Tag:

black students

Once bored, now soaring, thanks to all-boys charter school

Ron Matus March 28, 2018

BRADENTON, Fla. – Lena Clark has a recurring nightmare. The former Army medic and Iraqi War veteran is trapped on the battlefield – bombs exploding, smoke everywhere – and desperately looking for the date in her contract that tells her when she can leave. She can’t find it. Nobody can help. The war drags on.

Brothers Frankie and Allen Clark are thriving at Visible Men Academy, an all-male charter school. Pictured here, the Clark family. (From left to right: Lena, Kennice, Allen, Frank and Frankie.)

Clark said the nightmare persists because it’s about her sons, Frankie, 11, and Allen, 10, and the hurdles they face as black males. It’s about the education she feels they must have – and she and her husband must give them – to navigate a world that can be hostile to children of color.

“I’m always going to be in a war for my children because I am raising black men,” Lena Clark said. “And that’s something I need my school to help me with.”

Thankfully, she said, she and her husband found that school.

For the past three years, Frankie and Allen have attended Visible Men Academy, a K-5 charter school south of Tampa Bay that is 100 percent male, 99 percent low-income, 96 percent black and Hispanic – and on the rise academically. The school emphasizes personalized instruction and character development. It’s big on expression through art and parental engagement. That combo, Clark said, has been a tonic for her boys.

“When they get up in the morning, they iron their own clothes and say, ‘We’ve got to be men today,’ “ she said. “If I have to pull them out for a dentist appointment, they’re like, ‘Mommy, what are you doing?’ They don’t want to go. They want to be in school.”

It wasn’t always that way.

Clark said she and her husband, Frank, removed their boys from their district school because the boys’ enthusiasm had begun to wane. Frankie and Allen are straight-A students. Clark said she pressed teachers for tougher assignments, but it didn’t happen.

When Frankie and Allen got home, they binged YouTube with Bill Nye the Science Guy, and devoured websites for brain teasers. That was good, but the Clarks also saw another sign their sons weren’t getting the intellectual nourishment they needed at school.

“We were higher than our grade level, but our teacher didn’t have anything for us beyond that,” Frankie said. “It wasn’t really challenging.”

Too often, Allen said, it was also frustrating.

“If a student had to be redirected,” he said, meaning steered back on track after dis-engaging or causing a disruption, “it was like, ‘Here we go again.’ “

March 28, 2018 0 comment

On parental choice and pluralism

Ron Matus March 15, 2016

Ron Matus

In 1968, Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks, then a leading light of the Voucher Left, argued for universal school vouchers, primarily to benefit black students: ” … for those who value a pluralistic society, the fact that such a solution would, for the first time, give large numbers of non-Catholics a choice about where they send their children, ought, I think, to outweigh all other objections.” (Image from www.hks.harvard.edu)

This is the latest installment in our series on the center-left roots of school choice.

School vouchers won’t drain money from public schools, won’t violate the Constitution, and won’t fray the social fabric. Ultimately, they should be supported by “those who value a pluralistic society.” So wrote liberal Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks, once a leading light on the Voucher Left, in a lengthy 1968 essay in the New York Times Magazine.

Oh, how times have changed.

Too many of today’s progressives boo and hiss at school vouchers, thinking they’re a Koch brothers weapon to kill public education. They should be reminded, as often as possible, that some of their left-of-center brethren (like him, him and him) see vouchers through a radically different lens and that, in fact, this progressive view goes back decades.

Jencks’s 1968 essay, “Private Schools for Black Children,” is yet more evidence. In the 1960s and ‘70s, Jencks led the team that tried, as part of a federal experiment, to field-test school vouchers in a California school district. He concludes in his NYT piece that vouchers are necessary for political reasons, even if he doubts it will move the ball academically for black students.

Today’s school choice supporters would respectfully disagree on the academic piece, and they have the benefit of evidence (like this, this and this) that wasn’t there 50 years ago. Also and obviously, there are plenty of other good reasons to restore parental power over education, like those thoughtfully laid out by Berkeley Law Professor Jack Coons.

Conclusion aside, what’s striking about Jencks’s essay is how he brushes aside so many anti-choice arguments that so many modern progressives embrace.

Don’t school vouchers defy constitutional restrictions separating church and state? No, Jencks says. At the time of his essay, the U.S. Supreme Court hadn’t ruled on that question. (It would, in favor of vouchers, in 2002). But, writes Jencks, it’s reasonable to think there wouldn’t be constitutional objections as long as the vouchers are “earmarked to achieve specific public purposes … “ Public money flows to Catholic hospitals and Catholic universities, he notes. Why not Catholic K-12 schools? The selectivity question continues to dodge scrutiny.

