing bad lasts forever. Even abysmal traditional public schools.

Photo courtesy of the Press-Enterprise

As a filmmaker, Saul Williams is responsible for one of the best visual lessons on staying in school and avoiding crime with Slam, his 1998 masterpiece about a young man who managed to make a way out of no way. But in his main role as hip-hop poet, Saul Williams has crafted more commentary on improving the lives of youth with his poem, Children of the Night. Watch this video, listen to his messages, and think about what you can do to save “the little girls of fire wearing pigtails of braided smoke” and the other children like them.

The senseless deaths of youth must stop. It's just that simple.

What is happening today in the dropout nation — or what has been happening while your editor has been on the road:

1. Amid last week’s woeful responses to the reading test results from the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress, Education Sector’s Chad Alderman offers a different perspective. He notes that if you break down the results — and realize that the underlying sampling now includes more blacks and Latinos (in order to better represent the nation), one will see some real progress. Black 4th-graders, for example, scored 23 points higher than fellow students in the same grade four years ago. This is all good. But a more-longitudinal assessment — showing progress among students between being in 4th and 8th grade — would certainly offer more perspective on the nation’s academic progress.
2. Meanwhile the Bluegrass Institute’s Richard Innes notes that Kentucky’s NAEP performance may seem better than that of California, but appearances are deceiving. Especially when Kentucky’s education officials suppresses 46 percent of its English Language Learners and special ed students. Declares Innes: “only two other states in the entire country played the exclusion game harder.”
3. Those two states, according to Dropout Nation‘s analysis: Maryland and Tennessee , which respectively excluded 57 percent and 55 percent of their ELL and Special Ed students. Which may explain why Maryland, in particular, is among the most-stubborn in resisting school reform efforts (and always seem to be the best-performing state in the union). New Jersey, which excludes 42 percent of ELL and Special Ed students, is no better, and neither is Delaware (it excludes 42 percent of ELL and Special Ed students); North Dakota excluded 44 percent of students while Ohio excluded 40 percent of its ELL and Special Ed students from NAEP. Certainly this dishonor role deserves much in the way of scorn; it also offers more ammunition to opponents of Common Core State Standards and other attempts at putting the nation under one national curricula standard.
4. Speaking of scorn, two more deserving of it are the American Federation of Teachers’ New York City local and the Big Apple branch of the NAACP. They succeeded in convincing one judge to halt the shutdown of 19 of the city’s worst-performing schools and their replacement with higher-quality options. As Chancellor Joel Klein rightly notes: ““My view is that you don’t send students to failing schools, schools that can’t provide them what they need. The sad thing is that the union would bring a lawsuit to resign kids to failing schools in order to save jobs. And ultimately, that is what this is about.” Exactly. Shame on the two groups and those who support their position.
5. Tom Vander Ark offers some thoughts on how to develop high-quality urban schools through a portfolio approach.
6. Meanwhile in Chicago, the Black Star Project is looking for 1,000 men to help mentor the city’s children and keep them out of violence. Given that 143 Chicago Public School students have been shot during the 2009-2010 school year (and 20 slain), the need for adults to take to the schools and take action is greater than ever. Do your part.

Check out this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, this time a part two of my focus steps needed to improve teacher quality. More will be coming down the pipe later this week.

And finally, to start off your Monday, here’s a little Tower of Power. Enjoy.

Although in the shadows of Big K.C., Kansas City, Kansas City, K.S. struggles with similar academic woes.

The closing of 29 (of 61) schools by the Kansas City (Mo.) school district has captured the attention of the nation. But across the state line in the Big KC’s sister city that shares the same name, a more-fundamental crisis looms. It is one that both cities share with each other — and with other urban school systems across the nation: The young men, no matter their skin color or ethnicity, don’t graduate.

At the beginning of the 2003-2004 school year, young men made up the slight majority of Kansas City’s graduating Class of 2008. This is typical in many districts. But five years later, according to data from the National Center for Educational Statistics, the numbers reverse. Young women, no matter their race or ethnicity, make up the majority of seniors. Among blacks in the Kansas City district, young women account for a slight majority over young men in the Class of 2008; but among whites and Latinos, the young women outnumber the young men by a 3-to-2 ratio.

Black males in KC barely progress, but...

The white males do even worse. And...

Promoting power rates for young black men are, as one would expect, not high. But with 63 percent of young black male 8th-graders reaching senior year of high school (compared to 72 percent of their female counterparts), at least more than half are making it through. Among young white men, the numbers are even worse: A mere 44 percent of them made it from 8th grade to senior year versus 71 percent of young white women. And only 49 percent of the district’s Latino male 8th-graders were promoted to 12th grade; the promoting power rate for Latino females was 71 percent.

the Latino males do little better.

With less than 60 percent of the young men in the Class of 2008 actually making it from 8th to 12th grade, one wonders how so few are making it to graduation. The answer seems to lie in several factors common across urban districts (and even many suburban ones). This includes over-diagnosis of learning disabilities (13 percent of young black men in the district are labeled as some sort of special ed case versus a mere 7 percent of young black women); and the overuse of harsh school discipline (15 percent of Kansas City’s white males were suspended during the 2005-2006 school year, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s office for Civil Rights database, compared to a similarly atrocious 9 percent of their female schoolmates). The latter may play less of a role because the out-of-school suspension rate of 13 percent for all females, while lower, is far too high anyway.

The consequences can be seen in little Kansas City’s demographic and economic statistics: Seventeen percent of the city’s residents are economically impoverished; only 10 percent of Kansas’ citizens (and 13 percent of U.S. citizens) report poverty-level incomes; 18 of Kansas City households are headed by an unmarried woman (versus 8 percent of the U.S. population). But these consequences can be felt nationwide, especially as higher educational attainment becomes key to economic sustainability.

