NEWSLETTER: CHILDREN'S DEFENSE FUND: THE OPPORTUNITY GAP

Newsletter - Children's Defense Fund

 

 

 

The Opportunity Gap

In the spring of 1954, like so many Black families, mine waited anxiously for the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. My father and I talked about it and what it would mean for my future and the future of millions of other Black children who were attending segregated but unequal Black schools. He died the week before Brown was decided. But I and many other children were able, in later years, to walk through the new and heavy doors that Brown slowly and painfully opened.     It was a transforming time that set into motion a spate of other challenges to Jim Crow laws and yet sixty years after that historic May decision the doors to true educational equality have never fully opened wide enough for millions of American children to walk through especially those living in poverty. The most recent findings from the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), called the “richest, fullest” collection so far measuring education access and equity in our nation’s public schools, show many children are still receiving an unequal education.     This is the unfinished work of the Civil Rights Movement.     The new Office for Civil Rights data cover the 2011-2012 school year and are the first universal data collection since 2000, with information about all 97,000 schools in the nation’s 16,500 school districts serving 49 million students. Some information was collected for the first time, including one of the most startling findings: new data on preschool suspensions that show Black preschoolers are 18 percent of children enrolled in preschool programs in public schools, but 48 percent of children suspended more than once. While the data show only six percent of the districts offering preschool in public schools reported that they had suspended preschoolers, there is something terribly wrong when we are suspending any children from preschool in the first place. We now know Black children are more likely to be pushed out of school before they’ve even made it to kindergarten, and other numbers in the recent OCR release confirm those disparities do not go away.     Overall, Black students are suspended and expelled at a rate three times greater than White students. Boys receive more than two out of three suspensions, but Black girls are suspended at higher rates than girls of any other race or ethnicity and higher rates than most boys. Students with disabilities (those served by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) also are more than twice as likely to receive an out-of-school suspension as students without disabilities. And inequities in school discipline continue right up through the most consequential responses: Black students represent 16 percent of student enrollment but make up 27 percent of students referred to law enforcement and 31 percent of school-related arrests.     These differences in discipline can’t be explained simply by differences in student behavior. The Equity Project at Indiana University has reviewed the research on the role of student behavior and characteristics in disparate suspension rates and found that in fact schools and districts that have taken seriously their responsibility to educate all of their students have seen significant improvements by adjusting the policies and practices of adults. Both Buffalo, New York Public Schools and Denver, Colorado Public Schools are heralded as examples of school systems’ ability to change to better serve students. The Children’s Defense Fund and AASA, the School Superintendents Association, have been funded by the Atlantic Philanthropies to work with ten school districts from Texas to Wisconsin to Pennsylvania whose leaders are committed to reforming their school discipline policies to reduce the use of exclusionary discipline and address racial disparities.     Children’s unequal chances in school go well beyond discipline. Black, Latino, American Indian, and Native Alaskan students have less access to experienced teachers than White students. While most teachers are certified, nearly half a million students nationwide attend schools where 60 percent or fewer teachers meet all state certification and licensure requirements, and racial disparities are particularly acute in schools where uncertified and unlicensed teachers are concentrated. Black students are more than four times as likely and Latino students are twice as likely as White students to attend schools where 80 percent or fewer teachers meet these requirements. There are also teacher salary disparities: Nearly one in four districts with two or more high schools reports a teacher salary gap of more than $5,000 between high schools with the highest and the lowest Black and Latino student enrollments.     All students don’t have equal opportunities to take the most challenging courses to prepare them for college and career. While 81 percent of Asian American and 71 percent of White high school students attend high schools where the full range of math and science courses are offered (Algebra I, geometry, Algebra II, calculus, biology, chemistry, and physics), fewer than half of American Indian and Native Alaskan high school students have access to the full range in their schools, and Black students, Latino students, students with disabilities, and English language learner students also all have less access. Black and Latino students are also disproportionately less likely to be enrolled in at least one Advanced Placement (AP) course. The new data also show students with disabilities, English learners, and Black students are all more likely to be held back each year. Twelve percent of Black students were retained in ninth grade— about double the overall rate.     Six decades into the “post-Brown” era, will the doors of opportunity finally open wide or continue to stay half shut on our watch? Most students know the phrase “knowledge is power.” CDF is happy that the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is taking new steps to expand the range of data about inequalities that still exist in our nation’s schools. But now that we have more knowledge—what are we going to do with it? If you are interested in learning more and taking action, you can find out how the schools in your community are treating their students at the Civil Rights Data Collection’s website, and you can find new guidance on school discipline and positive alternatives to suspensions and other exclusionary discipline practices at the National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments’ website. It’s time to close the opportunity gap and fulfill the promise of education as a great equalizer and a strong pathway to opportunity for all of our nation’s children