March 15, 2016 0 comment

Achievement Gap Homeschooling

Black & homeschooled

Ron Matus February 24, 2016

Ron Matus

Tamsin Thomas homeschools her daughter Olivia, 5, while sister Ona, 1, sits close by. “I don’t want my daughter to be short-changed because of the color of her skin,” Thomas said of Olivia. “I feel like I’m the only one who has her best interests at heart.” (Photo courtesy of Tamsin Thomas)

Tamsin Thomas of Orlando, Fla. said when she was in high school, public school officials determined her younger brother, a bright-but-shy fifth grader, should be in special education classes. She was horrified. She feared her brother was being shifted, for no good reason, into less-challenging classes and onto a lesser track in life. She urged her mother to fight it.

Mom won. Now Thomas’s brother is set to graduate with a standard diploma, and planning to enlist in the Marines. But that experience and others convinced Thomas that when it comes to public schools, African-American parents are rolling the dice with their children’s futures.

So, she homeschools.

“I don’t want my daughter to be short-changed because of the color of her skin,” Thomas said of Olivia, 5. “I feel like I’m the only one who has her best interests at heart.”

Thomas isn’t alone.

Although the evidence is mostly anecdotal, a flurry of recent stories (like this, this and this) note a growing number of African-American parents turning to homeschooling.

Researchers estimate 200,000 of the 2.4 million homeschoolers nationwide are African-American. Their parents are largely motivated by the same reasons that propel other homeschool parents. But a significant number also want to shield their children from schools they believe will shortchange them, leading to outcomes that are beyond troubling.

In this respect, the rise in black homeschoolers isn’t a trend on the fringe, but another thread in the educational freedom story that has always been part of the black experience in America. As a new report from the Black Alliance for Educational Options put it, “Black people’s struggle to obtain an education in America is older than the Declaration of Independence.”

It wouldn’t be surprising if the homeschool chapter was especially telling in Florida.

The state with the second-highest number of black students in the nation (after Texas), and arguably the most robust array of choice options, had 84,096 home-schooled students in 2014-15, up 21 percent in five years. The state doesn’t track the students by race, but many homeschool parents, both white and black, say the increase in African-American homeschooling families is clear.

Thomas said when she began homeschooling Olivia several years ago, she was the only African-American parent in her homeschooling networks. But now there are several, and she expects to see more.

“It’s the way things are going in society,” Thomas said. “We say we think racism is behind us, but … “

February 24, 2016 1 comment

Achievement Gap Blog Administration Blog Guest Progressives and ed reform

Peter Hanley: Wishing outrage extended to America’s two-tiered education system

Peter H. Hanley December 22, 2014

Peter H. Hanley

Hanley

Editor’s note: This is the second post in our school choice wish series. See the rest of the line-up here.

I wish those who are outraged and protesting that “black lives matter” over the two-tiered policing and criminal justice system would connect the dots and express similar outrage over our two-tiered, state-operated, feudal education system. Why do so few similar demonstrations occur, and never with a statewide or national scope, about the outcomes American education provides to families generally, but particularly for African-Americans, when the effects on lives are at least equally devastating?

At the surface, America has these two exemplary 21^st Century societal systems that represent the very core of its founding beliefs – equality, justice, and fairness. Criminal law is not race- or class-based as written in statute. Everyone is equal before the law and no one is above it. Public education is free and, since the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision, universally open and equal for all. The double standards that in fact exist are neither explicit nor openly condoned. We have reams of data to document the injustices at the hearts of both systems.

From speeding tickets to drug arrests through convictions to imprisonment, African-Americans (as well as Latinos and poor people of all colors) are disproportionately represented, often grossly so. In the 2011 U.S. Department of Justice’s report, Contacts Between Police and the Public, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that while white, black, and Hispanic drivers were stopped at similar rates nationwide, black drivers were three times as likely to be searched during a stop as white drivers, and twice as likely as Hispanic drivers. During a more than 20-year period, white secondary students were slightly more likely to have abused an illegal substance within a month than a black student, yet black youths were arrested at twice the rate. Although black Americans make up only 12.7 percent of the U.S. population, they make up 48.2 percent of adults in federal, state, or local prisons and jails.

All Americans accused of a crime have an absolute right to an attorney, but the quality of that defense is inconsistent at best. More than 70 percent of American public defenders’ offices reported extreme or very challenging funding issues in 2012. On average, each public defender handled more than one new case for every day of the year at a rate of $414.55 per case. Given that the poverty rate for both African-Americans and Latinos is about 25 percent compared with 9 percent for whites, many more minorities are affected by this overburdened system.

