Tag: Advanced Math

Rationing Opportunity This is Dropout Nation

D.C. Denies Children Access to College Prep

January 20, 2018 1:53 am January 20, 2018

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Discussion about the reform of public education in the District of Columbia has long tended to be driven by two equally-true narratives. On one side, as reformers such as David…

Discussion about the reform of public education in the District of Columbia has long tended to be driven by two equally-true narratives. On one side, as reformers such as David Osborne of the Progressive Policy Institute correctly note, there is clear evidence that the three-decade-long effort to transform education in the Nation’s Capital is reaping some fruit. Fewer children are struggling with literacy while more high-quality teachers are working within its traditional district and public charter schools.

On the other side, news over the last few months that D.C. Public Schools allows children to graduate from high schools such as Ballou and Wilson despite high levels of absenteeism and unpreparedness for success beyond secondary school is a clear reminder that those efforts, especially within the district, have been plagued by allegations of test-cheating, favoritism to city officials, efforts to hide the overuse of out-of-school suspensions and other harsh school discipline by all school operators, and gamesmanship that have little to do with teaching and curricula.

But there is a third story in the District of Columbia, one that hasn’t been given much consideration by reformers or traditionalists: The state of access to college-preparatory coursework, from Algebra 1 courses in middle schools to Advanced Placement and trigonometry classes critical to success in American higher education. Based on a Dropout Nation analysis of Civil Rights data submitted by traditional district and charter schools to the U.S. Department of Education, the narrative that emerges should displease every D.C. parent, caring adult and political leader.

Regardless of whether a student attends a D.C. traditional district or charter, there is little likelihood of any of them gaining access to college-preparatory education. This is absolutely unacceptable.

Few traditional district and charter school students take AP: Just 23.5 percent of D.C. Public School high school students and 11.4 percent of high schoolers attending charters took AP courses during the 2013-2014 school year. Overall, just 18.8 percent of high school students in the Nation’s Capital took the college preparatory courses that can help them prepare for the rigors of traditional colleges, community colleges, technical schools and apprenticeships (which are often run by community colleges). Put simply: The average D.C. high school student has just a one-in-six chance of taking an AP course by the time they are supposed to graduate with a diploma.

As you would expect, the numbers are even worse when broken down by race and ethnicity. Just 19.4 percent of Black high schoolers served by DCPS accessed A.P. courses that year. This is lower than the 61.9 percent rate for White students, 47.7 percent for Asian peers, and 26.9 percent for Latino high school students. It doesn’t get much better in charters. Just 11.2 percent of Black high schoolers served by charters accessed A.P. courses in 2013-2014; 36.2 percent of Asian high school students, 12.2 percent of Latino peers, and 8.9 percent of White students accessed AP that year.

Few D.C. high schoolers will take advanced math: Overall, just 30 percent of D.C. high schoolers accessed calculus, trigonometry, statistics and other forms of advanced math important for success in the working world in 2013-2014. But the bad news gets worse depending on whether you attend a DCPS school or a charter: While 41.8 percent of DCPS high schoolers took advanced math that year, only 11.7 percent of charter high schoolers did so.

Again, the numbers get worse when broken down further. Forty-three percent of Black high school students served by DCPS accessed calculus and advanced math in 2013-2014. Good news on its face. But that’s still lower than the 58 percent of White high schoolers, and 57.4 percent of Asian peers accessing those courses. Latino high school students trail behind, with just 38.9 percent of them taking calculus and advanced math.

Meanwhile, just 12.6 percent of Black high school students served by charters accessed calculus and advanced math that year. This was higher than the four percent of White high schoolers and 7.3 percent of Latino peers accessing those courses, but lower than the 17 percent of Asian high school students taking some form of advanced mathematics.

Only one in six take physics: Few D.C. high schoolers are taking physics, a key course for gaining preparation for success in science and technology courses in higher education (and ultimately, higher-income careers in those fields after college graduation). Just 18.4 percent of all high schoolers in the Nation’s Capital took physics in 2013-2014; this included 19.4 percent of DCPS high schoolers and 16.8 percent of peers served by charters.

Twenty-point-three percent of Black high schoolers served by DCPS took physics that year. That is higher than the 15.4 percent access rate for Latino high schoolers, but lower than the 28.7 percent rate for White peers and 24.7 percent rate for Asian high school students. Within charters, 13 percent of Black high schoolers took physics, compared to 19.7 percent of Latino high schoolers, 16.9 percent of White peers and 12.8 percent of Asian counterparts.