NEWSLETTER: CHILDREN'S DEFENSE FUND: ELLA BAKER: MY CIVIL RIGHTS GENERATION'S "FUNDI"

Until the killing of Black men, Black mothers’ sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a White mother’s son—we who believe in freedom cannot rest until this happens.
--Ella Baker

 

 

 

 

 

During this last week of Women’s History Month I wanted you to learn about Ella Baker, a transforming but too little known woman and overpowering justice warrior for my generation of civil rights activists. The quote above is from Ella Baker 50 years ago, and like so much about this visionary civil rights leader it is still just as relevant today. She was talking about the murders of civil rights movement workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, who disappeared together in Mississippi in June 1964, and reacting to the fact that searchers sent to comb local rivers and swamps to find the bodies of Chaney, who was Black, and Goodman and Schwerner, who were White, also found the bodies of other missing Black men for whom authorities had not bothered to search. Ella Baker was an outspoken warrior against injustice and inequality her entire life, and always, always unwilling to rest. Her words continue to be a rallying cry for all of us who believe our nation still does not see and value Black and White children’s lives the same way.

 

 

Sweet Honey in the Rock’s Bernice Johnson Reagon featured these words in the stirring “Ella’s Song.” She was one of hundreds of young people Ella Baker mentored during the civil rights movement. I was one of them who first met Mrs. Baker during my senior year at Spelman College in Atlanta. She was a staff member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and was often a powerful behind-the-scenes advisor to close colleagues like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Ella Baker believed in servant leadership and shared leadership rather than charismatic leadership and encouraged young people like me to find and lift our own voices and join them with others. She was instrumental in founding the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and fought to make sure we retained our own independent organization as students rather than simply becoming the youth arm of the Dr. King-led SCLC. Julian Bond, Diane Nash, Bob Moses, and many other fellow student activists and young activists were all influenced by her example, counsel and convening and share a special debt of reverence and gratitude. Ella Baker was tough and disciplined and demanded the best of the young and older adults around her. She understood that movement building was about more than protests and meetings and speeches—it was hard, daily, persistent, and sacrificial behind-the-scenes work. She was an institution builder and stressed the importance of strong institutions that could last over time rather than reliance on a single strong leader.

 

 

Ella Baker was born in 1903 in Norfolk, Virginia. She had a strict mother, a warm and caring father, and a large extended family of grandparents, uncles, and aunts who shared what they had with the poor. She was a fighter and as a child beat up White children who called her names. Since there was no schooling for Black children beyond elementary years in her area, she went off to boarding school at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and was valedictorian of her high school and college graduating classes. She moved to Harlem, got caught up in its excitement, and went everywhere to hear lectures and speeches and read in libraries to learn everything she could. After working as a domestic and as a waitress, she got a job with the Negro National News published by George Schuyler who later recommended her for a job at the NAACP. She rapidly rose through NAACP ranks. “Wherever she went,” her biographer and friend Joanne Grant wrote in Ella Baker: Freedom Bound, “she created a whirlwind, leaving a scatter of papers, notes, leaflets, church programs, and phone numbers in her wake. . . She never let up her struggle to increase the role of the rank and file.”

