Education Law

It’s the little things

Keeping up with the trends that President Obama’s pep talk to students (and the surrounding commentary) demonstrated yesterday, this article from CNN caught our attention.  The president didn’t say anything out of the ordinary, or to be candid, anything those students haven’t heard 100 times before.  But some students, maybe thousands, maybe millions, had never heard the president talk directly to them.  His speech was worthy of note not because of what he said, but because he did what millions of teachers and school leaders do every day.  That’s why the CNN article about making a difference in urban education comes at such a good time.

In it, the Center for Public Education’s Patte Barth discusses a few of the challenges urban students face.  Difficult home lives, crime near where students live, parents working mutliple jobs, and little support, pepper the list of tough situations students face.  But there are lots of people that are making a difference and helping the low (about 53%) graduation rate in the 50 largest cities creep up. 

One of those men is Enoch Muhammad, in Chicago, who estimates he’s reached 15-16,000 students in the last 16 years with his “Hip Hop Detox” class, where he looks carefully at what musicians are saying and the context they say it.  Another is Adam Gray, a math teacher in Boston who had his students join Mu Alpha Theta, a math honor society.  Even though many of his students didn’t qualify, he worked with them and raised expectations for all his students, and the new group is showing growth.

So there are two quick examples of how teachers make a difference.  We all know they do, but in our urban districts it’s even more critical, it’s urgent, and everyone from the president to parents know that we’re in a unique time that we must think to the future.  As Obama said:

So today, I want to ask you, what?s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a president who comes here in twenty or fifty or one hundred years say about what all of you did for this country?

For more success stories, visit the Center’s website here.

Full post as published by BoardBuzz: NSBA's Daily Weblog on September 09, 2009 (boomark / email).