The study expands on a previous, much-cited 2009 report that looked at Chicago charter schools--the vast majority of those in Illinois--as well as charters in another 16 states and found that the city’s charters performed better overall. Both reports are part of ongoing research on charter school effectiveness at CREDO, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, which plans to publish a full study covering 26 states next week. (The reports can be found at CREDO’s website.)

The gains touted in the latest report, which covers 2008 through 2012, are statistically significant in research terms, albeit modest in the real world. On average, Illinois elementary charter school students gained two additional weeks of learning in reading and one additional month of learning in math over the course of the school year, according to the study. And only about one in five charters performed significantly better in reading than traditional schools.

Those findings might not be striking, especially to charter critics. Andrew Broy of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools acknowledges that. “One thing revealed by this report is that we don’t have enough high-performing schools of any type in Chicago," he says. "We view charters much more as part of the solution [than critics do]. But that doesn’t hide the fact that we all have to do better by our students.”

Chicago’s older charter schools drove much of the improvement. Newer charters have a positive effect, but less than in the 2009 study, according to Dev Davis, research manager at CREDO. However, the new report does not provide breakdowns for the two groups.

The study used the same methodology as the 2009 report, comparing reading and math scores for Illinois elementary charter school students, in grades 3 through 8, with a “virtual twin”--a demographically similar student from a traditional district-run school that the charter student would have attended. (The report included 65 charter campuses and 18,689 students.)

Other findings:

-- In reading, 21 percent of charters performed worse than traditional schools, while 20 percent did better and 59 percent showed no difference. In math, 21 percent of charters did worse, 37 percent performed better and 42 percent showed no difference.

-- Black and Hispanic students continued to lag behind white students in reading, and received “no significant benefit or loss from charter school attendance” compared to students in traditional schools

-- Latinos in charter schools made far more significant gains in math than in traditional schools, even when compared to white students, effectively erasing the achievement gap in the subject.

-- Low-income charter students made slightly more gains in reading than low-income students in traditional schools, but had similar performance in math.

“Clearly, there is room to grow,” says Broy. “We have substantial achievement gaps, especially with black students, poor students. The same challenges as faced by public schools are faced by charters.”

The study also found that students in their second and third years at a charter performed better than new, first-year charter students. English-language learners in charter and traditional schools had similar performance.

The study found evidence that charter students were more likely to hold students back, and retained students made stronger gains in charters than in traditional schools. Still, the study says that the difference can’t be considered significant, since retained students are a small group whose academic performance varied widely.

 So it should be no surprise that our failure to keep up with the rest of the world on matters of education poses dire consequences for our economy and national prestige.

Here are some important statistics: the U.S. ranks 14^th in global college completion and by 2020, an estimated two-thirds of all jobs will require an education beyond high school.

We have seen a troubling trend for low-income and minority students — students who, in the past, have been left to fend for themselves.  This is particularly true for Latinos — who represent the fastest-growing, youngest demographic in the country. Thousands of Latino students, who have with the smarts and skills to succeed in college, aren’t even applying.  Increasing degree attainment among this particular demographic is essential, considering our nation’s goal to re-establish our place as the world’s leader with the highest proportion of college graduates by 2020.  As the U.S. strives for global competitiveness, training a new generation of workers is increasingly critical.

As a young man who grew up on the streets of the South Side of Chicago and today is a successful businessman, I have a particular appreciation for the importance of a well-educated, diverse workforce. I have seen the devastating effects of repeated cycles of poverty on those who can’t break it.  That’s why I feel so strongly that all students who are academically prepared for the intellectual demands of college — no matter their location, background or socioeconomic status — have a right to fulfill their potential.

I have known many Latino students, in particular, who have the academic potential to succeed in college but lack role models and resources. They need support and guidance. They need parents, teachers and schools that foster a college-going culture in the earliest grades.

If you work on behalf of students or feel your expertise could help to support traditionally underserved students, I strongly recommend that you attend “Prepárate™: Educating Latinos for the Future of America” from May 1 to 2, 2013 at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago. Hosted by the College Board, the conference will convene the voices and best practices of some of America’s most respected educators and advocates to improve academic success and opportunity for Latino students.  Teachers, counselors and administrators from high schools and colleges will address critical issues within Latino education and focus on successful strategies that include: creating opportunities for students to experience challenging high school course work that prepares them for college; strengthening students in math and science for STEM careers; and ensuring high school graduation and improving timely college graduation rates.  To register and for more information, please visit http://preparate.collegeboard.org.

We face, in no uncertain terms, a crisis that threatens our nation’s long-term health and prosperity; America’s success in the 20th century was achieved not only through the might of our arms but the dexterity of our minds.

It is our responsibility as parents, elected officials, administrators and business leaders to support each and every one of our students. We must be advocates and we must keep pushing our students to achieve greatness above and beyond even their own expectations. If we fail, our failure will become theirs. If we succeed, our success will echo for generations.

Martin Cabrera, Jr.

Founder, CEO

Cabrera Capital Markets

This ethos, which has shaped the American experience from the inception of our nation, explains why we’ve devoted so much time, attention and energy to public education over the last 40 years.  After all, an individual’s chances of gaining employment—especially high wage, good benefit employment—are more closely correlated with educational attainment now than ever before.  So it’s no surprise polling data consistently shows Americans believe every child should receive a good public education. 

Yet despite this broadly shared belief, America’s public education system fails to provide each child with a meaningful educational opportunity.  While there are many reasons for this failure, one core barrier stands out: the way our nation funds schools.  It is this very issue that motivated Congressmen Mike Honda of California and Chaka Fattah of Pennsylvania, to work with the Obama Administration and create the Equity and Excellence Commission under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Education.  I had the distinct honor of serving on this Commission from its inception on February 2, 2011, through issuance of our final report “For Each and Every Child” two years later, on February 2, 2013.

The commission’s charter challenged us to take the education funding issue head on, and in meaningful new ways. For instance, while states currently have the primary obligation to fund schools, the commission was charged with delineating “how the federal government can increase educational opportunity by improving school funding equity.”  In addition to rethinking the federal role, the commission was tasked with making “recommendations for restructuring school finance systems to achieve equity in the distribution of educational resources and further student performance, especially for students at the lower end of the achievement gap.” 

This meant the commission had to identify: (1) what educational resources and other services are needed to provide a meaningful educational opportunity to all children, with a particular focus on children who have traditionally struggled to achieve academically, like those who live in poverty or are English language learners; and (2) how to pay for it.  This focus on ensuring adequate capacity to educate at-risk children was challenging, but also the absolute right thing to do.

That’s because public education in America is “broken” not because it fails to educate all children well, but because it is under-resourced to provide every child—regardless of race, ethnicity or income class—with a quality education.  Indeed, in most communities where resources are abundant and available, the public education delivered is competitive with the best performing systems in the world.

The Program for International Student Assessment, known as PISA, measures how students in different Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries stack up in reading, math, and science. When the 2009 scores were released last year, the overall U.S. tally of 500 was middling.  But that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Poverty, unequal resources 

A study that divided U.S. schools into cohorts based on poverty found that non-poor U.S. children performed quite well. Indeed, American schools with less than 10 percent of students living in poverty scored 551 on the PISA, best in the world for nations with a similar poverty profile, with Finland coming in second at 536. American schools with poverty levels between 10 percent and 24.9 percent also placed first when measured against nations with similar poverty profiles. In fact, PISA scores of American schoolchildren did not start plummeting until poverty concentrations climbed to significant levels.  

This puts the real problem in stark relief: America isn’t broadly failing to educate all children, but it is failing poor and low-income children.  And a big reason for that is resources—or the lack thereof.  See, we know quite a bit about the educational practices and resources that have been proven to enhance student achievement over time.  We just don’t have a national finance system that can cover the cost of providing them in poor and low-income communities.  Too often, a state’s funding of public education is tied to what decision-makers believe that state’s fiscal system can afford, rather than the actual cost of educating each child.  This encourages an over-reliance on local property taxes to fund schools, which in turn results in significant, meaningful disparities in the resources available among wealthy, middle-income and poor communities. 

The net result: American children receive qualitatively different educations simply based on the state in which they were born, the district in which they are enrolled, and the school to which they are assigned.

To address this clear inequity, our commission issued numerous recommendations for how state governments should determine what it will take to provide each child with a meaningful education, including how to pay for it in a fair, sustainable way.  But we didn’t stop there.  We also recommended that the federal government take a substantially greater role in covering the cost of educating our nation’s at-risk students.  This is especially important given the widely varying fiscal capacities and demographics of the 50 states. 

