LeBron James’ I Promise Public School Supports Rising Achievement Among Akron, OH’s Poorest Children
LeBron James understands that 90 percent of American children and adolescents are enrolled in public schools. He knows that if you want to support the education of America’s poorest children, you’ll have to do it by improving the experiences of students and teachers in the public schools in our nation’s poorest neighborhoods. Erica Green’s NY Times report on LeBron James’ school in Akron, Ohio, his hometown, is inspiring and measured. It isn’t the story of some kind of one-year, impossible school turnaround, the kind we’ve been led to expect by federal laws and programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Instead it is the bottom-up story of someone who himself experienced educational failure as a young child, figuring out a way to give back.
Now a star in the NBA, LeBron James missed 83 days of school in the fourth grade. He understands that school improvement requires a lot of support. He knows that expectations for improved academic prowess must be incremental, the timeline for measuring improvement reasonable, and acknowledgement for even small successes consistent. Green describes Nataylia Henry, “a fourth-grader (who) missed more than 50 days of school last year because she said she would rather sleep than face bullies at school. This year, her overall attendance rate is 80 percent.” While some school reformers would call a school a failure if this student’s attendance didn’t increase more rapidly, this school celebrates the student’s improvement.
LeBron James’ I Promise School is an Akron City Schools public school; James chose not to underwrite a charter school: “The school’s $2 million budget is funded by the district, roughly the same amount per pupil that it spends in other schools. But Mr. James’s foundation has provided about $600,000 in financial support for additional teaching staff to help reduce class sizes, and an additional hour of after-school programming and tutors.”
James’ vision was for a school to serve young students facing the kind of challenges he faced as a kid. The school is selective: To qualify for the lottery, a student must have been among the school district’s lowest scorers on standardized tests. Nevertheless, the children are making what District officials view as good progress on the Measures of Academic Progress or MAP CONTINUE READING: LeBron James’ I Promise Public School Supports Rising Achievement Among Akron, OH’s Poorest Children | janresseger