Few middle schoolers gain access to Algebra 1: Just 8.5 percent of the District’s seventh- and eighth-grade students take this important gateway course to other forms of math in 2013-2014. This includes a mere 9.3 percent of DCPS middle-schoolers and a woeful 7.6 percent of peers in charters. Put bluntly: D.C. children are losing out on future opportunities to learn.

Within DCPS, only 5.8 percent of Black middle school students took Algebra 1 that year, the lowest rate of access among all student subgroups. Twenty-seven-point-six percent of Asian middle-schoolers, 24.3 percent of White counterparts, and 10.7 percent of Latino peers took Algebra 1 that year. But it doesn’t get better for those in charter schools. Just 6.6 percent of Black middle school students took Algebra 1, versus 20 percent of Asian middle-schoolers, 12.4 percent of Latino counterparts and 11.9 percent of White peers.

Certainly it is clear in some ways that children in Washington are receiving higher-quality education than they did back in the 1990s, when DCPS was known as the Superfund Site of American public education.

Between 2002 and 2015, the percentage of D.C. fourth-graders reading Below Basic on the National Assessment of Educational Progress declined by 25 percentage points (from 69 percent to 44 percent) while the percentage reading at Proficient and Advanced levels tripled (from 10 percent to 27 percent). This included a 20 percentage point decline in the number of Black fourth-graders in the city struggling with literacy (from 72 percent to 52 percent) and an 11 percentage point increase in fourth-graders reading at and above grade level (from seven percent to 18 percent).

The reform efforts within DCPS that began under Michelle Rhee and have continued under successors Kaya Henderson and Antwan Wilson helped more children gain the knowledge they need for greater chances of success. Charter schools also contributed to these improvements; the percentage of fourth-graders in charters reading Below Basic declined by 19 percentage points (from 64 percent to 45 percent) between 2005 (when NAEP began including charters in testing) and 2015, while the percentage reading at and above grade level increased by 12 percentage points (from 10 percent to 22 percent).

But as Dropout Nation‘s analysis demonstrates, far too many children, especially Black children (who make up 75 percent of high school students and 77 percent of middle-schoolers in the District’s traditional district and charter schools) continue to be shortchanged of the knowledge they need for success beyond their elementary and secondary years. This is especially clear when looking at how poorly charters in the city are doing in providing such opportunities to the children in their care compared to the traditional district.

D.C.’s public charter schools have helped the District become a better place for children to learn. But their failures in providing college-preparatory courses is stunning and unacceptable.

Some charter school leaders will, of course, argue that this analysis is painting their operations with a broad brush. After all, some charters, most-notably See Forever Foundation’s Maya Angelou schools (which was featured in a Dropout Nation commentary seven years ago), focus on youth who previously dropped out of school or were incarcerated in the District’s juvenile justice system, and therefore, are working hard to stem the years of neglect to which those children were subjected while in DCPS.

Others such as the Knowledge is Power Program, which nationally has done a better job of preparing children for college completion than all but a few traditional districts, will likely argue that college preparatory curricula is already part of the agenda, and thus, AP isn’t needed. Some seem to be doing the work: Some 43 percent of Black high schoolers served by E.L. Haynes Public Charter School took physics in 2013-2014, one of the highest numbers among charters in the District in this category.

But it is hard for Friendship Public Charter Schools, one of the nation’s premiere charter school operators, to explain why it provided calculus and advanced math to 18.2 percent of Black high schoolers attending its schools (and 18.1 percent of its students overall). KIPP can’t explain with credibility why not one student regardless of background took physics that year.Or why BASIS, which has been ranked the top charter school in the District, only had four students — out of 520 — taking advanced math and calculus in 2013-2014.

Excuses cannot and should never suffice when the numbers are absolutely woeful — and children are being denied high-quality opportunity. There are far too many charters that should be providing college-preparatory learning that aren’t doing so. Which is unacceptable in light of the charter school movement’s mission of providing all children with high-quality educational options that cannot otherwise be found within traditional districts.

As for DCPS? The good news is that it is doing better than its peers among charters in providing college-preparatory courses to its middle- and high school students. But as the data shows, the district is still doing poorly by far too many of our children, especially those Black and Brown. Given the latest news about graduation rate inflation and allowing children wholly unprepared for college and life to walk out of its schools with sheepskins, there is also reason to be skeptical about how well the traditional district is doing in actually educating the youth who are in those classrooms.