If convicted, Supreme Court decisions that have made an “inadequate defense” argument nearly impossible to win on appeal only further weaken efforts that advocates make for increasing funding for public defenders. Courts have upheld convictions even when defense counsels have slept during trials, used cocaine and heroin throughout trials, and admitted they had not been prepared on the facts or law of the case.

These “dots” that have stirred outrage connect easily into an education system that falls far short of its promise for equality and justice. As the Alliance for School Choice recently noted, 75 percent of state prison inmates are high school dropouts. This failure feeds the criminal justice system.

We are making slow progress to increase parental choice, but most students remain assigned to schools via ZIP code.

December 22, 2014 1 comment

Achievement Gap Blog Administration Parental Choice School Choice

Howard Fuller: More parental choice, more hope for black children

Ron Matus December 27, 2013

Ron Matus

Editor’s note: Dr. Howard Fuller is board chair of the Black Alliance for Educational Options. This is the fourth post in our #schoolchoiceWISH series.

Dr. Fuller

My parental school choice wish this year is to see substantive and real improvements in the life chances of all of our children, particularly those who come from low-income and working-class Black families in America.

For them, the realization of the promise of the American dream remains largely elusive. The crushing impact of poverty with all of its manifestations is the primary reason they face huge odds in their quest for a better life. For them, the only chance they have to improve their individual lives is to have access to a quality education. Yet, in America today, 42 percent of black students attend schools that are under-resourced and performing poorly. Forty-three percent of African-American students will not graduate from high school on time with a regular diploma.

These horrific data will not get better without empowering parents to be able to choose better options for their children. Yet, opponents of parent choice and other transformational education reform initiatives continue to place one obstacle after another in the path of parents seeking the power to choose the best educational environment for their children and/or to fundamentally change some of the systems that purport to educate their children. While cloaking their arguments against these reform efforts in the rhetoric of protecting democracy, ensuring equity, and supporting social justice, they are in fact this generation’s protectors of the status quo. Many of them were at one time opponents of the bureaucracy that now stands in the way of fundamental change, and fighters to empower the people. Now, they ARE the bureaucracy and no longer interested in giving power to the people!!

Throughout history, black people have waged a continuing struggle to educate themselves and their children. Time and again, black people have been in a position where others have had the power to make fundamental decisions about the education of their children. While those in power have employed very different means, the net result has left low-income and working-class African-Americans with fewer high-quality educational options.

December 27, 2013 0 comment

School Choice Tax Credit Scholarships Vouchers

Scholarship student & dad overcome struggles, graduate together

Lisa A. Davis September 18, 2013

Lisa A. Davis

Demonte Thomas and his father, Mario, at graduation.

On graduation day 2013 for Franklin Academy in Tallahassee, the sanctuary at Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church was packed with 1,500 guests who came to support the small private school’s 24 graduates.

But there were two students who brought the guests to their feet.

School Principal and Founder Margaret Franklin told the crowd, she had never done this before, and then called Demonte Thomas, 18, and his father, Mario, 40, to walk together down the aisle to receive their diplomas.

“As they marched down together it was just awesome,” recalled Franklin. “The crowd stood up and they were just roaring.”

It was a day for Mario that was a long time coming, and one that almost didn’t come for Demonte.

By 11^th grade, Demonte was failing at his neighborhood school, which led his parents to secure a Step Up For Students Scholarship for him to attend Franklin Academy, where his brother was already attending and thriving. (The tax credit scholarships are sometimes called private school vouchers; they’re administered by Step Up, which co-hosts this blog.) But Demonte was still not committed to his future, and when his father tried to give him advice, he’d brush it off.

Mario was terrified his son would end up on the street where as a younger man he spent many years as a member of a local gang, and survived being shot twice before realizing he had to change his ways or end up dead.

Mario looked to the school for help with his son, and Principal Franklin reached out to Demonte regularly, but her words didn’t seem to be getting through.

“Demonte came in as a child not really respecting his father,” she said. “He kept saying he (his father) didn’t even have a diploma.”

And that was all about to change.

September 18, 2013 0 comment

Achievement Gap Know Your History Progressives and ed reform School Choice

The unrealized dream of educational justice

Special to redefinED August 29, 2013

Special to redefinED

Gant

Editor’s note: This is the fourth and final post in our series commemorating the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Dr. Vernard Gant is director of Urban School Services with the Association of Christian Schools International.

by Vernard T. Grant

As the nation marks the 50^th anniversary of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, speculation abounds as to what the content of that speech would be if delivered today. It is noteworthy that in all of his speeches and writings, Dr. King had little to say about education beyond segregated schools and low performance by black students. He apparently thought that once the racial barriers of discrimination and social injustices were removed, educational disparities would self-correct. It would not be much of a stretch to suggest he would be appalled to discover that according to the latest NAEP report, black children in 2011 are still not performing in reading at the level of white children in 1970 (just two years after his death).