 

 

Ella Baker pushed for organizational structure and rules in the NAACP just as she did later at SCLC and SNCC. Ella Baker was the one who sat down with Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levinson to discuss how to create a continuing movement out of the Montgomery bus boycott, which led to SCLC’s formation. As the first staff member hired for SCLC, it was Ella Baker who tried to put the new organization in operating order so that Dr. King was not just a leader who reacted to and jumped from one event to the next. She worked to give SCLC the capacity to plan and implement action. And Ella Baker convinced Dr. King to bring me and about 200 other Black college students who had been arrested for engaging in sit-in protests to open up lunch counters around the South to a meeting at her alma mater, Shaw University. My first plane ride ever was from Atlanta to Raleigh for that meeting. SNCC was the meeting’s result.

 

     

Ella Baker was fully aware of but unintimidated by the men she worked with who devalued the advice of women and sometimes resented her forcefulness, prodding, and “mothering.” She made no special effort to be ingratiating. She labored at SCLC as she had at the NAACP to raise money, conduct voter registration drives, speak to citizens groups (sometimes ten times a day), and travel to community after community to help people help themselves. She warned against SCLC becoming “a cult of personality” for Dr. King rather than a means of empowering others, and she eventually left SCLC after deciding that movement building was more important than the specific organization and personalities involved—another of her lessons that is so relevant today.

 

 

At a gathering celebrating Ella Baker’s seventy-fifth birthday, Bob Moses called her the “Fundi,” the person in the community who masters a craft with the help of the community and teaches it to other people. Fundi became the title of a film on her extraordinary life and work. Ella Baker died in 1986 on her 83rd birthday. I remember her counsel as I think about sustaining and strengthening the Children's Defense Fund’s mission today and future tomorrow for the long haul struggle to create and maintain a level playing field for every child. I learned from her the crucial importance of training a successor generation of young servant-leaders which has been a strong priority of CDF’s since its inception. Policies are no better than the people who are implementing them and their commitment to just treatment of children and the poor. I am so proud that over 13,000 college students have gone through training at CDF’s Ella Baker Child Policy Institute at the former Alex Haley Farm, that more than 113,000 children have gone through the CDF Freedom Schools® program with a sense of commitment to something beyond themselves, and that many CDF alumni are doing wonderful public service across the country. This is one way CDF honors her legacy along with other great unsung women justice warriors like Fannie Lou Hamer, Unita Blackwell, and Septima Clark who too few ever hear of but we all owe a great debt of gratitude.

 

 

We also all honor Ella Baker by keeping her belief in freedom and equality alive until it becomes reality for every mother’s child. In a nation where Black children are more than three times as likely to be poor as White children; where Black babies are more than twice as likely as White babies to die before their first birthdays and Black children are twice as likely to die before their 18th birthdays as White children; where more than 80 percent of fourth and eighth grade Black public school students cannot read or compute at grade level and Black children are more than twice as likely to drop out as White children; where gun violence is the leading cause of death among Black children ages 1-19 and Black children and teens are nearly five times more likely to die from gun violence than White children and teens; and where Black mothers’ sons can be seen and treated as lethal threats for wearing hoodies in the rain or refusing to turn their car radios down, we who believe in freedom still cannot rest.

 

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Marian Wright Edelman is President of the Children's Defense Fund whose Leave No Child Behind^® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. For more information go to www.childrensdefense.org.

 

Mrs. Edelman's Child Watch Column also appears each week on The Huffington Post.

CHILDREN'S DEFENSE FUND NEWSLETTER: I WANT TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE

Doctors told Jaime Gonzalez’s parents that his birth defects were so severe he probably wouldn’t live to age one. When he did, doctors told them next that he’d probably never walk. He did that too—though it is still difficult even after a series of surgeries. “[My parents] both pushed me,” Jaime said. “When I was little and didn’t want to try, my mother said, ‘Don’t say you can’t. You can.’ That became my attitude, and even when it was hard—I’m in pain even now—it’s never been an option for me to quit.”
 

Others also sold Jaime short. He was put in special education when he started kindergarten in South Central Los Angeles even though his mother had already taught him to read and write. But after his mother switched him to a new school, his first grade teacher saw his abilities and ­persuaded the principal to put him in the second grade. He eventually attended magnet programs throughout middle and high school, graduated seventh out of his class of 500, and received a full tuition scholarship to the University of Southern ­California in an eight year combined bachelor’s degree and medical school program.