District of Columbia officials, including Mayor Muriel Bowser (who oversees DCPS), the city council and the Public Charter School Board need to put pressure on all school leaders to step up and provide all of the city’s children with high-quality education. [Congress, which has oversight over the District, should also help. But given the penchant for doing harm, it may as well stay out.] This includes doing better in providing information to families on how they can access college-preparatory courses, continuing to overhaul elementary and preschool curricula (a reason why so few children gain access to college preparatory courses down the road), and pushing both DCPS and charter school operators to ensure that all children are given the classes they need for lifelong success.

Reformers at the national level must also play their part, holding their counterparts in D.C. (and in other districts and school operations inside the Beltway) to account for failures to meet the high expectations we implicitly set for school operators in the rest of the nation. The District must be the model for transforming public education and ensuring high-quality options, curricula, and teaching for all children, especially those Black and Brown.

Certainly the progress being made in D.C.’s district and charter schools should be noted — as should the failures in leadership that still remain. But that isn’t enough. It is also time to address the failures of the District’s school operators to help the children they serve gain college-preparatory learning they need and deserve.

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Building A Culture of Genius

The Integration Mirage

December 20, 2017 4:33 pm December 20, 2017

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If the Century Foundation and other advocates for socioeconomic integration are believed, Cambridge Public School in Massachusetts is supposedly the model for harmonious, high-quality educating of all children regardless of background. This is because “73 percent of schools were balanced by race in the 2011–2012 school year” and 64 percent of them were “balanced” by socioeconomic status (including percentage of kids on free- and reduced-priced lunch plans). Declares Century in its lullaby to the school: “Cambridge remains a leader in school integration”.

Yet a Dropout Nation analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Education offers a much different story than what Century and others want to promote. If anything, the rationing of opportunity for high-quality education is as much a problem in Cambridge and other districts considered successes of integration as they are in the nation’s most-highly segregated traditional districts.

Just 8.5 percent of Cambridge’s 577 Black high school students — 49 of them, to be exact — took Advanced Placement courses in 2013-2014. This is four times lower than the 34. 5 percent of White peers (226) taking the college preparatory coursework. [Sixteen-point-four percent of Latino high schoolers took AP that year.]

It gets only slightly better when it comes to access to calculus, trigonometry and other forms of advanced mathematics. Twenty eight-point-four percent of Black high schoolers took college-preparatory math in 2013-2014. But that still trailed the 48.4 percent of White peers who took those course. [Some 35.2 percent of Latino high school students took calculus and advanced math.]

The numbers got slightly better when it came to physics, a critical gateway course for science, technology, engineering and math careers. Thirty three-point-four percent of Black high schoolers took the course compared to 35.9 percent of White peers. But only 28.7 percent of Latino high schoolers took the course.

Meanwhile there is another form of denying opportunity that is pernicious within Cambridge — in the form of who gets put into its special ed ghettos. One out of every four Black children in Cambridge’s district — 25.9 percent of Black children in its care — are labeled special ed cases, as are 25.4 percent of Latino peers. This is almost double the (also far too high) 14.2 percent of White children placed into special ed. Based on those numbers, a Black or Latino child in Cambridge has a one-in-four chance of being denied the high-quality teaching and curricula they need for lifelong success.

Districts such as Stamford Public Schools are touted as examples of success in integration. But the data proves that illusory.

Even worse, the Black kids condemned to special ed are more-likely to be subjected to out-of-school suspensions and other forms of harsh traditional school discipline that ensure that they have a one-in-six chance of graduating from high school. Cambridge meted one or more out-of-school suspensions to 9.7 percent of Black children and 8.9 percent of Latino peers in Cambridge’s special ed ghettos; this is three times higher than the 3.5 percent out-of-school suspension rate for White peers.

For all of Century’s talk about Cambridge representing the success of socioeconomic integration, the data on equality of opportunity doesn’t support it. But this should be no surprise — especially to otherwise-sensible outfits such as the Center for American Progress (which released its own call for integration this week). Because integration has never proven to be the solution for the nation’s education crisis and its damage to the futures of poor and minority children that its proponents claim it to be.