It was incredibly difficult reaching consensus on these contentious issues.  Indeed, the very composition of the commission itself made it doubtful that any agreement on school funding equity could be reached.  Not only were a broad array of world-views represented, the commission included members who literally were on opposing sides in education funding lawsuits.  Yet despite all that, we voted unanimously to endorse the final recommendations contained in the report, and with good reason. 

See, it shouldn’t matter if a child is born in Mississippi, Connecticut, Illinois or California. That child is an American and our entire nation has the responsibility to ensure he or she receives a high-quality education.

Ralph Martire is the executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability and served as a commissioner on the U. S. Department of Education’s Equity and Excellence Commission.

The following weekend, my father took me to the Museum of Natural History and showed me a map and then explained the realities of Columbus’ journey.  His story stood in stark contrast to the song my teacher had us singing in class with the lyrics, “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” My father taught me that Columbus’ journey proved disastrous for the Taino people.

Once the lie was revealed, my 5-year-old mind told me teachers were no longer to be trusted.  From then on, I was labeled a “problem.”

As a child, my family supported my questioning of authority despite how much I got in trouble for it. While no one in my immediate family was an activist or organizer, they always conveyed to me their sense of justice. In their view, if something wasn’t right, it was the duty and responsibility of the person experiencing the injustice to address the issue head-on. As long as I was respectful in the process, they approved of me speaking my mind.

Unfortunately, the school I attended didn’t adhere to such beliefs.  My sense of justice led to a career of trips to the office, talking back to teachers, and all sorts of disciplinary infractions. I became the one in class who “didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut.”

In the end, these experiences influenced my decision to become an educator. Working with schools over the last 18 years, teachers and administrators often approach me about their black male “problem.”  As soon as I hear black male students referred to this way, I cringe.

In my 37 years of life, I’ve heard many claim they know how to solve the “problem” of being an African-American male, but few have attempted to get to know me—or other black males—personally, or to address systematically our issues and concerns.

Few have been bold enough to say that there was never a problem with me. The problem, rather, is society and the decisions I made when I didn’t understand the fallacy of conventional social perspectives on black males. Someone had to explain to me that when I had a raging fit because I felt mistreated, I was doing exactly what society expected me to do, what society is afraid I will do. In fact, when I physically reacted to unfair treatment, people in positions of power were provided greater leverage in rationalizing their decision to remove me from school.

Someone had to explain to me that teachers would respond more positively to me if, when I spoke up for myself, I organized my thoughts and actions to focus on changing my condition. For me, this happened in 4th grade when the teacher, Ms. Lester, told me that education is more than what happens in the classroom.  To her, education was the sum total of the decisions I made in life to change my condition and the conscious decision to work collectively with others to change conditions in my community. These lessons stuck with me. Yet, for many black males, this may never happen.

There are some African-American male graduates of Chicago’s public schools who are able to make it through school relatively unscathed.  Some move on to prominent positions in society and prove to be a success. Yet those achievements are individual. Those victories are reached in spite of the resources provided by Chicago Public Schools. 

My concern is for the young African-American men who are never given a chance. These are the young people who are asked to learn under severely adverse conditions. In 2009, some schools still are without books in their libraries. Students are not allowed to take books home because educators fear loss or theft. Mobility is an issue for students whose homes or schools were demolished to make way for high-priced housing that their families cannot afford. 

Statistics comparing the number of African-American males in schools to those in prison are harrowing.  Almost 75 percent of African-American males in state, local or federal prison systems are illiterate.  Eighty percent have not graduated high school. To effect lasting change for the benefit of black male students, we need to ask these questions:

• Who is going to address the issues and concerns of African-American males on a systemic and personal level? 
• More importantly, what are we doing to support their efforts?

We cannot make the mistake of treating African-American males as problems. Instead, we must be thoughtful in listening to their individual concerns and working with their families to address their specific situations. It is a lot of work, but our black male students are worth it.

Today, every time I see a young black male in the principal’s office, I reach out through eye contact and often say, “I know what you’re going through. Be strong.”  To this day, we still don’t recognize their strengths.

David Stovall is an  associate professor of Educational Policy Studies/College of Education and African-American Studies/College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Preschool quality can influence students’ learning and ultimately,their readiness for kindergarten. But some of the children who needhigh-quality preschool the most are not always getting it, according to a Catalyst analysis ofdata from the Classroom Assessment Scoring System.

TheCLASS tool, used last year in a wide-scale project to rate theinteractions between Chicago teachers and preschool students, is basedon research that has found that students do better in classrooms whereteachers are emotionally supportive, create an organized and structuredenvironment, and provide high-level instruction.

Disadvantaged students placed in highly-rated classrooms, research has shown, can actually catch up to their peers.

Observers using the CLASS tool found that CPS classrooms were generally above average compared to other programs nationwide.

However,a Catalyst Chicago analysis of data from the Chicago Department ofFamily and Support Services shows that classrooms in schools with highstudent mobility, and in schools where fewer students met statestandards on the 2010 ISAT, were the most likely to rank in the bottomquartile of all preschools that were rated. (The department iscoordinating CLASS and providing training to teachers.)

Schools where more than 90 percent of students areAfrican-American, and with mobility rates of 30 percent or higher, wereless likely to earn high scores in every area of the scale.

Researchers have found disparities in preschool classroom quality elsewhere in the country.

“Essentially,you tend to find lower-quality preschool programs in centers that areexposed to higher levels of risk or stress, and in communities that areexperiencing higher levels of stress,” says Ginny Vitiello, researchand evaluation director at TeachStone, the company that distributes theCLASS tool.

Preschools where a majority of children are living below the poverty line, and are underfunded or
financially stressed, also tend to be lower-quality, Vitiello says.

“Partof it is access to resources within the classroom, part of it can tiein to teacher compensation and pay,” she says. “Parent factors can playinto it--how engaged is the community in supporting the work thepreschool is doing?”

Vanessa Rich, deputy commissioner of children’sservices for DFSS, said in an email that her department has notanalyzed the data for possible disparities and noted that the city iscollecting the data only to guide teacher training.

The teachers whose classrooms had the lowest ratingswill receive intensive support and coaching through theMyTeachingPartner program, which has been shown to improve classroomquality in randomized control studies. One study also showed thatstudents whose teachers took part in the program had improved languageand literacy skills, and fewer behavior problems.

Here is how the classrooms scored:

NOTES:Classrooms were observed between October 2010 and March 2011. Resultsare from the 103 assessed preschool programs in CPS elementary schoolsand may not be statistically significant.

High mobility is 30 percent or more; low mobility is 20percent or lower. High test score schools are those with compositeaverages above 60 percent; low test score schools are those withcomposite averages below 60 percent.

SOURCE: Catalyst Chicago analysis of CLASS data fromthe Chicago Department of Family and Support Services and CPS data onschool demographics.

“The dropout rate for African-American males is really shocking,” said Gary J. Miron, a professor of evaluation, measurement, and research at Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo, and the lead researcher for the study. “KIPP is doing a great job of educating students who persist, but not all who come.”

With 99 charter schools across the country, most of which serve grades 5 to 8, the Knowledge Is Power Program network has built a national reputation for success in enabling low-income minority students to do well academically. And some studies show that KIPP charter schools have succeeded in significantly narrowing race-based and income-based achievement gaps between students over time. While not disputing that track record, the new study attempts to probe some of the more unexplored factors that might play into KIPP’s success.

It concludes, for instance, that KIPP schools are considerably better funded on a per-pupil basis than their surrounding school districts. The KIPP schools received, on average, $18,500 per pupil in 2007-08, about $6,500 more per student than the average for other schools in the same districts, according to the researchers’ analysis of federal 990 tax forms filed by schools reporting both public and private sources of funding. The study reports that nearly $5,800 of that per-pupil amount is private donations and grants.

Mr. Miron said the “$6,500 cost advantage” raises questions about the sustainability of the KIPP model.

The study also faults KIPP for not serving more students who are still learning English or who have disabilities.

“The limited range of students that KIPP serves, its inability to serve all students who enter, and its dependence on local traditional public schools to receive and serve the droves of students who leave, all speak loudly to the limitations of this model,” the report says.

Luis A. Huerta, an associate professor of public policy and education at Teachers College, praised the study for exploring indicators of KIPP’s operations other than student achievement, which, while important, doesn’t tell the whole story, he said.