Here’s my take on what his reaction would be, a slight variation on the words from his speech: It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro [children] a bad check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” But we refuse to believe that the bank of [educational] justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of [educational] opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check — a check that will give us upon demand the riches of [educational] freedom and the security of [educational] justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. [Brackets mine]

Just as in the days of the civil rights movement, a grave injustice is transpiring today that is adversely and profoundly impacting its victims. A quality education, essential for cashing the promissory note that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, is being systematically denied families that do not have the economic means to secure one for their children.

A quality education is a purchased commodity. It depends on the financial wherewithal of individual families. It can be purchased either by paying tuition to private schools, or by paying higher mortgages and property taxes in neighborhoods with high-performing public schools. Parents who have low and moderate incomes simply do not possess the financial means to secure such an education for their children. They are bound to accept what is offered in schools assigned on the basis of where they live. They have no choice and no freedom in their children’s education. To compound matters, they are often told, from the public’s standpoint, that they should never have a choice because if they did, it would financially cripple the public school system. Translation: the important thing is not the best interest or well-being of the child, but the best interest and well-being of the system.

To add insult to injury, parents are told this by opponents of school choice and educational justice, all of whom exercise choice in where their children go to school. As a general rule, people of means naturally send their children to schools that effectively educate them. No caring parent (no matter how dedicated to a cause) would put their child in a school and sacrifice his or her education on an altar they know would fail their child. The tragedy is in the hypocrisy; what these individuals practice personally (school choice for their own children), they oppose politically for other folks’ children. They act in the best interest of their children, but insist the children of less economically advantaged families remain bound to a system that does not benefit them but rather benefits from them.

What is needed today and what Dr. King would call for is educational justice.

August 29, 2013 0 comment

Achievement Gap Parent Empowerment Progressives and ed reform School Choice

Parental choice would honor the Dream

Peter H. Hanley August 28, 2013

Peter H. Hanley

Hanley

Editor’s note: This is the third post in our series commemorating the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s Dream speech.

It was January 18^th, the Saturday of the MLK weekend in 1997, when I printed out the “I Have a Dream” speech. I’m not completely sure why, except that I was transitioning in my life from international business to education reform. The powerful language and ideas King conveyed, especially the notion that we had defaulted on our promissory note, captured me then and have stayed with me. The speech has been in my briefcase ever since. Multiple times each year, I pull it out when I need to refresh my memory as to why I remain engaged in what is often such an arduous struggle.

By now, I hope, people are familiar with the dismal stats. Our schools remain mostly separate and unequal. Schools that enroll 90 percent or more non-white students spend $733 less per pupil per year than schools that enroll 90 percent or more white students. That’s enough to pay the salary of 12 additional new teachers or nine veteran teachers in an average high-minority school with 600 students. Almost 40 percent of black and Hispanic students attend those high minority schools, whereas the average white student is in a school that’s 77 percent white. Whites now constitute only 52 percent of K-12 demographics.

Meanwhile, only 19 percent of Hispanic 4^th graders and 16 percent of black 4^th graders scored proficient or above on the 2011 NAEP reading exam. About half of Hispanic and black students were “below basic,” the lowest category. Even our best students often leave the K-12 system unprepared, as best evidenced by a 60 percent remediation rate in the first year of college and large numbers of dropouts.

Although progress has been made, America remains in default on its promise of access to a high quality educational experience for all. In the words of Dr. King, we are addicted to the “tranquilizing drug of gradualism,” and mired in a “quicksand of racial (as well as class) injustice.” Powerful adult interest groups continue to benefit. That part is analogous to the civil rights struggle of the 50’s and 60’s, though thankfully so far without the snarling dogs, fire hoses and bullets. My frustration with the pace is that the vision of justice, of what is right and what is possible, is so clear. We see hundreds of charter schools, private schools and traditional public schools achieving at high levels with children of all classes and ethnicities. When we know better, as we do, we should do better. But mostly we do not.

Parental school choice alone is no panacea. Standards need to be raised; teacher recruitment, preparation, training, evaluation, and compensation systems dramatically restructured; and technology integrated to improve efficiency. But Dr. King would likely look askance at using school district attendance boundaries to corral families the way we do cattle, allowing them in and out only when it pleases the owner. This system is inherently unjust, immoral, and even evil when it condemns families to poor performing schools year after year, generation after generation. It forcibly segregates us from one another. Without choice, we de facto have Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate, but equal” that has never actually been equal. Often it destroys hope.

August 28, 2013 0 comment