When it comes to educating poor, urban children, far too many consider it impossible to do without solving all the surrounding issues within a community. Essentially, those folks — especially defenders of traditional public school practices that promote educational malpractice — simply give up on our poorest children. But as seen in the success of some traditional public schools, Catholic diocesan school systems and charter schools run by Harlem Children’s Zone and the Knowledge is Power Program, high-quality schools with highly-effective teachers, rigorous curricula, strong leadership and high expectations can help every child succeed.
One such school is Chicago’s Providence-St. Mel, a former Catholic school that was taken over by a group of parents after it was targeted for shutdown by the Second City’s archdiocese in 1979. Since that threat, Providence-St. Mel has made it its mission to get every one of its students ready for college and life. Watch this trailer from the documentary profiling the school, The Providence Effect, and consider how we can expand the number of high-quality schools in every community. It will take the reform of American public education — and even redefining it to mean a system of funding the best educational options, public or private, for every child — to stem the dropout crisis that leaves 1.3 million kids trapped in despair.