“If we can start speaking about these more nuanced layers, and move beyond this discussion of student achievement, we tend to get a real picture,” he said. “Here we have schools receiving upwards to $6,000 or more than traditional schools, and that’s not even accounting for the fact they have fewer services than traditional schools, yet the gains they’ve shown in student achievement are quite modest.” Mr. Huerta is a faculty associate of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, which had a hand in distributing the study but did not take part in the research.

The study came in for criticism from KIPP officials, as well as from two other researchers not involved in it. They questioned its methodology and said that while Mr. Miron is asking the right questions about KIPP schools, he hasn’t provided adequate evidence to answer them.

“We see this report as having significant shortcomings in the methodologies and reject the core conclusions the report is making,” said Steve Mancini, the public-affairs director for the San Francisco-based KIPP network, which was started in 1994.
Methods Differ

The study by the Western Michigan researchers used the federal Common Core of Data as its primary source. The researchers were able to obtain data from 2005-06 to 2008-09 for 60 KIPP schools across the country. The KIPP schools were compared with averages for other, more-traditional schools in the same districts. Besides the 990 forms, the researchers drew financial data on KIPP schools from the same federal database, which had financial data for 25 of those schools.

Robin Lake, the associate director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, at the University of Washington in Seattle, was one of the scholars who questioned the study led by Mr. Miron.

“It seems he’s trying to explain away the KIPP effect rather than explain it,” she said. “More work needs to be done to get real answers.”

“The main point to make is the kind of data they are looking at is quite different from the kind of data we’ve been looking at,” said Brian P. Gill, a senior fellow for the Princeton, N.J.-based Mathematica Policy Research and a co-author of a comprehensive study of 22 KIPP middle schools released last June. ("KIPP Middle Schools Boost Learning Gains, Study Says," July 14, 2010.) That study was commissioned by KIPP.

Mr. Gill said that Mathematica based its conclusions, including a finding that attrition of students from KIPP schools is about the same as from neighboring regular public schools, on data from individual students, not on aggregate data sets, as Mr. Miron’s study has done.

The study led by Mr. Miron found that approximately 15 percent of students disappear each year from the KIPP grade cohorts, compared with 3 percent per year in each grade in the local traditional school districts. Mr. Miron said that finding doesn’t contradict the finding by Mathematica that attrition rates are comparable between KIPP schools and local district schools on average, because his research team compared only KIPP “districts”—the cluster of KIPP schools in a particular district—and their surrounding local traditional school districts as a whole, not individual schools with schools.

Mr. Mancini, Ms. Lake, and Mr. Gill share the view that the comparison groups used in the Western Michigan study don’t provide reliable information about student attrition. It’s not appropriate, they contend, to make conclusions about attrition by comparing the proportion of students who leave a KIPP district with the proportion of students who leave the entire surrounding school district, which might have hundreds of schools.

“You want apples-to-apples comparisons. This is like apples to watermelons,” said Ms. Lake.

Mr. Miron said that the Mathematica approach to determining student attrition is “superior” to his. But his study explores an issue that he said Mathematica hadn’t addressed: How does the fact that KIPP schools tend not to replace students that leave, particularly in the upper grades, affect attrition?

“The low-performing students are leaving KIPP schools, but they are still in the public school sector,” Mr. Miron said.

Mr. Gill said Mr. Miron’s study doesn’t account for how grade retention, a hallmark of the KIPP model, may account for some of the shrinkage in cohorts of students moving from 6th to 8th grade.

He said Mr. Miron is on target, though, to ask questions about how KIPP replaces students in its schools. Mathematica has gathered data on that point that it will present this month in New Orleans at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Mr. Gill said.
Praise for KIPP

The Western Michigan study doesn’t challenge KIPP’s positive student outcomes. It says that the nonprofit network’s claims that its schools improve students’ test scores at a faster rate than regular public schools are backed by “rigorous and well-documented studies,” such as Mathematica’s.

Mr. Miron praises KIPP charter schools for how they have prepared and mentored principals and started new conversations in education circles about the benefits of extended instruction for students from low-income families. The KIPP school day is typically nine hours long, as much as a third longer than for the school day in surrounding school districts.

The new study contains at least one finding that echoes what the Mathematica study concluded: KIPP schools are less likely than local regular public schools to enroll English-language learners or students with disabilities—even though Mr. Miron’s data suggest the KIPP schools may have more financial resources to do the job.

But Mike Wright, who oversees KIPP’s network growth and sustainability, characterized the report’s findings on the financing of KIPP’s schools as misleading.

He focused on the finding that KIPP schools receive nearly $5,800 more per pupil from private donations than do their surrounding school districts. One problem, Mr. Wright said, is that the finding is based on a sample of 11 KIPP districts that isn’t representative of all KIPP schools. (Mr. Miron said he used those 11 KIPP districts because they were the only ones that reported public revenues in the federal data set researched for the study.)

Also, Mr. Wright said of the study’s authors, “they are including everything under the kitchen sink, whether starting a school from scratch or investing in facilities” in the figure for private per-pupil funding. He contends it’s a “misrepresentation” to imply that KIPP schools are overflowing with resources, when, unlike regular public schools, they are often left on their own to pay for buildings.

Lastly, Mr. Wright said, one KIPP school district skewed the finding for private revenues for the sample by mistakenly reporting that the bulk of its $8.1 million in revenue for 2007-08 was mostly from private sources, when it was actually from public sources.

Mr. Wright contends that the average funding advantage from private sources for KIPP schools in comparison with their local school districts is closer to $2,500 per pupil.

Ms. Lake said she has found in her own research on charter school financing that it’s hard to make meaningful conclusions based on the 990 tax forms because of ambiguities over what’s behind the numbers in the categories reported.

Mr. Huerta, however, said Mr. Miron’s methodology is strong, even though there are “complications in trying to dig out some of this information.” He added Mr. Miron is very clear in reporting his study’s limitations.

Republished with permission from Education Week. Copyright © 2011 Editorial Projects in Education, Inc. For more information, visit www.edweek.org.

 Coretta Scott King Book Award winners
Established in 1969, the award honors African American authors and illustrators whose works embody the themes of peace and brotherhood.

Cooperative Children’s Book Center
The center, based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, collects information about children’s literature published by and for people of color.

The Brown Bookshelf
This blog promotes book recommendations for young readers and interviews with African American writers and illustrators.

“I have thought about writing a book myself because it’s so important for our students to get engaged,” says Coke, whose 14-year career as a Chicago Public Schools teacher includes 3rd and 4th grades and middle-school science.

In libraries and bookstores, African-American boys are missing, both as characters in books and as readers. The two absences are related and feed off each other, according to literacy experts: If young African-American males don’t see themselves in books, they aren’t inclined to become readers, and if publishers perceive that black boys don’t read, they won’t approve books that might interest them.

“For publishers, it’s a business. And they’re publishing for how they feel the market is defined,” says Kathleen Horning, director of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which studies and compiles data about books for kids. 

Of the 5,000 children’s books published every year, no more than 5 percent are written by or about blacks, Asians, Latinos or Native Americans, Horning says.  Last year, the center catalogued 172 picture books, novels and nonfiction books published that were about Africans or African-Americans.  Of those, 83 were written or illustrated by blacks.

Horning says that despite the growing diversity in classrooms, there hasn’t been much change in the industry, which has few editors of color. “Children just are not seeing themselves in children’s books,” Horning says.

Publishers are loathe to talk publicly about whether they ignore black readers. However, last month, one major publisher was widely accused of racial insensitivity. Bloomsbury Children’s Books put a photo of a white girl with long, straight hair on the cover of a teen novel about an African-American girl with short hair.

The book’s author, Justine Larbalestier, says the cover decision was made over her objections.  Publishers, she says, have outdated notions of race and think books seen as “black” won’t sell. “The publishing industry still doesn’t seem to get it,” Larbalestier, who is white, wrote on her blog. “...I hope it [the controversy] gets every publishing house thinking about how incredibly important representation is and that they are in a position to break down these assumptions.”

In early August, Bloomsbury decided to change the “Liar” book jacket to feature an African-American teen when the novel is released in October. The company said in a statement that it regretted that its original cover had been “interpreted by some as a calculated decision to mask the character’s ethnicity.”

Many librarians and teachers say that publishing more books for African Americans isn’t merely a matter of political correctness. It’s crucial to lowering the achievement gap.

Reading test scores show that blacks significantly lag behind whites. Among 4th-graders, the gap was 27 points; it was 26 points for 8th-graders, according to 2007 data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. On average, black boys scored 28 points behind their white counterparts, while the gap between white girls and black girls in the 4th grade was 25 points.