Take the Jefferson County district in Louisville, Ky., another district that has been touted by Century and others for efforts on integration. Back in October, the foundation bemoaned an effort by the state legislature to end its “controlled choice” effort and allow families to send their kids to neighborhood schools. Just 11 percent of the district’s Black high schoolers and 18 percent of Latino peers accessed AP courses in 2013-2104, versus 28.5 percent of White high school students. Only 12 percent of Black high school students and 14.2 percent of Latino peers took calculus and advanced mathematics; this is lower than the 21.5 percent of White peers who accessed those courses.

Meanwhile the denial of high-quality education in the form of sending kids to special ed ghettos remains a problem. Fourteen-point. six percent of Black children are put into special ed, slightly higher than the 12.3 percent of White peers. [Only 6.4 percent of Latino children are condemned to special ed.] Yet Black children in special ed will suffer even worse than White peers when it comes to out-of-school suspensions and other forms of harsh school discipline. Jefferson County meted one or more out-of-school suspensions to 17.7 of Black children, compared to just 7.1 percent of White peers (and 10.2 percent of Latino students). Even when Black and White children are equally condemned to educational failure, they are not harmed in equal ways.

Another ‘model’ for integration is the Stamford district in Connecticut, which has been credited by Century for “remarkable success maintaining racially and socioeconomically desegregated schools”. Yet only 14 percent of Black high school students and 17 percent of their Latino peers took AP courses in 2013-2014, compared to 40.5 percent of White peers. Just 15.1 percent of Black high schoolers and 14.3 percent of Latino counterparts took calculus and other advanced math, two times lower than the 32.2 percent participation rate for White peers.

Meanwhile 19.1 percent of Black children and 12.6 percent of Latino peers were condemned to Stamford’s special ed ghettos. Only 9.2 percent of White children were denied high-quality education. Within those ghettos, Stamford meted one or more out-of-school suspensions to 13.3 percent of Black students and 6.6 percent of Latino peers. Just 3.3 percent of White students — 16 in all — were suspended one or more times that year.

Your editor can go on and on with each of the nine examples Century touts as models of success in socioeconomic integration — as well as point out other examples such as Clinton Separate School District in Mississippi. But that would be piling on. What the data points out is that for all the claims advocates make, socioeconomic integration doesn’t address the underlying issues that keep poor and minority children from receiving the high-quality teaching, curricula, and cultures they need for lifelong success.

Socioeconomic integration doesn’t deal with the reality that mixing Black and Latino faces into White spaces doesn’t address the myriad ways traditional districts deny opportunities to them. This includes the gatekeeping by school leaders, teachers and guidance counselors of gifted-and-talented programs that are the first steps towards kids attending AP and other college-preparatory courses, the low-quality instruction and curricula in regular classrooms that keep Black and Brown kids off the paths to success, and even selective high schools such as those of New York City, which Contributing Editor Michael Holzman has shown to be forms of “segregation by another name”.

Oddly enough, the magnet schools and other “controlled choice” models integration-as-school reform advocates often tout are among the worst offenders. One reason? Because they are as much used by districts as tools for luring and keeping White families at the expense of poor and minority children as they are mandated by courts for integration. [By the way: The power to use choice and high-quality education as a political tool is one reason why traditional districts oppose the expansion of charter schools in the first place.] Basically, magnets and controlled choice deny our most-vulnerable children access to high-quality education in the name of socioeconomic balance. Even worse, the approaches are no different in practice than the kinds of “curated segregation” that take place in many cities today.

There is a reason why charters have become the choice of so many Black families: Because of the opportunities for children to have their cultures and lives affirmed.

Integration also doesn’t address the failure to provide poor and minority children with teachers who are subject-matter competent and also care for them regardless of their background. As Dropout Nation noted last month, far too many Black and Brown children are taught by teachers who subject them to the not-so-soft-bigotry of low expectations, harming their chances for high school graduation and college completion. Nor does integration address the need to overhaul how we recruit, train, and compensate teachers, deal with the need to bring more talented Black people (including midcareer professionals ready to work with kids) into classrooms, or even the near-lifetime employment rules (in the form of tenure) and teacher dismissal policies that keep so many low-quality teachers in classrooms often filled with the descendants of enslaved Africans.

Addressing those underlying issues requires undertaking the kinds of teacher quality overhauls reformers have been pushing for the past two decades, ones that integration-as-school reform advocates often oppose. Put bluntly, it is difficult for your editor to take integration advocates seriously when they refuse to deal honestly with the consequences of policies and practices that allow educationally-abusive teaching to fester.