The issues facing young women, especially young black women (who are more likely than the general population to become head of households and never marry) cannot be ignored; the likelihood that young women are being under-diagnosed for learning disabilities must always be kept in mind. The promoting power rate for Kansas City, while better in some respects than its more-populous neighbor, still means that one out of every four children are dropping out. But if the nation wants to stem the dropout crisis, it needs to work on improving academic achievement among young men. Working in little KC wouldn’t be bad place to start.

Helpling with homework and attending the PTA is no longer the only part parents must play in their children's academic lives. They must also help in shaping their curricula -- and must have the tools and support to do so. (Photo courtesy of needsfoundation.org)

What’s happening today in the dropout nation:

1. The Dallas Morning News takes a look at the school district’s dropout factories — many of which are home to largely black and Latino students — and dissects why turning around their performance is so difficult. One reason that can easily be mentioned: The lack of community leadership, especially from black and Latino leaders. EducationNews’ Jimmy Kilpatrick (hat tip to him) rightly asks this question of the city’s (and the nation’s) black political leaders (and it goes for Latino and white leaders as well): “Where is the… outrage?
2. Speaking of the lack of leadership on school reform among the nation’s black politicians, Jennifer Medina profiles New York State Sen.  Bill Perkins, who has proven to be the biggest foe against the expansion (and existence) of charter schools in Empire Land. Sadly, he ignores the benefits charters are bringing to students who live in his Harlem-centered district. Lovely. As Harlem Children’s Zone boss Geoffrey Canada points out, Perkins’ problem seems to be that most of the operators of charters are from outside the community. Well, Mr. Perkins, how about demanding more from the black leaders and middle class residents in your own community instead of piling on people who are willing to help children who aren’t their own by birth. Really. When you ask that question and demand more, then come back with your criticisms. Or as Twitter participant Clifton Whitley writes: “why doesn’t he protest failing public schools?”
3. Another area in which “leaders” are failing to take the lead: Saving the urban private and parochial schools — including Catholic schools — that have served many a poor urban child well over the past few decades. I look further at the need for school reformers — especially centrist Democrats — to embrace vouchers alongside charter schools in order to expand choice and high quality instruction for the poorest children in my latest report for The American Spectator. Also, check out my report from December about the efforts by the Archdiocese of Washington to maintain its mission of educating poor and middle class families, Catholic and (more often) non-Catholic alike.
4. Michael Shaughnessy interviews Rick Hess about the fostering “greenfield” approaches to education reform that move away from traditional school district systems and the underlying infrastructure (teachers unions, best practices) that come with it. Interesting read.
5. The Journal: Technological Horizons in Education reviews the Obama administration’s plans for the use of technology in education.We know what Tom Vander Ark thinks. I’m still thinking this through: The report is correct in arguing that American public education is in need of an overhaul to fit the needs of the 21st century. I’m all for expanded use of technology in schools in innovative ways, but I also think that technology is no more a lone silver bullet that charters, vouchers or shutting down poor performing schools. Ultimately, it comes down to great teaching and active engagement of children in learning. What are your thoughts?
6. In Kentucky, the state lower house passed a bill that would require students to stay in school until age 18. This is all well and good. Perhaps the legislature will also get around to passing a law allowing for the authorization of charter schools, which could help improve the quality of education for students.
7. Off the beaten track: Math can be found in interesting places. Even in one of my five all-time favorite books (along with Anne of Windy Poplars, Parliament of Whores, A Tale of a Tub, and Homicide: Life in the Killing Streets), Alice in Wonderland, according to the New York Times.

Check out the Dropout Nation Podcast this evening; it will be on the next steps President Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan should take with Race to the Top and school reform. Also, read the report this week on the alarming dropout and lack of on-track graduation among male students in Chicago’s public schools (and elsewhere).

And now, for your Sunday pleasure, one of my favorite songs, Come Fly With Me in live form by Sinatra himself:

Source: Consortium on Chicago School Research

A Chicago Public Schools freshman performing well academically and with good attendance is more likely to gain the credits needed to be promoted to the next grade. This in turn, means that they will graduate; 81 percent of Chicago freshmen promoted on time made it to graduation in four years while just three in 10 students graduated, according to the Consortium on Chicago School Research.

Source: Consortium on Chicago School Research

On-time graduation rarely happens in Chicago Public Schools. A mere 64 percent of the freshmen who made up the district’s Class of 2012 had attained the credits needed for promotion to the next grade. It is even worse for the district’s young men, especially the ones attending George Washington High School, one of the district’s poor-performing schools. Just 57 percent of male freshmen were on the path to graduation versus 71 percent of their female classmates. At George Washington, only 48 percent of freshmen males were on path to graduation; 73 percent of females were likely to graduate on time.

The problems are longstanding. Seven years ago, just 49 percent of freshmen males attending Washington were on the path to graduating on time. More importantly, the problems begin long before children reach high school. The dropout crisis begins in elementary school with poor academic instruction along with the lack of focus on addressing deficiencies in reading. An overdiagnosis of learning disabilities — generated in part by the tendency of boys to be boisterous along with a lack of strong parental discipline — means that young boys are relegated to special ed without their issues being addressed through other means. By the time the boys are in sixth grade, the problems have festered. After all, a student failing in math and missing more than 10 days of school a year has just a one-in-six chance of graduating from high school.

These stats can be seen throughout the nation. Over a period of four years, the enrollment of males versus females can reverse, from majority young men to majority female by senior year. The impact of this can be seen on America’s college campuses where young women are now outnumbering men — and in society at large.

All the young men — black, white, Latino, rich or poor — need to graduate. Addressing these academic failures will not only stem the dropout crisis, but also improve the lives of young women and society overall.