Deborah Taylor, a leader in several national children’s book organizations, says that most black children who are first learning how to read have no problem finding engaging material. Many picture books appeal to all kids because they feature animals as main characters. Others recount folk tales from different cultures.

The challenge comes when the kids are ready to move on to books for older readers, Taylor says. That’s when their interest can lag—and there’s a dearth of books with characters and storylines with which they can relate. Black girls don’t face the same level of frustration in finding engaging books as do black boys, since the overwhelming majority of children’s books feature female characters and are written by women.

“We’re losing African-American boys at the 3rd grade,” says Taylor, a Baltimore librarian who chairs the Coretta Scott King Book Awards Committee, which honors notable children’s books by black authors or illustrators. “That’s the age where you’ve been taught how to read, but the critical piece is reading practice. Having books that kids will just want to keep reading every night—that’s where kids can become fluent readers.”

Alfred Tatum, an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago whose research focuses on reading and black males, has argued that even the best teaching methods in the world will fail to reach students if they aren’t paired with interesting texts.

In one of his studies, Tatum worked with a 16-year-old black male student from Chicago’s West Side who had been held back three times because he had failed to meet the minimum reading score for promotion to high school.  The student told Tatum that he had never finished a book. That changed when Tatum gave him the book, “Yo, Little Brother...: Basic Rules of Survival for Young African-American Males.” The teen stayed up all night to finish it.
Author Greg Neri says that he thinks of how to inspire such youths when working on his books. In his award-winning “Chess Rumble,” a middle-schooler learns to take his anger and frustration from the streets to the chess board.  A forthcoming book by Neri is a graphic novel about Robert “Yummy” Sandifer, the 11-year-old Chicago gang member whose murder by older gang members made national news in 1994. Both are published by New York-based Lee & Low Books, which specializes in multicultural children’s literature.

Neri says that in elementary school, he was a reluctant reader until he discovered the “Phantom Tollbooth,” an adventure novel, and books about urban life written by Walter Dean Myers.  “It’s all about finding your book,” says Neri, whose ethnic background is a mix of Creole, Mexican and Filipino. “It’s a book that surprises you and changes your concept about what a book can be and what a book can do.”

Neri, who lives in Tampa, was inspired to write young adult books when he attended a reading festival. A teacher in the audience begged a panel of authors to write for African-American boys.     “I find it a great niche to be in,” says Neri, who previously taught animation and storytelling to inner-city teens. “I’ve found a tremendous response from teachers and librarians and parents. It’s become this mission for me.”

But until more writers and publishers see books that appeal to black youngsters as both a mission and a market, teachers have to be persistent and creative.

Stacy Stewart, who teaches 6th grade at Adam Clayton Powell Academy, says she’s passed out sports magazines and newspaper articles to her student. Graphic novels are popular, as are audio books. The motivational book, “Letters to a Young Brother,” by actor Hill Harper, was a hit with boys as well as girls.

Kids will read, Stewart says, “as long as you give them something that sparks their interest. Otherwise, they’re not going to see reading as anything more than a classroom assignment. As long as the content is appropriate, I don’t care what they read.”

Phuong Ly is a Chicago-based freelance writer.

Taking to the blackboard, Stinson made three columns and labeled them—Red Apple, Green Apple and Rotten Apple. Then he asked the young men to name characteristics typically associated with each type of apple.

Quickly it became clear where Stinson was going. He wanted the young men to associate the qualities they prized in red apples—solid, desirable, fully developed—with the people they chose to spend time with, whether in school or out.  Conversely, he wanted them to see the perils of rotten apples—people who are a bad influence and would steer them wrong, and should be avoided at all costs.

Stinson got the young men’s attention. And they got his lesson. His hope now is that the lesson stays with them over the summer and beyond.

Stinson’s session took place as part of Oak Park District 97’s Leadership Academy, which draws on the experiences and insights of male mentors to help close the performance gap between African-American male students and their peers in the district, which includes Julian and Brooks middle schools. The goal is to raise achievement, foster leadership skills and decrease behavioral incidents that might lead to suspension of black boys.

The Academy was launched in the 2008-2009 school year and despite some road bumps, the pilot year proved promising enough to spur the School Board to renew the program for a second year, with changes that officials hope will make the program more effective.

While Oak Park has a relatively diverse population and many black parents have moved there from Chicago to take advantage of high-performing schools, academic success for their children, for the most part, remains elusive. With a black student enrollment around 30 percent, the district has only six African American male teachers, and black parents and school staff often see this under-representation as one reason young black males have a harder time navigating the system. The Academy was designed to address that by providing black male mentors as role models that both parents and students could depend on.

District 97 includes Julian and Brooks middle schools; at both schools, about one in three students is African American.  A report completed in May showed that overall, Oak Park’s black and low-income elementary students start the school year at a much lower level of achievement and their improvement over the course of the year, while steady, is not sufficient to close the achievement gap.

 “We look at the ISAT (Illinois Standards Achievement Test), and African-American males are not doing as well,” says District 97 Superintendent Constance Collins, who is black. “When you look at behavioral information, we have African-American males disproportionately referred for service in special education [and] overrepresented in suspensions.”

The idea for the Academy took shape after a team of district educators learned about a successful program started several years ago in Kentucky’s Fayette County Public Schools called BMW, or Black Males Working.

Lynn Allen, District 97’s director of multicultural education, attended a conference of the National Council on Educating Black Children and heard retired educator Roszalyn Akins present her work on the BMW program. Allen came away convinced that students in Oak Park could benefit from something similar, especially if it emphasized mentoring. “We felt that our African-American men needed to be with other men as role models,” says Allen. She describes her program as one that “seeks to “educate, motivate and activate the potential for excellence that lies within every African American male.”

Akins’ program got results. “The number of African American males sent to the principal’s office (for misbehavior) was cut 55 percent in one school,” says Akins. “We’ve seen ACT scores go up, grades improve, [increased] self-confidence. And the discipline has really improved.”

Impressed with what Akins accomplished, Allen and Brooks Middle School teacher Lindsay Pietrzak and teaching assistant Don Robinson joined with a committee of parents, counselors, principals and social workers to write a proposal for a Leadership Academy similar to Akins’ program. The proposal included after-school meetings three days a week with participants and volunteer mentors who could help them with homework and life skills, says Robinson, who attended elementary and high school in Oak Park. Healthy snacks, field trips, workshops, community service and a mandatory family education and support component were included. Collins and the District 97 School Board agreed to fund the proposal for a pilot year.

Teachers, assistant principals and social workers referred students to the program (Except for one Latino student, all Academy participants have been African-American males.)

One hurdle was consistent participation. Julian 8th-grader Emmanuel Jenkins joined the Academy in early 2009, but stopped attending for a while. Eventually, however, he realized the benefits and returned. “It was a good thing,” he says. “It changed how I act, like [I’m] more mature.”

During sessions, mentors and students talked candidly about topics such as use of the “n-word,” wearing baggy pants, and handling anger, says Allen.  The students also read and discussed “Letters to a Young Brother,” a collection of essays and inspirational writing compiled by TV actor and Harvard Law School graduate Hill Harper.

 Emmanuel, an animated 14-year-old now on his way to high school, says the program has helped him reach out to younger kids “to keep them out of trouble.” Reminded of the apple analogy, he says he’ll now be able to resist peer pressure in high school and stay on the right track—that is, he’ll steer clear of rotten apples, as Stinson advised.

Another Julian 8th-grader, Zach Booth, who has a serious demeanor and an impressive vocabulary, says the program has taught him that leadership “is about always being a red apple. Leadership is about responsibility, respect, common sense and maturity.”

Zach’s passion for basketball and his dream of getting drafted into the NBA is emblematic of another hurdle that the program faced. Robinson, who is black and a former school athlete himself, notes that many of the young men have similar notions. “They feel they can all play basketball. That’s what they focus on,” Robinson says. “When basketball season came around, and they couldn’t try out because of their grades, that was a reality check. They all started to sit back and think.”

Now, after participating in the program, Zach has a different mindset. When he talks about his future, Zach says “education is key” and he has a backup plan to do “something in engineering. I like to build things.”

Robinson, Allen and Pietrzak all say they and other teachers saw improvements in the grades and attitudes of students who attended the Academy.  But one goal that did not materialize was substantial parent involvement.

Robinson spent after-school hours calling parents, inviting them to Academy events.  But last fall, after an article in a local newspaper seemed to imply the Academy was for students who get into trouble, parents called to complain, and some took their sons out of the program, saying they didn’t want their son involved in a program that labeled him negatively, Robinson says.

