No boys left behind at Detroit public school freep.com Detroit Free Press:
"The school-to-prison pipeline, especially in poverty-plagued cities like Detroit, has become a national disgrace. Nearly eight in 10 African-American males drop out of Detroit public schools."
As someone who spends a lot of time in Michigan's prisons, I see where too many of them wind up. Black men make up more than half of the nearly 50,000 people locked up in Michigan, and a similar slice of the more than 2 million people imprisoned in America.
Nationwide, more than half of high school dropouts, ages 16 to 24, are jobless, and an estimated one in 10 male dropouts are in jail. It's no accident that prisoners typically read at a sixth-grade level.
Community leaders, including Mayor Dave Bing and Bishop Edgar L. Vann II, will seek some solutions to this local and national tsunami during the "Boys to Men" education forum on Saturday. I'd suggest they also spend some time at Detroit's Frederick Douglass Academy, an all-male middle and high school that's changing lives and switching the statistics.
Formerly an alternative school for bad boys, Frederick Douglass has become, over the last five years, a high-achieving college preparatory academy. All 32 of this year's graduating class were accepted to college, clocking $1.2 million in scholarships and financial aid. It was one of only a handful of Detroit public high schools to make adequate progress under the No Child Left Behind Act.
"The school-to-prison pipeline, especially in poverty-plagued cities like Detroit, has become a national disgrace. Nearly eight in 10 African-American males drop out of Detroit public schools."
As someone who spends a lot of time in Michigan's prisons, I see where too many of them wind up. Black men make up more than half of the nearly 50,000 people locked up in Michigan, and a similar slice of the more than 2 million people imprisoned in America.
Nationwide, more than half of high school dropouts, ages 16 to 24, are jobless, and an estimated one in 10 male dropouts are in jail. It's no accident that prisoners typically read at a sixth-grade level.
Community leaders, including Mayor Dave Bing and Bishop Edgar L. Vann II, will seek some solutions to this local and national tsunami during the "Boys to Men" education forum on Saturday. I'd suggest they also spend some time at Detroit's Frederick Douglass Academy, an all-male middle and high school that's changing lives and switching the statistics.
Formerly an alternative school for bad boys, Frederick Douglass has become, over the last five years, a high-achieving college preparatory academy. All 32 of this year's graduating class were accepted to college, clocking $1.2 million in scholarships and financial aid. It was one of only a handful of Detroit public high schools to make adequate progress under the No Child Left Behind Act.