Coverage of the Reform of American Public Education

Tag: The Black Star Project

Dropout Nation Podcast Giving Parents Power This is Dropout Nation

Rewind: The Dropout Nation Podcast: Building Ties Between School Reformers and Grassroots Activists

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As part of a further discussion about the importance of Beltway school reformers to embrace the grassroots, here is a rewind of a February Dropout Nation Podcast on the subject….

As part of a further discussion about the importance of Beltway school reformers to embrace the grassroots, here is a rewind of a February Dropout Nation Podcast on the subject. Inside-the-Beltway policymaking, important as it is, will mean nothing for improving the educational destinies of children if school reformers don’t reach out to urban groups such as the Black Star Project and activists working in suburban and rural 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.

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This is Dropout Nation Three Questions

Three Questions: Phillip Jackson of the Black Star Project

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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 —…

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 21st 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 21st 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.

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Read: What is NAEP? Edition

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What is happening today in the dropout nation — or what has been happening while your editor has been on the road: Amid last week’s woeful responses to the reading…

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.


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This is Dropout Nation

Voices of the Dropout Nation: This Past Weekend

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“Black men must mentor Black boys.  No other way has worked or will work.  Many Black men say that they, themselves, have too many problems and competing issues or that…

They are all our children. All of us -- including black men and even white men -- should teach them well.

“Black men must mentor Black boys.  No other way has worked or will work.  Many Black men say that they, themselves, have too many problems and competing issues or that they are “too busy” to mentor Black boys… Unless Black men mentor Black boys, Many, if not most, Black boys will continue to struggle and fail in this life.” — Phillip Jackson of the Black Star Project on the need for black men to play stronger roles in the lives of young men.

“If traditional public schools had been meeting the community’s needs, there would never have been a discussion of using public education dollars for anything other than “traditional” neighborhood schools. This is not the case. America has had it up to ‘here’ with the failures of traditional neighborhood schools. Therefore, charters have no impact on good traditional schools.” —CNN commentator Steve Perry on why urban parents are looking to charter schools and other forms of school choice.

“Mistreatment and miseducation causes student failure. The failure experience as a repeated occurrence frequently constitutes child abuse for at-risk kids as debilitating and inexcusable as the better publicized child abuses.  Moreover, failure is condoned and perpetuated as expected traditional educational policy. Teachers, having been successful in school, have difficulty relating to kids’ devastating failure and imperiled lives. Educators and community leaders who should be outraged are, instead, contributing to the calamity… Meanwhile, children’s lives are devastated. Without publicity, there is no outcry; without an outcry, there is no change.” — Bill Page of the At-Risk Student Advocate to EducationNews‘ Michael Shaughnessy about why he is dedicating “my twilight years” to activism on behalf of the most-neglected children.

“If we revert to a patchwork of standards and assessments that vary according to political pressures or societal and community biases, historically disadvantaged students, whether intentionally or unintentionally, will be mislabeled as achieving high standards when in fact they are not. In turn, the schools in which poor and minority students are enrolled are likely to be overlooked when it comes to badly needed investments in teaching and learning and in formulating and implementing fundamental reforms in chronically failing schools.” — Democrats for Education Reform and the Education Equality Project in a recent report explaining the need for standardized testing.

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This is Dropout Nation

Voices of the Dropout Nation: Walter Dozier On Education and Violence

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One man’s call for using education to end violence.

Killing our seeds before they grow: Black America must stop this.

Killing our seeds before they grow: Black America must stop this.

As an applied anthropologist in the D.C. suburb of Prince George’s County, Walter Dozier has spent much of his time addressing the high levels of underachievement and crime that have plagued that community’s neighborhoods. But after watching the spate of teen-on-teeen murders that have bloodied Chicago’s streets, Dozier wonders whether black communities in that city — and elsewhere — are ready to embrace education as the solution to ending such carnage. Here are his thoughts (thanks to Phillip Jackson of the Black Star Project):

It has been two months since the murder and funeral of Chicago teenager Derrion Albert. His violent death sparked a national outrage and generated intense international media attention. Albert is one of thousands of young black males whose loss of life has gone largely unchecked within the black community. Yet black youth violence alarm bells have been sounding for decades.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, homicide is the leading cause of death for the majority of black Americans between the ages of 10 and 24 years old. Further, research by Northeastern University shows that the number of homicides involving black male youth as perpetrators increased 43 percent between 2002 and 2007. Just as important, the number of black male youth involved as homicide victims increased 31 percent.For gun killings, the increase was even greater with a 54 percent increase for young black male victims and 47 percent increase for young black male perpetrators.

In Chicago, almost 70 students have been murdered in black communities, since the beginning of the 2007 school year. But this is not just a Chicago problem Two weeks after Albert’s death, in the Washington D.C. area, where I live, seventeen year-old Kenyetta D. Nicholson-Stanley was killed during an exchange of gunfire at the Edgewood Terrace housing complex while she sat on a bench. A week later, 15-year-old Davonta Artis and 18-year-old Daquan Tibbs, were gunned down not far away from where Nicholson-Stanley was killed. Artis was on his way home from a local middle school where he was reportedly an A-student. Three other teens were also wounded in what community members called a war-like shootout between rival neighborhood gangs.

In all three incidents, law enforcement officials and family members publicly pleaded for community assistance in identifying the attackers so they apprehended and brought to justice. In all three incidents police struggled to get witness support as community members refused to take a stand against the epidemic violence – in their own communities. Had it not been for the technological advances in visual media – cell phone cameras — Albert’s killers might still be unidentified.

So, with a generation of black youths attending candlelight vigils as a cultural way of life and make shift memorials unexceptional landmarks throughout many black communities, there is a disquieting absence of community call-to-action, a disquieting lack of effort to address the killing of young black males – unless the assailant is white. Then the call to unify against racism is unyielding.

Some community watchers say the complacency is a problematical mix of family breakdown and an engrained sense of hopelessness fueling violent episodes of self hatred. Still others cite a concentrated and misdirected focus on materialism and consumerism rather than on educational excellence. Education advocates say the failure to provide black children with a 21st Century education will only increase the rate of terror within black communities. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates 90 percent of new high-growth, high-wage jobs will require some level of postsecondary education.

Children without a quality high school education are hopelessly destined to the lowest possible quality of life imaginable in the United States. According to a recent report by Columbia University’s Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education at Teachers College, reducing the high school dropout rate in half would yield $45 billion annually in new federal tax revenues or cost savings.

So we have now reached the “what now?” stage of the Derrion Albert tragedy. The media attention is fading, the family will be left to grieve alone and young black males continue to terrorize our communities while self-annihilating each other. The status quo approach to solving problems is not, and has not worked for years. Since the arrested development of thousands of young black males can no longer be singularly attributed to racism, new community survival strategies are critical to our survival. Blaming and complaining are not strategies; they are excuses. It is now time for a moratorium on excuses and a fundamental shift in thinking and action.

The problems of under-and unemployment are clearly related to educational deficits and too many black youths are turning to the criminal enterprise. In majority black communities across the nations the governance of school systems has rested in the hands of black leadership for years. Yet, the quality and direction of education remains in question as political, faith-based, business and community leaders are for the most part hopelessly uninvolved, uninformed and uncommitted to saving our children.

Our communities have gotten too comfortable with violence and underachievement.Without a committed and sustained effort to educate our children and rebuild our families, the permanent destruction of the black community is simply a matter of time.

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