At the July 21 District 97 board meeting, Collins reviewed the pilot year and highlighted changes for the coming 2009-2010 school year. The program will limit the number of students it accepts in hopes of having a greater impact with the young men. Meetings will be held twice a week (to make it easier for students to attend regularly), and leaders will try to bring parents in earlier to lay out expectations, according to an end-of-year report, “Creating the Newest Model,” prepared for District 97 School Board members.

The program will be renamed The Brothers: Leadership Academy for Young Men, to reflect how the students see themselves. And the Academy will operate only at Brooks; Julian has other programs to benefit students, Pietrzak says.

(Overall, black students at Julian were more likely to meet or exceed standards on the ISAT reading test than black students at Brooks, according to the 2008 state report card.)
Dominican University in nearby River Forest will be brought in to serve as a partner to provide tutoring.

Collins, who is passionate about seeing the program succeed, says she will take a more active role with the Academy. This summer she met with the president of 100 Black Men, an organization committed to youth development, for help with expanding the program’s mentor base.

“We can’t just talk about the achievement gap and keep it in the background,” says Collins. “We have to be actively doing something about it. If we pilot something and we really believe in the reason for which it was started and we have not corrected it, there is still a need.”

Cassandra West is a freelance writer and former Chicago Tribune editor. She lives in Oak Park.

The Digital Youth Network, launched by the Urban Education Institute at the University of Chicago in 2005, aims to develop budding composers, filmmakers, record producers, game designers and other workers in tech-heavy, creative industries. The program primarily serves students in the university’s charter schools, where digital learning is part of the daily curriculum. But students from other schools attend the after-school and summer portion of the program, now expanding into the new library studio. (The network is supported by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s digital learning initiative.)

While both boys and girls participate, mentors like Michael Hawkins spend a lot of time working with the boys. Often, the young men are drawn in by a love of hip-hop and the prospect of creating their own music.

“A lot of times, people are surprised that African-Americans are doing digital media,” says Hawkins, a well-known spoken-word poet. “It’s like, ‘Wow, they’re using technology.’ Yeah, they are.”

Experts say the digital network and programs like it can help close the achievement gap by tapping into kids’ passions and interest, engaging them in ways that keep them coming to school and off the streets. David Stovall of the University of Illinois-Chicago, however, says the success of such ventures hinges on something more substantive: quality mentors who can win the hearts and minds of teens. With such mentoring comes strong relationships that can help keep boys on-track academically and socially.

Kimberly Gomez, an associate professor of educational psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, has studied the network’s impact on learning. Students are developing higher-order analytical skills as well as digital savvy, she reports. While other schools in Chicago offer technology programs, she adds, none feature the combination of cutting-edge technology and access to skilled mentors who receive additional training in teaching.
 
“The difference is the artists-technologists, who are there every day, guiding kids through inquiry-based projects,” Gomez says. “This is a kind of demonstration site of what is possible if you believe kids can, with support, have more self-directed learning and develop more creative and analytic thinking.”

Michael Hawkins—a.k.a. Brother Mike—begins his classes with call-and-response.

“Power to the people,” his students shout. And, in a throwback to political movements from the 1960s, he answers, “Right on.”

Dressed in beat-up Converse All Stars, worn-out blue jeans and a maroon zipper jacket circa 1985, the 35-year-old Hawkins exudes a boyish, carefree style, complete with dreadlocks and speech that is heavily peppered with the latest youthful slang.

Underneath the surface qualities, however, is something far more important: Hawkins’ ability to connect to his students, earn their trust, nurture their creativity and win their respect with his deep understanding of the media-rich environment that young people live in.

“Mike has always been there like a big brother, so to say,” says George Michael, Jr., a student at the University of Chicago’s Woodlawn Charter High School. Michael has worked on his poetry under Hawkins’ tutelage for three years. “Some teachers leave and some teachers stay. Mike stays.”

Hawkins’ work with the young African-American boys in the network often involves walking a tightrope between fostering their freedom of expression and pushing them to go beyond stereotypes about black males that the boys encounter daily. The goal is to have the boys come up with more thoughtful ways to talk about issues that are real in their lives, like gangs, drugs, girls and violence.

Many popular rappers perpetuate those stereotypes, Hawkins notes. “You’ve got Jay-Z talking about he’s still a hustler,” Hawkins says. “No, he’s not. He lives in the Hamptons, and he has a beautiful wife. Or Nellie—his kid goes to private school. But we don’t see that. We see the guns, the drugs, throwing money in the air.”

Hawkins’ goal is shared by Simeon Viltz, another network instructor who is also a jazz, soul and hip-hop artist. Viltz, who also works with students at the Comer Youth Center in Bronzeville, mans the studio microphones and helps students develop musical beats on their laptops.

Instead of banning topics like gangs and violence, Viltz and Hawkins help students relate them to what they’re learning in school.

Recently, some students worked on various media projects, such as poems and songs, focused on the contemporary literary classic The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros.

Hawkins says some of the older students, who had recently been at a party where a shooting took place, juxtaposed their experience with a segment in the book involving a hit-and-run accident.

“All of the sudden, the text becomes reality,” Hawkins says.

Quality instruction is integral to the network. And the most important addition to the project since its inception has been the professional development that gives mentors information on teaching, says Gomez.

Initially, the focus was to give students experience with digital tools. But leaders realized a need to give the artist-mentors teaching strategies to move students beyond mere skill- building.

Hawkins has taken the challenge to heart.

“You can create, create, create all day,” he says. “But why are we creating, and what are we creating? What is it ultimately going to do for you as a citizen? [Students] find empowerment in it and that’s what keeps them coming.”

Many students reject rote schooling, but Hawkins says digital and hip-hop projects can pique their interest.  He recalls one boy who opted to write a rap about Elie Wiesel’s account of his experience during the Nazi Holocaust, Night, rather than churn out a traditional book report.

“He demonstrated a very clear understanding of the characters, themes and issues,” Hawkins says. “If Public Enemy can tell you about the social conditions of the neighborhood through an album like It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, why can’t these kids do the same thing with classic texts?”

In the after-school programs, students can attend an array of project-based classes, from music-making to the design of video games and robots—traditional areas of interest for boys. The work is shared on Remix World, the network’s public website, and critiqued by students and mentors on its private social network. In one class, students proudly show off the characters they’ve animated in a video-game design program called Scratch.

“I made a Star Wars game, a Sonic game, three Naruto games, one Halo game, one Marvel vs. DC and my latest Naruto, the Search for Sarskai,” says Christopher Rayford, 13, ticking off a list of popular games that he re-envisioned. Rayford plans to attend ACE Tech Charter High School this coming fall and eventually plans to pursue a career in computer technology.

Mentors encourage classroom teachers at the university’s charters to add multimedia options to projects and assignments, a strategy that has started to take off. In Shayne Evans’ classroom at Woodson South Charter, for example, nearly a third of students took an alternative, digital approach to a recent book-report assignment.

Network leaders hope the marketing campaign for the expansion into the Harold Washington Library will draw students from across the city. Hawkins says he wants to figure out how to get that young man from Englewood to “buy into going to the library, and that’s not a nerd thing.”

Moving to a downtown location that is accessible to public transportation may also help to address another problem that Viltz describes: the need to attract more students from the city’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods. In his work with after-school organizations like Street Level and the Comer Center, Viltz worked with some very hardened young men, some of whom could have benefited from the mentoring and teaching the network provides.

At Street Level, Viltz watched one young man obsess over the lyrics of a song that glorified the “grinding,” or selling, of crack cocaine. The student soon dropped out and turned to the business himself.

“He loved the beats, but the lyrics were getting into his subconscious,” Viltz says.

The experience forced Viltz, an experienced musician, to rethink his own compositions, which had taken on sexual tones. His music began to shift toward more instrumental work and he realized how important it would be to help kids understand the way music can affect them.

While Viltz lost one student to violence, he’s watched others blossom. One student who nearly dropped out of school, he says, now works as a music producer among Viltz and his professional peers.

As the network’s approach begins to expand nationwide—Gomez is trying to start a similar project at a school in Pittsburgh—Hawkins says it will be important to ensure mentors can connect with students on a cultural level.

As George, the budding poet at Woodlawn Charter High says: “Mike has potential to be the biggest poetry artist in Chicago. But he wants to work with the kids more. It actually does more good for the community than just going out to the poetry shows. Because if you work with the kids, the kids might come back, just like Mike does.”