Meanwhile integration fails to address the restrictions on opportunity for poor and minority children that result from the traditional district model as well as the zoning policies and property tax-based finance systems on which it is sustained. Integration does absolutely nothing to address how districts use their dependence on property tax dollars to oppose the ability of poor and minority families in other communities (who finance those schools through state and federal dollars). Nor does it stop districts from using school zones and magnet schools as tools for denying opportunity to the Black and Brown families who live within them. And it definitely doesn’t stop White communities seeking to secede from integrated districts from doing so.

It’s long past time to break the ties between educational opportunity, property taxes and housing policy. This means moving away from a model of public education built upon districts and school boundaries (which integration merely overlays) to one in which states finance high-quality opportunities from which all children and families of all backgrounds can choose.

Finally, what integration advocates fail to admit is that their approach is patronizing to the very Black and Brown families for which they proclaim concern. This is because throughout American history, integration (along with its kissing cousin, assimilation, about which American Indians know all too well) has always been based on the racialist idea that Whiteness is superior, that White people are better, and that if it isn’t close to White or attended by White, then it is inferior, and by implication, should be destroyed.

Anyone who has gone to a Historically Black College and University, or been to a rural White school knows this isn’t true. Even worse, it is unconscionable and immoral for anyone to believe it or embrace it or perpetuate it. But the fiction remains as pernicious and destructive now as it was during the heyday of integration in the 1960s and 1970s when schools in Black communities were shut down instead of being provided with the resources they needed to serve children properly. If allowed to re-emerge, that thinking will damage the new efforts Black and Latino people are doing now to help their children succeed on their own terms.

For Black and Latino families who just want and deserve high-quality schools in the communities in which they live that also affirm their cultures, where their kids also go to schools with kids who look like them, where they know that they can succeed (even when they are told otherwise), integration remains what Charles Ogletree once called a false promise. Based on the data, their feelings are justified. They are also tired of having their children being forced to teach White people’s children how to treat them with respect, and exhausted with negotiating with White people for the resources their children are supposed to get by law. Those feelings are also well-deserved. Integration does nothing to affirm the people it is supposed to help.

If we want to build brighter futures for all children, especially those Black, Brown, and poor, we have to get to continue to overhaul the policies and practices that keep them from getting the knowledge they deserve. Focusing on integration as the solution merely papers over the hard work that must be done.

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Building A Culture of Genius

End Maryland’s Indifference to Black Children

October 7, 2017 11:39 am October 7, 2017

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Below are prepared remarks by your editor for a panel at a confab hosted yesterday by Faith Leaders for Excellent Schools’, a coalition of pastors in Baltimore working to transform…

Below are prepared remarks by your editor for a panel at a confab hosted yesterday by Faith Leaders for Excellent Schools’, a coalition of pastors in Baltimore working to transform public education in both Charm City and the nation. The event, which featured former U.S. Secretary of Education-turned-Education Trust President John B. King, FLES cofounder and Maryland State Board of Education Board Member Pastor Michael Phillips, and Baltimore City Schools Chief Executive Sonja Brookins Santelises, focused on helping pastors and others understand what they must do for kids in order to make the state fulfill its obligations under the Every Student Succeeds Act as well as address school finance.

Good morning! It is great to see all of you champions for our children. You are already working to transform our communities and the world for our children and families, and serve the least of us as the Beatitudes command. I am here to help you gain perspective on the issues in education here in Maryland that need to be addressed so that all of our people get the knowledge they need to survive.

As Secretary King has noted, the current administration has little concern for our children, especially our Black children. I go further and say that this is a regime bent on committing educational genocide and, when it comes to our immigrant children, what can only be called low-grade ethnic cleansing. We are a nation in moral and political crisis.

But I always say that the problem isn’t the active bigotry and evil of the very few. This administration is the very few. The problem lies with the vast indifference of the unhuddled masses to the futures of children and communities not their own. It is the failure of all of us to remember, as Hezekiah Walker would tell, to pray for you, to pray for me, to love each other, we need you to survive.

The evil may be in Washington, But the indifference is happening here in Maryland, in our very own communities, and it has been happening long before the current Occupant of the White House took office. It is rooted both in the legacies of the bigotry that is America’s Original Sin, and, at the same time, a result of current policy decision that are harmful to our children.

