Save Our Black Youth

On July 31st, I journeyed down to Mississippi for a "Save Our Black Youth" conference. I was very happy to make the front page of the Columbus Dispatch, the local Columbus, Mississippi newspaper. I was also overjoyed to see the number of Black students at the conference.

I wasn't happy to learn about the large dropout rate of students at a local high school in a town near Columbus. At a meeting for Black parents, an educator and parent showed a fantastic Powerpoint presentation. The statistics were depressing. In 2002, there were 142 Black males in this school's 9th grade. By the tenth grade, 75 had dropped out. Another 7 left in the eleventh grade and only 47 of the original 142 graduated. What happened to those 95 black males? Why such a large dropout rate?

Although Black males tend to leave during their high school years, they begin disengaging from the educational process much sooner. When I taught in a high school dropout prevention program, for example, the students told me that school was boring. They said the curriculum is basically the same from grades one to twelve with slightly different information at each grade level. To these students, it was much more interesting hanging in the halls or staying at home than learning.

Can we as a society continue to have this kind of hopelessness among our Black males or any youth? Aren't there enough bright people in the country to sit down and fix the problem? Will we let our youth continue to drop out and become unemployed at higher rates than anyone else in the population? Or is there a solution?

I point to the Marcus Garvey School in Los Angeles. On a visit to their facility some years ago, I was pleasantly surprised to see little, Black children counting in Spanish, Swahili and English. In another class, a little, five-year-old girl came up and told me every state in the United States beginning with Washington. By the time I visited the upper grades, it was a little hard to follow the information given in some of those math classes. But the students were totally engaged. They were excited about learning. Another model institution is the Piney Woods School in rural Mississippi. There are many more.

Let's look at these schools to see their teaching methods. Let's follow their philosophies to teach our Black youth. Can we argue with success?