 

 

 

Jaime—now Dr. Gonzalez—is part of the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF)’s network of young servant leaders who are devoting their lives to serving the next generation of children. Winning a CDF Beat the Odds® scholarship in high school for demonstrating academic excellence despite great obstacles helped Jaime with living expenses in college, and getting involved with CDF’s efforts to enroll children in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) shaped his medical goals. He added a year to his education to get a master’s degree in public health along with his medical degree. He lost a year when his mother was shot while taking out the trash, and he saw her through two surgeries. After completing his residency Jaime is planning to return home to serve the Spanish-speaking underserved and uninsured population. “That’s where there is a need,” he explained, and unlike 90 percent of his medical school classmates, he speaks Spanish.

 

 

 

Growing up in Minnesota Katie DeSantis overcame a different set of terrible odds. At the age of three she witnessed her drunken father beat her mother. When her battered mom crawled into bed with her on another occasion, Katie consoled her by saying everything would be okay. But it wasn’t. Her mother escaped the abuse and moved Katie and her younger sister to Minneapolis, but then there were new problems.

 

 

 

The family was homeless seven times in Katie’s childhood. “My mom couldn’t hold down a steady job or a place for us to stay. We would live somewhere for six months to a year and get evicted and end up in a shelter.” There was often no privacy in the shelters and it was hard to do her homework in a loud and crowded area. Plus it was embarrassing, especially for a teenager in high school: “I would have the bus drop me off around the corner and I never invited anyone to where I lived.”

 

 

 

School became Katie’s refuge and the place where she excelled. When she too won a Children’s Defense Fund Beat the Odds® scholarship award in 2006, it was a turning point: “Beat the Odds really helped me to be able to tell my story and not be ashamed of the life I had lived.” Katie went on to graduate from Gustavus Adolphus College in southern Minnesota. She now works for Head Start in Minneapolis as the coordinator of its Project Secure for homeless children: “I was one of those kids and that’s where my heart is. They didn’t do anything wrong. I want to make sure they know that.”

 

 

 

La’Mont Geddis’s path to servant leadership started with a call to CDF’s headquarters from a pay phone after he heard a professor talk about the Freedom Schools® program during a lecture: “I’m a student at Howard University and I want to get involved in Freedom Schools. I want to make a difference.” That was 18 years ago, and La’Mont has since proved to be a truly valuable asset in the public schools of Washington, D.C. La’Mont always wanted to be a teacher and studied education at Howard, but believes much of what he knows about how to reach children comes from the training and experience he received as a servant leader intern, or teacher, in the Freedom Schools program, whose model curriculum provides summer and after-school enrichment that helps children fall in love with reading, increases their self-esteem, and generates more positive attitudes toward learning.

 

 

 

La’Mont’s first teaching job after Freedom Schools—a fourth grade class that had had six teachers by the time he got there in October—was so difficult he almost quit. But he remembered the message Freedom Schools instills in both its teachers and its students: You can make a difference. “I ended up loving that class and vice versa. I’ve followed some of them through college.” His career has since included serving as a principal and school leader, and he has never lost sight of the lessons he learned from Freedom Schools: “Teachers can become almost like robots. You go through the lessons without bringing in passion or creativity or empathy for the students. I’ve heard teachers say, ‘I don’t give parents my personal number’ and ‘I don’t make home visits.’ No. You’ve got to bring the school into the community and put all you’ve got into it. That’s the heart of Freedom Schools values. Teaching is not a profession. It’s a ministry.” 

 

 

Jaime, Katie, and La’Mont are three of 40 young servant leaders whose stories we are celebrating as part of our 40^th anniversary celebration—each representing hundreds, even thousands, of other young servant leaders who have come up through CDF’s leadership training ranks and who are making wonderful contributions as doctors, lawyers, educators, service providers, and parents in their communities and nation. I am so proud of them all and so grateful for all their good work. They are a reminder that we must never ever give up on any child and that the most important responsibility every generation and nation has is to prepare its children—all of them—for the future.