Sherman Elementary Principal Lionel Allen and the school’s social worker Azell Madden, Jr., say they believe regular group therapy sessions like this one, that teach young children anger-management skills, are time well- spent. Without them, children whose behavior often lands them in trouble are at risk for suspension—often the first step on a road toward failing classes and eventually dropping out.

The sessions arose as part of the district’s effort to bring in programs that focus on social and emotional learning, a strategy touted by Chief Education Officer Barbara Eason-Watkins to curb suspensions and expulsions, which are on the rise in CPS. Young black males—all the boys in the group at Sherman are African-American—are more likely than any other group of students to be suspended for misbehavior.

Sherman in New City is one of several schools to receive district and state funding for social and emotional programs. Sherman combines group therapy for the most troubled students with a classroom curriculum that aims to help all children learn appropriate ways to interact and handle conflict. (Districtwide, it’s difficult to say exactly how many schools have social and emotional curricula or group therapy programs because some principals adopt them on their own, sometimes with outside grants.)

It’s unclear what will happen with social and emotional learning, given the district’s budget deficit and central office cuts. But at schools like Sherman, the need to provide support for students who act out is critical.

Dismal academic performance put Sherman on the turnaround list in 2006, and management of the school was handed over to the nonprofit Academy for Urban School Leadership.

Allen recalls that when he walked in as the new principal, he found a school that was out of control, with parents and students ruling the roost. His efforts to instill order resulted in a five-fold increase in the number of suspended and expelled students. (Some of the increase, Allen says, is due to more accurate reporting.)

But Allen, who chose to use some of his extra turnaround funds to hire Madden, also knew that he needed to find another way to deal with unruly students. Hence, the anger-management groups. Several are now up and running, both during and after school. The groups are separated by gender. The groups for girls begin in the middle grades. The boys start in second grade.

Allen and Madden believe the group therapy sessions, and other social and emotional supports, are helping to improve the school’s behavioral climate, if only because they give teachers an option for dealing with students they are having trouble with. However, Allen insists that he must continue suspending students whenever they step out of line. “They have to know the limits,” Allen says.

Madden says the children in these groups are prone to throwing things, hitting people and shutting down when reprimanded by a teacher. He suspects that underlying issues, such as problems at home, are to blame for the behavior problems. A case in point was a kindergartener in the group meeting this day in the small office.

The short, pudgy 5-year-old was practicing origami and made a cute dog. On the back, he wrote to a girl that she should kiss him after school. Under the ears, he wrote “bich” and “asshole.”

"A child on his own does not get this language or behavior,” Madden says. He doesn’t yet know details about this particular student’s life, but the boy’s parents are young and he’s being raised by a grandmother. "You have children afraid to go out and mingle with other children, so they are inside all day with adults and that is the behavior they see,” Madden notes.

On this day, Madden and Sherman’s other social worker, Henry Prear, work with three boys, including the kindergartener. They’re discussing and filling out a worksheet on setting goals for the week, determining rewards the boys can earn for accomplishing them. (Teachers must sign off daily on whether the boys have behaved.)

Because this is the first week for the exercise, Madden suggests that the goals be fairly modest. One boy's goal, for instance, is to keep his shirt tucked in all week. As for rewards, the boys decide they should get time to play with the toys that Madden keeps around his office.

In the course of the sessions, the boys are encouraged to talk about issues that bother them. Today, one 7-year-old lists a litany of offenses that he commits in class—kicking the desk, talking out of turn, and hitting and choking people.

"Why?" Madden asks him.

“Somebody messes with me,” he says. “Somebody messes with me all the time.”

“What should you have done?” Madden asks.

“Told the teacher. But I get mad all the time,” he replies.

Another boy interjects, saying that when other children bother him he tells the teacher, but she just tells him to be quiet.

“How does that make you feel?” asks Madden.

“Angry.”

“You have established a reputation,” Madden continues. “Do you know what that means?”

The boy shakes his head and then looks down. Madden tries to explain to him that if he's always in the center of trouble, sometimes teachers assume that he’s the cause of it.

Madden is not easy on these boys or their families. He believes the boys need to be held accountable for their behavior, and faults their families for not punishing them enough when they are on suspension. He also notes that families sometimes move often, or are in denial about their child’s problems, and so they never make the effort to get the help they need.

But Madden also has witnessed a fair number of misunderstandings in which teachers wrongly assumed the worst of the student. One such instance took place when a boy was sent to the disciplinarian’s office for allegedly grabbing another boy's genitals. Madden says that when he talked to the boy, it turned out he was grabbing inside a pocket for some fake money.

These misperceptions are “part of how the broader society looks at black males,” Madden says. “Experience plays a role. If you have a young, white teacher, they sometimes can be unfamiliar with the culture or behavior, and they can easily misread what is going on. Teachers are trained to work with a curriculum. They are not trained to have empathy.”

A teacher’s attitude and classroom management style are important. Madden points out that some children may have no behavior problems with one teacher, but the very next year, the same child gets in trouble all the time.

“Is it the child that changed, or is it the teacher?"

This wrong-minded logic is endemic in today’s society, where negative stereotypes of black males are pervasive. While it is true that black males can be found in the universe of students who behave badly at school, it is not at all correct to presume that all black males who are suspended or expelled from school deserve what they got.

The numbers are striking: Black males comprise 23 percent of the CPS student population but amount to 44 percent of those who are suspended, and 61 percent of those who are expelled. Black boys are the only group of CPS students whose suspension rates are higher in elementary school than in high school.

Code of conduct

CPS policy stipulates the following mitigating factors be taken into account when disciplining students:

• age, health, maturity, and academic placement
• prior conduct
• attitude
• parent/guardian cooperation and/or involvement
• willingness to make restitution
• seriousness of the offense
• willingness to enroll in a student assistance program

Suspension rates are so high in Chicago, one researcher speculates that federal civil rights officials may see reason to investigate. “Something is wrong in a school district that suspends half or a quarter of one group of students,” says researcher Daniel Losen of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California-Berkeley.

Yet schools have the power to do something about this disparity. Just a few years ago, two out of every three black male students at Dyett High School got suspended. The situation was similar at Ryerson Elementary, where until recently, black boys were suspended at three times the district average. Principals at both schools reversed the trend once they zeroed in on the problem and embraced alternative discipline and student motivation strategies that didn’t result in boys missing classes. Rather than blaming students, these educators took it upon themselves to look for ways to address behavior issues that ensured students’ academic needs were factored in.

Here’s what’s at stake: More African-American male students drop out of CPS (55 percent) than graduate (40 percent). Research shows, unequivocally, that students who are absent perform poorly, and that suspensions put students at risk for dropping out.

When it comes to punishing black male students, the district’s scales of justice tilt toward discrimination. It’s time for CPS to publicly recognize that something is wrong, and for CEO Ron Huberman to take it upon himself to address, districtwide, the paradox of black male punishment and performance.

Micah Williams, Cassius Rodriguez and Kenny Rainey were freshmen that year, and they were right in the mix. They fought with other students and got sent home for days at a time. They failed nearly every class. They were on the fast track to dropping out.

But instead, they beat the odds.

Micah and Cassius walked across Dyett’s stage in June to get their diplomas, and are both heading for college. Kenny finished the year but still must make up some classes to get his diploma.

The boys’ success came through a mix of individual effort and the encouragement and guidance of adults. Pulling the three through high school took patience and diligence, according to the mentors and teachers who got to know the boys.

To a certain degree, the boys matured and realized that fighting and misbehavior are not solutions to problems. They became more engaged in school and started to believe in themselves. Cassius and Micah discovered a passion for extracurricular activities. Kenny, a foster child, figured out that school was the most stable force in an otherwise unstable life.

Dyett, too, played a role in helping the boys change course. A new school administration swept in with a strategy to improve the school climate and institute less punitive discipline. Outside funding brought in a mentor, Cornelius Ellen, who gave the boys hope by telling them that they could go to college—and proving that he was for real.

Research has found that 9th grade is a pivotal, make-or-break time for students. Few who veer off-track, by missing too many days or failing too many classes, get back on the path to graduation. At Dyett, in Washington Park, more than 60 percent of black male students are not on track to graduate.

Cassius, Micah and Kenny veered off-track and describe 9th grade as a tough year. Personal issues weighed heavily on their minds, they were too young to know how to deal with the pressures and school had little relevance.

