Recently, two Black men were arrested for sitting in a Starbucks here in Philadelphia. They were waiting for a friend who arrived shortly after his friends had been handcuffed. The men were supposedly “causing a...
Archive - April 2018
“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” -Frederick Douglass When I think about this quote it often leads me to reflect on the trauma that our Black boys face growing up. To help nurture strong...
Some of the most contentious decisions in a city often involve schools that are struggling – many for generations. While everyone can give solutions that they believe (but haven’t often seen) work, there is a lot of...
Time and time again, I’ve heard educators say that the lack of parental engagement in their schools is what is holding them back. But, when I listen to families, in Philly or Chicago or any other urban city, I hear about the...
Hildebrand Pelzer III, the principal of a public school, lays out the hard, slow work of improvement—and what it takes to turn schools around. On tough days, I want to close my school and start a new one from scratch. But I’m...
A recent study, reported on in the New York Times under the headline “Extensive Data Shows Punishing Reach of Racism for Black Boys,” and facilitated by researchers at Stanford, Harvard, and the Census Bureau, found that...
In third grade, I remember learning about Martin Luther King. We listened to his “I Have A Dream Speech.” We read about Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycotts. We looked at photos of the marches in Selma. We were...
It’s March, and all over the country, students and their families are waiting anxiously to receive emails and letters about the status of school applications; parents furtively asking one another if they’ve received word from...