Detroit misery….
One in three boys showing up for a summit here said they had to sell drugs to survive:
From the Detroit Free Press:
November 24, 2009
JEFF GERRITT
What the streets don’t teach
BY JEFF GERRITT
FREE PRESS EDITORIAL WRITER
One in three of the 225 teens at the Boys to Men Education Forum in downtown Detroit said they had to sell drugs to survive.
That’s one of the findings of a report summarizing the recent forum, organized by Vanguard Community Development Corporation, to find ways to keep African American males in school.
Many boys ages 13-17, meeting at Wayne County Community College with parents and community leaders, including Mayor Dave Bing, said they needed drug money for bus passes, food and other basic needs for them and their families.
Bishop Edgar L. Vann II told me this morning that he plans to continue the dialogue with a citywide youth rally, followed by smaller symposiums, early next year to combat male dropout rates in Detroit of nearly 80%.
Even McJobs are practically impossible to find in the hood, and much of the money flows through the underground economy.
People need to know this, and they need to hear it from the source. What does all this have to do with education? Plenty.
Crime, drugs, lack of jobs and violence can twist or break the human spirit.
Educating young people from disconnected urban neighborhoods must account for what happens outside the class.
Students who come to school hungry or traumatized, with basic needs unmet, must feel secure, respected and engaged before they can start learning what they’ll need to finish high school, enter two- or four-year colleges, and dodge the school-to-prison pipeline that has swallowed too many of our young urban males.
Asked why their peers stayed away from school, these teenage boys gave answers that might seem remote to people living just 20 miles to the north, but they are real.
Some couldn’t afford to eat. Others had absent or incarcerated parents, or lived in homes that couldn’t afford to pay for a bus ticket or electric bill. Others cited violence, drugs, gangs and negative peer pressure.
Most of the hundreds of prisoners I’ve talked to over the years, including my brother-in-law, came up in neighborhoods where jail, prison or probation was practically a norm, a rite of passage.
Vann said the shooting death of Jamar Pinkney Jr., 15, a sophomore at King High School, allegedly by his father, was a “stark reminder of the ever present need for us to connect with these young men and do what we can to make a difference.
“We all need to be validated,” he told me. ” Some of these young kids don’t know that anyone in authority cares about them.”
It’s not about excusing failure but understanding the disadvantages many young people carry to the metal detector at the school door. Nor should we forget that, despite the obstacles, many kids are succeeding in Detroit public schools like Frederick Douglass Academy and Catherine Ferguson Academy, with smaller class sizes, visionary principals and dedicated teachers who understand the culture and problems of their students.
Educators and policy makers need to start examining what works, right here in Detroit.
Most important, they need to start listening to these young people.
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November 25th, 2009 at 9:20 am
What is going on in Detroit is almost unbelievable. But I think this is the key paragraph: “Nor should we forget that, despite the obstacles, many kids are succeeding in Detroit public schools like Frederick Douglass Academy and Catherine Ferguson Academy, with smaller class sizes, visionary principals and dedicated teachers who understand the culture and problems of their students.” If these schools are so wonderful, they should be replicated, completely and immediately. Why even wait for the end of the school year? Do it now! As I’ve said before, abolish every Detroit public school and establish new schools in this model. Supposedly, Detroit would go from male dropout rates near 80% to 0% with 100% advancement to college. Sound unlikely? I think so, too. But if these academies cannot be replicated, for whatever reason (cherry picking of students, administrators, teachers, etc.), then the praise for them needs to be turned down. Their existence has to have a negative effect on the rest of the Detroit schools, as they are shoved in the face of every administrator and teacher in the ”regular” schools of Detroit, who are constantly told how awful they are. But instead of being able to get a little sympathy for having to deal with the student population cited in this article, they are simply told that since the Frederick Douglass Academy does so well, they are obviously all slackers. Solutions need to be developed in the real world for the majority of Detroit’s students, not just a cherry picked few. Which brings up Washington, D.C., where it is now true that a third of the students are in charter schools. I hope that a study will soon be revealed where we will see the effect of all those charters on the composite results of the Washington, D.C. schools.