Cassius recalls being bored in school. Outside, the streets seemed much more tantalizing. He found friends, and they played football and basketball together and gave themselves a name, Clean Inn. In their teen slang, the name meant going full throttle into sports or some other activity—“going clean in,” as Cassius says.

They also fought together. Cassius got suspended three times and developed a bad reputation. His name topped a list of leaders of Clean Inn, which Dyett’s former principal pegged as a gang.

Kenyatta Butler-Stansberry, who was the assistant principal at Dyett before taking over the helm at Harper, is quick to defend the label. “These boys have to understand that if you go around fighting together as a pack, then that is want you are, a gang,” she says.

Every time one of the boys got into a fight, all of them would get called down to the school office.

Cassius insists Clean Inn is not a gang, which he defines as a group that is organized to sell drugs. But they do stand by each other, he adds, acting as brothers for each other because some of the boys don’t have strong families.

Kenny is one of those boys. When he was 5, child welfare officials took him from his mother. He bounced around in the system and eventually landed with one foster mother for seven years. But in 7th grade, when he was 12, he was taken from the woman’s home. Officials told him it was because she wasn’t paying her electricity bill and had her service cut off.

The day he left that foster mother’s house, Kenny cried. “I thought she loved me,” he says. He then went to live with his current foster mother, whom he still struggles to get along with. “We don’t see eye to eye,” he says. “I have been on my own for so long that it is hard for me to listen to her.” At school, he got little support from his 9th-grade teachers, Kenny recalls. It might not have made much difference, he says now, but it would have been nice if they had reached out more.

Clean Inn became Kenny’s family, and he was quick to fight to defend himself or his friends. Eventually, he, too, was pegged as a leader and troublemaker. That view became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Kenny got suspended more times than he could count.

Some of his friends shrugged it off when they got suspended, but it was always a bad deal for Kenny, who says his foster mother then wouldn’t let him in the house. So he hung out at a friend’s house if he could, or just walked the streets. If he couldn’t go to a friend’s house and it was too cold to be outside, he hid in his foster mother’s hallway.

“I felt sad,” Kenny says now. “I felt like I didn’t have a home.”

Micah says he was “a mess” in his first year of high school. He is good friends with Kenny and Cassius, but he didn’t join Clean Inn. 

When Micah was 14, the death of his elderly father sent him reeling. “He was my everything,” Micah says. “I thought he would be around forever.”

He and his mother were not in a good place. In the midst of moving to a new apartment in Englewood, Micah and his mother got into intense fights and she became abusive, he says, to the point where he was scared to sleep in the house. He was angry and frequently got into trouble at school, since he was ready to throw a punch at the slightest threat.

“As I was growing up, everyone told me I wasn’t going to do nothing with my life,” Micah says. “That is why, for a long time, I did nothing. Everyone who would see me—my mother, even some of my teachers freshman year—would tell me that I am not going to amount to anything.”

Micah, Cassius and Kenny say Dyett administrators seemed quick to find reasons to suspend them when they were sent to the office. The police also had a strong presence in the school, and the threat of being arrested was yet another reason for the boys to stay away.

Youth advocates say that the strong police presence in some schools, and the arrests of students, is another big problem. CPS and Chicago Police Department officials say they do not keep data on how many students are arrested at schools and denied a Catalyst Chicago Freedom of Information Act request for the information.

The Advancement Project, a national racial justice advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., found that 8,000 students were arrested in CPS in 2003. They partnered with the local Southwest Youth Collaborative to compile the data, by having teens go to police headquarters to scour records and come up with the figures.

In the boys’ sophomore year, Dyett got a new principal, Jacquelyn Lemon, who came to the conclusion that the high number of arrests, suspensions and expulsions at the school didn’t make any sense. “Especially for African-American males, it is often a straight path to jail,” says Lemon. 

That same year, the local nonprofit Grand Boulevard Federation won a grant to implement a program called Education to Success at Dyett High School, which was targeted at black boys. The grant paid to bring in Cornelius Ellen to run the program, and required that the school adopt a strategy called restorative justice, in which students are taught why their misbehavior is wrong and how to make amends. A peer jury was started, and a peace room was set aside as a place for students to go to talk over conflicts—or just take a deep breath when they were stressed or upset.

Lemon also brought in a new attitude that complemented restorative justice. She leaned toward giving students another chance and talking to them to show new ways to handle conflict.

Micah says the halls became quieter and fewer students got into fights.

Cassius says the school became more people-focused. Lemon didn’t call the police immediately when trouble erupted, and that made a difference too.  “She knows the students,” Cassius says. “She learned our names, and not just our name, but what matters to us. There is more a homey feeling.”

For Kenny, the new approach was a saving grace. He desperately wanted to stop getting into fights, something that he is still struggling to accomplish. “It seems like I am lost; I am so used to fighting, so used to doing what I want to do,” he says. Lemon’s approach meant that school became the one place he could count on for support.

Cassius also found a sanctuary in school that year. He’d always enjoyed playing football in the park, throwing the ball around with his buddies and older brother. Sophomore year he took a chance and tried out for the team.

Dyett is a smaller high school, with less than 600 students, and most of the time the stands are all but empty during football games. But even in the absence of cheers, on chilly fall nights, Cassius fell in love and started to dream of “taking football to the next level”—to at least college or beyond.

“Football is what kept me interested in school,” says Cassius, whose broad shoulders and sturdy frame fit his position as a defensive lineman.

Micah also played football, but it was a change in his personal life that made the difference for him. His father had 12 children, many of whom Micah didn’t know. Yet in the wake of his father’s death, some began reaching out to him, the baby of the brood. One brother was a 50-year-old steelworker married to a nurse. They had a nice house and a quiet life in Washington Heights. They could see that Micah was having a hard time, so when his mom moved to a south suburb to get away from a bad landlord, they suggested that Micah move in with them. Though his mother was furious, Micah accepted his brother’s invitation. 

With his home life now calmer, Micah began getting to school on time and paying more attention once he got there.

Once the boys made it to their senior year, they still didn’t have much of a clue about next steps. No one talked to them much about their future, they recall. And secretly, they doubted whether they had many opportunities. “I didn’t think I had any options,” Kenny says. 

Their outlook began to change one day last fall when Ellen sat down next to them in the lunchroom. Ellen had chatted with Micah, Kenny and Cassius a bit during their junior year and knew their reputations and their past. Still, Ellen saw something beyond the story on their transcripts. He, too, had been a teen from the same neighborhood. Now, at 30, he remembered how it felt to be a young black man looking at the world from 51st Street and Martin Luther King Drive, feeling intimated by the forces of the world beyond.

“I am just like them,” Ellen says. Eventually, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Chicago State University and is now finishing work on a master’s degree. He felt it was his duty to tell the boys that if they listened to him, he could help them follow the same path.

In addition to talking with the boys about their future, Ellen also talked to them about life. On weekday afternoons and Saturdays, he and Kenneth Davis, the school’s restorative justice coordinator, took the boys out. Sometimes, it was a trip to a restaurant. Other times, they took them bowling or to the movies. Ellen, a laid-back guy with dreads who usually wears blue jeans and an untucked dress shirt, says the outings showed the boys that black men can hang out together, doing positive things and laughing and growing.

Still, getting the boys into college would not be easy. After failing so many courses in their freshman and sophomore years, Micah and Cassius had to enroll in evening classes to graduate. They dreaded the extra work, but signed up anyway. Kenny was so far behind that he would have to finish in an alternative school after June.

But Ellen and Davis refused to give up on him. They tried to find him jobs and showed him college catalogs, telling him not to let a few classes stand in the way of his future.
With Ellen’s prodding, Micah and Cassius spent lunchtime and study periods in the computer lab, filling out applications, writing essays and making sure their financial aid forms were ready. One disappointment came when they got their ACT scores. They each got a 16, well below the 20 students need to get into a selective college.

In November, they were still unsure that college would really happen. Micah was looking into trade schools to become a mechanic or a computer technician in case he didn’t get into college.

Cassius was even more indecisive. He quietly said that if he didn’t get an offer to play football in college, he wasn’t sure he would go. “School is really boring to me,” he said then. “If I can’t play football, I don’t think it will be interesting enough.”

As an alternative, Cassius was thinking about joining the military. But he was sure about one thing: He didn’t want to stay in the neighborhood. He saw other young black men around him, going nowhere fast. His older brother, at 22, was unemployed and aimless. His younger brother was supposed to be attending Dyett, but barely showed up.