I think about a farmer named John Hawkins, who is buried in Sacred Heart Church in Bowie, where I live. He was born into slavery in 1832 and spent his first three decades of live without freedom or education. By 1870, when the U.S. Census was taken that year, John had to admit that he never learned to read or write. All because systems and people made decisions to deny him the gateways to the world.

John would eventually learn to read and died in 1912 literate and as free as they allowed Black people to be back then. But imagine what his life would have been if he had free to live, free to learn, and given access to high-quality education for the time to maximize that freedom

Today in Baltimore and in Maryland, we have plenty of Johns and Janes in our schools and in our communities. They weren’t born into chattel slavery. But thanks to legacies of the past and decisions made by people today, these young people have been denied knowledge that can help them build brighter futures for themselves, their families, and their communities.

Maryland leaders lie about how well children are being educated, especially Black children often been wrongly placed into special education because they can’t read. Over the years, the state has excluded as many as 60 percent of special ed students from the nation’s chief exam of measuring how schools educate children.

This means Maryland lies to parents, to caring adults, to faith leaders just like you. Even worse, its leaders lie to children who deserve great teachers and comprehensive curricula.

Maryland leaders lie about the opportunities our children have to gain high-quality learning. Districts here provided calculus, trigonometry and other higher levels of math to 18 percent of Black high school students. Districts in Maryland provided Advanced Placement courses to just 16 percent of Black high school students.

Your editor (right), along with former U.S. Secretary of Education John King, Sonja Brookins Santelises of Baltimore City Public Schools, and Pastor Michael Phillips of Faith Leaders for Excellent Schools discuss transforming public education for the state’s Black and other minority children.

Most Black children in Maryland are ill-prepared to graduate from college or technical schools or apprenticeship programs. They have been condemned to poverty and despair.

Maryland leaders lie about the roles families and communities can play both within schools and in the decisions being made in Annapolis about what we should know about how well our schools are serving children. The state just passed a law effectively allowing many schools to continue failing our kids, and make it difficult for us to do anything about it.

Maryland leaders are keeping people like you, faith leaders, from transforming schools and systems on behalf of the children who sit in your pews — and those who are outside on our streets.

Finally, Maryland leaders lie about how they want Black children to be treated. They may talk about their concern for them. But they support harsh school discipline policies that keep them from learning — and worse, don’t address the learning issues often at the heart of bad behavior. There is no reason why thousands of Baltimore City Black children are suspended, expelled, arrested, and sent to courts year after year after year.

The solutions to this crisis in education require the hearts and hands and voices of many people. This includes faith leaders such as you. This is because you touch all of the men and women in our communities who are the messengers we need to demand high-quality education for our children, the villagers who raise all of our kids.

Your churches are home to Divine Nine fraternity and sorority meetings. Politicians come to your doors t solicit support. You are the only ones who will be in these communities long after teachers leave and superintendents move on to greener pastures. You have power that only those called by God can wield.

All of us, from faith leaders to those in and out of the pews, must be the ones who knock down the doors and are in the meetings where policy is being made. Because, as they say, if you aren’t at the table, you are the menu. And throughout history Black people aren’t the apple pies decision-makers enjoy eating, but the broccoli they throw into the trash.

We cannot be surprised that school reformers, especially some folks on our state board of education, didn’t solicit us earlier this year in the fight against eviscerating school accountability. They have never thought about including us in crafting policy. Same is true for those who defend the policies and practices that have damaged generation after generation after generation of Black children in our state. Our children and communities are the furthest from their minds.

Because we know that our concerns aren’t necessarily those of the people at the state capital, we have to stick our noses into the rooms and stick our necks out for all of our children. The children who are our own by birth. The children who we never birthed or conceived. Even the children we will never see in the pews and never know by name.

We have to ask every child we meet how they are doing in school. We have to demand teachers, principals, even superintendents, to show, not tell, how they are helping build brighter futures for all of our children. Particularly as faith leaders, you must organize, work the corridors of power, feed the children intellectually, spiritually, and physically, and advocate tirelessly.

Because as Christ commands, when we do for the least of us, for the most-vulnerable of us, we are also doing for Him. We must end the vast indifference of the unhuddled masses. Which means we must be few who galvanize the many to transform schools and systems and futures for children on behalf of He who created us.

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