A place where black children can learn is an antidote to bad news
For as bad as things are right now (with Jack Smith firing a modern-day shot at Fort Sumter), there is always hope. When I read about LeBron James’s failing school, which means hundreds of youngsters are losing, it reminded me that it doesn’t have to be that way. There are options for children locked in the slums, and they work. I know because I saw one in action.
The headline was its own form of indictment: “Not ONE incoming 8th grader at LeBron James’ ‘I Promise’ school in Akron has passed state's basic math test in over three years.” That school, which gets funding from both James’s foundation and Ohio taxpayers, promised to take kids out of poorly performing public schools and, using the “Stuart Smalley School of Education” approach, to get them to learn.
For those wondering, Stuart Smalley is the only vaguely funny thing Al Franken ever did. Smalley is a fictional character whose life was guided by banal affirmations from the self-help movement. His motto was, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough and—doggone it!—people like me!”
Image: Students at I Promise school. YouTube screen grab.
If you go to the I Promise website, you’ll find that this is pretty much the same ethos driving the school. It’s about self-respect and trying hard, which are definite virtues, but they’re only half of the equation. (I’ve also heard that there’s a real focus on DEI, which tells children they’re society’s victims, not its victors.) If you want to do education right, you must have high academic expectations.
Instead, the school’s expectations were really nothing better than “Well, we’re doing better than before,” a principle you can see in this 2019 New York Times article touting its success:
The academic results are early, and at 240, the sample size of students is small, but the inaugural classes of third and fourth graders at I Promise posted extraordinary results in their first set of district assessments. Ninety percent met or exceeded individual growth goals in reading and math, outpacing their peers across the district.
[snip]
The students’ scores reflect their performance on the Measures of Academic Progress assessment, a nationally recognized test administered by NWEA, an evaluation association. In reading, where both classes had scored in the lowest, or first, percentile, third graders moved to the ninth percentile, and fourth graders to the 16th. In math, third graders jumped from the lowest percentile to the 18th, while fourth graders moved from the second percentile to the 30th.
In other words, the students were doing slightly better, which is a good thing. The problem is that they never moved beyond merely awful, which is still failing. The same is true for reading and writing. The story is being seen as a demerit for James, which it is, but it’s terribly sad for the children, who are filled with feel-good affirmations but are as uneducated as if they’d never attended school at all.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Several years ago, I had the tremendous privilege of visiting the Northern Light School in Oakland, California. Oakland has one of the largest, poorest, and most broken black communities in America. That’s no way to raise a child. And yet the children at Northern Light School are extraordinary. That’s because, along with all the feel-good stuff, there’s a demand for academic excellence. I wrote about the experience here and will take the liberty of quoting myself a little:
At NLS, the mutual respect between everyone is palpable. I don’t know if NLS does this because of Maria Montessori’s insistence that respect is a two-way street in a school, even with children as young as two, or if the wise heads behind the school figured it out on their own. All I know is that I saw it, felt it, and liked it.
The other thing NLS does is expect that its children work hard. This has nothing to do with meeting curriculum metrics and deadlines or passing standardized tests (although I’m sure the children do well in those areas). Instead, this expectation is a subset of respect because part of respecting someone is believing them to be capable of high standards.
The school brings in speakers to educate and uplift the children. I was there when Mickey Ganitch, an absolutely charming Pearl Harbor survivor who died last year at 102, talked to the children. The children were a respectful audience and asked intelligent questions. Afterward, I had the chance to enjoy lunch with three thirteen-year-old boys:
I cannot say enough nice things about those young men. They had excellent manners, match perfectly the way in which I define good manners: putting another person at ease and making that person feel welcome and valued. The boys had no shyness and willingly answered my questions about their plans when they graduate. They also listened to me politely when I got all excited about history, as I so often do.
A horrible background is a barrier to education, but Northern Lights shows that, if you respect the children enough to demand that they perform well, a child can overcome that barrier. LeBron James’s school seems to have failed because it was all about feelings (“social-emotional learning”) but forgot to realize that, without real goals and serious expectations, what you get is feel-good nothing at all.