LeBron is dishing out assists to a local school district in Ohio
The basketball player opens his I Promise school to widespread applause
Last week President Trump scoffed – albeit indirectly – at basketball icon LeBron James’ intelligence in a tweet, stating, “Lebron James was just interviewed by the dumbest man on television, Don Lemon,” Mr. Trump wrote. “He made Lebron look smart, which isn’t easy to do. I like Mike!” But it looks like LeBron is the one taking Trump to school.
Last week, LeBron announced the opening of his I Promise School. It is open to 240 low-income, at-risk third- and fourth-grade students in his hometown of Akron, in northeast Ohio. Each year, the school will add grades, expanding to first through eighth grades by 2022.
I Promise is a public-private partnership between the Akron School District and the LeBron James Family Foundation, a unique model that exemplifies LeBron’s exceptional abilities to see the bigger picture in the role education plays in community development.
The new school is open for more days than the traditional school year, provides parents with job placement services, has a food bank on site, gives each kid a free bicycle and helmet, guarantees college tuition for every student who graduates and offers social and emotional support and other wrap-around services, something researchers and practitioners recognize as important. The school accounts for and addresses the structural discrimination that has long hurt black families — and black school districts. In a way, by connecting social assistances to the school, I Promise is providing wrap-around services for the entire district.
Amplifying the school’s offerings so far beyond the curriculum certainly isn’t conventional, but LeBron is deliberately stepping out-of-bounds, and kudos to him for that.
“Everything these kids are going through — the drugs, the violence, the guns, everything they’re going through as kids, I know,” said LeBron, the son of a single parent, during his remarks at the school opening. “For me to be in the position where I have the resources, the finance, the people, the structure and the city around me — why not?”
There have been other celebrities who’ve opened charter schools in the past, such as former basketball player, now sports analyst, Jalen Rose; entertainment mogul Sean “P. Diddy” Combs; former tennis standout Andre Agassi; and rapper Pitbull, to name a few. Those who see opening a school as a means of giving back, like LeBron, have also leveraged charter school legislation to do so, to the applause of education reformers.
Charters, which are publicly financed but independently managed, give founders the freedom to do more than what a traditional school may provide. So it’s perhaps unsurprising that the launch of I Promise spurred comparisons with the charter and education reform movements, which prize school choice, voucher systems, and competition.
“[T]he fact that this school opened only because of the good graces of a very wealthy, civic-minded athlete underscores the continuing problem with education funding in this country,” wrote education writer Valerie Strauss in her blog for the Washington Post. She gives him props for situating his school within the public school district, as opposed to launching a charter, but argues that this isn’t how civic institutions should be run. “America’s public schools should not have to depend on any wealthy individual or private entity to be sustained or improved.”
Reform advocate and writer Robert Pondisco replied to Strauss’ column with this short-sighted tweet: “As ever, no one asks ‘What about the other kids?’ when white parents move to affluent towns, or pull their kids out of zoned district schools. But it’s a problem when poor black and brown parents want something better — and when someone tries to offer it.”
Related: Disrupting education, the NFL way
It’s clear that LeBron has done his homework. His school offers a considered response to criticisms that have been levied against charter schools — that they impose what outsiders believe black kids need to learn, sidestep structural inequality, reduce the number of experienced black teachers and purposely erode locals’ voting power on school boards.
First, LeBron is a son of Akron. Local communities have learned to be Continue reading: LeBron bankrolls I Promise School in Ohio
