An African-centered success story

One premise of African-centered schools is that "black kids are brilliant, and black kids can learn - and those are two things that are seldom a part of the larger society's view of black children," says Lisa Delpit, executive director of the Center for Urban Education & Innovation at Florida International University in Miami. She tells of an African-American middle schooler who asked why she was being taught to multiply, believing black people only add and subtract while white people learn multiplication. "Children internalize the society's views," Ms. Delpit says.

That's one reason Jennifer Gordon, chair of the parents' School Advisory Committee, is so happy with her fourth-grader Johnny's experience. "I'm a single parent, and this school has provided much more in terms of self-esteem than I could ever do at home," she says. "I want him to be a leader in the world. To know who he is. To know that he counts."

Parents learn about the philosophy and the expectations at the school and sign a pledge of support. Staff training helps everyone from custodians to teachers become effective members of "the village." Grandparents help in the classrooms. The community involvement has helped Chick achieve 99 percent attendance and a near-total absence of serious discipline problems.

"We know it is really important that every individual who works here should believe in what we are doing ... and believe that every child is capable and can learn," says Audrey Bullard, the principal who led Chick's transformation into an African-centered school. She's also mother to coordinator Bullard.

"In order for the academics to prove to be successful, as defined by state testing, students need to have a clear sense of what's expected of them," Ms. Bullard says. "So behavior and character development is so important.... If they go in with an attitude of, 'I want to show the world what I know,' then they are more apt to put forth a greater effort."

Since the black-power movement of the 1970s, African-centered education has attracted both criticism and praise.

"The danger is, when [such schools] are in the hands of people who are very ideological ... they teach stereotypes," says Gary Orfield, cofounder of The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. But when it's not ideological or exclusionary, it can be a fine option, like any magnet-school theme, he says. Research suggests that "if you've got a community of teachers who really work together effectively ... and care about the kids - those things are really important."

In general, integrated schools are best, Mr. Orfield maintains, especially now that American society is so multicultural. But many urban districts continue to have a high concentration of minority students. Despite a decades-long desegregation lawsuit that ended in 2003, 70 percent of Kansas City's schoolchildren are African-American and only 13 percent are white.

The court-ordered approach in Kansas City focused on trying to attract white students by creating magnet schools with top-notch facilities and themes ranging from technology to Latin. Meanwhile, African-American teachers and families at Chick, then a neighborhood school, decided to take academic improvement into their own hands. Leaders of the African-centered movement were not pleased with the message they believed had been implied: that in order for black children to do better, they needed to wait for white role models to come sit next to them in school.

When its test scores began to rise dramatically, Chick became a magnet school. Educators have visited from as far away as Japan and Brazil, Mr. Bullard says.

Page: 1 | 2 | 3