One gray day, Cassius said that while he was in school, he was sure his younger brother and many of the guys he started high school with were standing on 47th Street, dealing drugs. “I can’t stay here,” Cassius said. “All I would do is get in trouble or get killed.”
Davis and Ellen listened to Cassius’ trepidation. They say they understood his fear and urged him to push through it.

They also told Cassius and Micah that when they go to college, they will have a safety net. Ellen and Davis have built up a network of friends and fraternity brothers who can be available for the students at the colleges they targeted for the boys.

Still, when talking about college, the boys sounded anxious. They each received rejection letters, shattering their already tenuous confidence.

Midway through the year, Micah and Cassius went to visit Tuskegee University in Alabama with Ellen, Davis and other students. Cassius and Micah had interviews with admissions officers. “If I do get accepted, it will be on probation,” Micah said.

Cassius went to Tuskegee with a copy of his football tape tucked into his bag. At high schools with big-time sport programs, coaches shop their players’ tapes to prospective college coaches and from day one, show them the steps to take to get picked up. But Dyett doesn’t have an established football program, or many college-goers, so it falls on the athletes to market themselves. For Cassius, this proved difficult.

Davis and Ellen introduced Cassius to the coach at Tuskegee and urged Cassius to hand the coach his tape. But Cassius just shook his hand and didn’t say a word. Later, Cassius said that he learned a valuable lesson. “You have to take matters into your own hands. You can’t wait for others to do it for you.”

Still, Cassius and Micah were impressed with Tuskegee and couldn’t stop talking about it. They had been worried about encountering racism in the South, but were surprised to find the people so friendly. And they loved the Southern food. Even the dorm’s cafeteria food was delicious, they said.

Still, they could do nothing but wait to see if they would be accepted at Tuskegee or another college. So for a few months, they focused on the tedium of homework and evening school.
Micah had found another outlet, too. He signed up for band class, where he picked up drum sticks and immediately took to playing. He learned to read and write music, and stayed after school to practice every chance he got. For the school’s Black History Month program, he and the band teacher performed one of his own compositions.

Then, one Saturday in March, it happened. Micah came in from hanging out with friends and found a thick envelope sitting on the kitchen table in his brother’s house. Inside was his acceptance letter from Tuskegee.

His brother and sister-in-law were thrilled.  Micah wished his dad were there to hear the news. “On my mom’s side, I will be the first one to go to college. On my dad’s side, I have a sister who lives in California who went.” 

When he went to school the next week, he wore a gray Tuskegee t-shirt and a blue-and- white argyle sweater that he had bought on his visit to the school. Micah stood out among the other students, who wore Dyett’s maroon-shirt-and-khaki-pants uniform. If anyone asked, he proudly announced why he was dressed so differently. “I never thought I would go to college. I never really thought about it.”

Cassius, too, was accepted into Tuskegee. But a few weeks before graduation, he still seemed hesitant about enrolling. Cassius says his parents are proud of him, but Ellen notes that Cassius has been disappointed at his parent’s lackluster response and pegs it as a factor in Cassius’ own lack of enthusiasm.

One spring weekend, Tuskegee hosted a banquet in Chicago for seniors who will be attending the university. Cassius and Micah got dressed up and attended, but no members of their families did.

Cassius got a bumper sticker for his dad and wondered out loud if he would put it on his car.  A few days later, Cassius says his dad didn’t want it. “Something about he was going to get a new car soon,” he says softly.

Kenny was on the sidelines as his two friends make college plans. As June rolled around, he faced an uncertain path. At 18, he will no longer have to stay with his foster mother and hopes to stay with his father, with whom he has never lived. Kenny was also desperate for a job, and wanted to enroll in an alternative school so he could get his diploma.

Within earshot of Kenny, Ellen said that he believes in him, that he’s a natural leader who can use this skill to bring about positive behavior. “He is very intelligent. He is a tall, handsome black man, who can fend for himself,” Ellen says.  
 
By mid-June, Ellen reported that Kenny had found a prospective job with a community organization called MAGIC.

Ellen, however, faced the prospect of job-hunting. The Grand Boulevard Foundation grant that paid for his position had run out, and Dyett’s new principal, Robert McMiller, was still trying to find money in his budget to pick up Ellen’s salary. McMiller supports the school’s new approach. (Lemon left Dyett to become the principal of the new Chicago Talent Development High School slated to open this fall in West Garfield Park.)

Kenny says he’s been thinking a lot about his future lately, wishing that he hadn’t lived so much in the moment. He used to wear a big, rock-like faux-diamond earring. But he has taken it out because someone told him it was unprofessional.

“It is kind of hard to say what I will be doing next year or two years from now,” he says. “I don't know how to feel about everything. Time just went too fast.”

“Paul is our main guy that struggles academically,” says his coach, Lewis Thorpe, who considers it part of the job to keep Paul on track whether he’s playing or not. Thorpe once found his starting center lounging at home just before a game—Paul had failed to get his school work in order that week and, knowing he would be benched because of the school’s strict guidelines on athletic eligibility, had decided to settle in for a nap. In Thorpe’s view, Paul was shirking his duty, and he roused the young man out of bed and into his best street clothes so he could support the team from the sidelines.

Going the extra mile with his players is par for the course for Thorpe, even if it means pulling a player out of bed, housing him when the boy’s home is in chaos or working diligently with a teacher to head off a team member’s behavioral and academic problems before they go viral.

Researchers say coaches like Thorpe can have dramatically positive effects on the lives of student-athletes, especially young men who live in gritty urban neighborhoods like North Lawndale, where life is too often marred by fatherless families, violence and economic decline.

And organized athletics can provide a sense of structure and discipline for youngsters. “There’s a point when you realize that stability is really the beginning point of academic achievement,” says Dan Lebowitz, executive director of Sports in Society, a Boston-based sports research and advocacy group.

Zillijan Jones, one of the better students on Thorpe’s squad, wrote his senior thesis on how extracurricular activities keep students engaged in school. Describing his thesis, he says: “It gives you more of a social status. And when you have a social status, you don’t mind coming to school. Extracurricular activities make you popular, and kids don’t want to miss school when they’re popular.”

As mentors and, in some cases, surrogate fathers, coaches like Thorpe can play a key role in motivating black boys to work hard in the classroom as well as on the basketball court or football field.

But finding effective coaches isn’t easy. (In March, reports surfaced of the widespread use of corporal punishment in the city’s sports programs. Despite hundreds of allegations, CPS officials reported firing just 26 staff members for hitting, paddling or otherwise physically abusing students between 2003 and 2008.)

The district’s top sports administrator, Calvin Davis, wants to beef up training for current coaches and attract high-caliber newcomers with better pay. Coaches make $22 an hour in addition to their salary as teachers or other staff, but have a cap on their working hours, an arrangement that can cut into pay if a coach works beyond the cap. Instead, Davis faces the prospect of severe budget cuts.

Davis says the district hopes to finalize funding for a professional development program to teach coaches how to work on players’ character development. Overall, however, too few teachers are among the coaching ranks—roughly half, with the rest security guards and other school personnel. Davis notes that it’s easier for a teacher who coaches to fully grasp the link between academics and sports, and schoolwork is more likely to top the priority list.

Many of North Lawndale’s players, including Paul Bunch, hardly know their fathers, and they look to Thorpe—“Pops,” as they call him—for much more than basketball instruction.
The ability to earn the trust of young black men, as Thorpe does, is an important factor in closing the achievement gap because trust paves the way for teaching to take a foothold, according to experts.

David Stovall, an assistant professor of education policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, says that effective teaching of young black men begins with trust. Only then, he says, will they respect and take advice from a teacher.

Teenagers like Paul—a soft-spoken, reflective and ultra-polite young man who kept largely quiet during a team interview with Catalyst—do not trust adults easily. Largely estranged from his mother and father, he was raised by his grandparents in Austin, says Paul’s favorite teacher, Misuzu Miyashita, who teaches English and classical literature. The young man was hit with a series of troubles. After his grandfather and grandmother died—his grandfather three years ago, and his grandmother during Paul’s freshman year—his aunt took custody of Paul and moved the family to Oak Park. But the long commute to school hurt Paul’s attendance and the family moved again to North Lawndale. It was a chaotic year, and Thorpe brought Paul into his home temporarily, giving him a much-needed dose of structure and discipline. It’s an extreme example of how Thorpe keeps his players afloat academically, says Miyashita.

“He spends so much time with the students,” she says. “He is vigilant about checking on them. He is on top of the grades. If I have problems with a student, I’ll send a quick email and it’s usually taken care of within 48 hours.”

Paul is bright and inquisitive, Miyashita says, but his motivation to attend school foll