Vision Circle

College Graduates and Affirmative Action

If you listen to some people, Blacks don't graduate at the same rate from college as white students because of affirmative action.

Right now, overall, the percentage of Blacks in college is around 14%.

The number of Blacks with a college degree is around 12% while, for whites, it's about 28%.

I bring this up for one reason:

Study: Most College Students Lack Skills
Jan 19 2:43 PM US/Eastern
By BEN FELLER

Nearing a diploma, most college students cannot handle many complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food.

Those are the sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses, the first to target the skills of students as they approach the start of their careers.

More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks.

More than 50%?
That can't be mainly Black students, can it?

"This Hurts More More Than...."

I never believed the saying, "This hurts me more than it hurts you".

Until now.

Sometimes you have to let your children fail in order to teach a life lesson.

Stand back, say, "You do what you want to do, but it is wrong for the following reasons...". Then, let them go along their way. Just pray that they find their way back onto the right path.

The "kid" messed up the first year of college. No more funding from me until it's determined that the "kid" has proper priorities. Meanwhile, swim on your own. If you sink, you sink.

With love...

Are HBCUs Failing?

From today's NYT:

IN a classroom of white walls and black students, an air-conditioned sanctuary from a sweltering July morning, Devon Moore walked toward the front table with his homework. He had clipped out a newspaper article and now gave a one-sentence synopsis of its subject, safety problems in pickup trucks. He identified a word new to him, "adjacent," and a word that used a prefix or suffix, "faulty." He was less than four weeks from starting his freshman year of college.

Devon had passed up a senior-class trip to Atlanta to enroll in the Summer Academy at Texas Southern University here, and at the outset of the eight-week session, he had wondered why. Having graduated from high school, he figured, "I already knew everything there was to learn." That illusion crashed and burned on Day 1, when the math instructor taught a lesson on slope and even gave an overnight assignment.

For some 185 incoming freshmen like him, and indeed for Texas Southern as an institution, the summer courses in reading, writing, and math form one front in a battle to reverse a disturbingly low graduation rate. Of the students who received diplomas last May, only 6 percent had earned their degree in the normal four years, and only 21 percent in six years. Those numbers, incredibly, reflected improvement from prior rates.

Detroit Catholic schools close, repoen. Race involved?

I graduated from Bishop Borgess High School, right outside of Detroit, in 1987. 92 out of 287, or something like that.

Now? The school itself has barely 200 students total. Earlier in the year the Archdiocese closed down over ten Catholic schools.

Borgess was one of them. St. Martin DePorres, where my brother graduated? Closed it too.

I didn't care that much for my high school. I tolerated it as much as it tolerated me. I got into Michigan DESPITE, not because of, my high school. But when I got the news about the closing I was still set back a bit. Like I didn't have a home to go back to.

But recently someone with deep pockets came to the rescue. DePorres, where my brother went to school? IT's reopening too.

The interesting thing? At least one other school that closed contacted the funder...but he didn't bite.

Tim Vervaecke, former development director for Notre Dame Catholic High School in Harper Woods, said he is puzzled by Maida's acceptance of the Covenant plan even as he rejected proposals to reopen Notre Dame.

The difference? When I went to school, Notre Dame had a black population so small you could count it on a few hands and some feet. If that's still the case now, you're talking about a largely white working class population with suburban options (Notre Dame), vs a largely black working class population with urban options (Borgess).

Cosby calls for $100 billion initiative

I wonder if this was part of a 1-2 punch? I've said all along that it was an inefficient use of resources (among other things) for Cosby (worth a few hundred million himself) to travel to various cities on his Smackdown Tour. Will he now travel to those same cities to mobilize support for his initiative?

(As an aside, usually projects like this are not so much co-authored as they are branded. Cosby probably wrote the introduction. I can't imagine him writing much else. Cornel West has done the same thing with many of his "co-authored" works.)

Out of the Mouths of "Babes"

Students Say High Schools Let Them Down

Students Say High Schools Let Them Down
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY

DES MOINES, July 15 - A large majority of high school students say their class work is not very difficult, and almost two-thirds say they would work harder if courses were more demanding or interesting, according to an online nationwide survey of teenagers conducted by the National Governors Association.

The survey, being released on Saturday by the association, also found that fewer than two-thirds believe that their school had done a good job challenging them academically or preparing them for college. About the same number of students said their senior year would be more meaningful if they could take courses related to the jobs they wanted or if some of their courses could be counted toward college credit.

Taken together, the electronic responses of 10,378 teenagers painted a somber picture of how students rate the effectiveness of their schools in preparing them for the future.

The survey also appears to reinforce findings of federal test results released on Thursday that showed that high school seniors made almost no progress in reading and math in the first years of the decade. During that time, elementary school students made significant gains.

"I might have expected kids to say, 'Don't give us more work; high school is tough enough,' " said Gov. Mark Warner of Virginia, a Democrat and chairman of the governors association, which opens a three-day summer meeting here on Saturday.

"Instead," Mr. Warner said, "what we got are high school students actually willing to be stretched more. I didn't think we'd get much of that."

More at the link provided.

Robbin' Hood

It seems that anywhere one looks, there are countless stories of educators taking from the till. Rich and poor school districts alike are undermined by these thieves. Whether you're poor in DC or paid on Long Island, some teacher/administrator/ is pimping the public for all he/she can get.

It's too easy to "demonize" the students. It's not as if they're blind. They are surrounded by moral decay - and wonder why they should follow rules that are not obeyed by the very people who would be their "educators."

Howard beats Harvard

In this year's moot court competitions Howard University beat Harvard in what was a first for Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

My man Bomani, himself a proud product of Clark Atlanta (where his old man Mack produced a generation or three of black political scientists), chimes in.

There is a pride in attending schools like Morehouse, Howard, Clark Atlanta and even Tennessee State that is as strong as fealty to a Christian denomination amongs Christians with a capital "C". I've been to more than a few black homecomings in my day, and there's nothing like being at the football game and hearing thousands upon thousands of black men and women singing their fight song at the top of their lungs.

But I think that we're making too much of kids' decision not to attend black schools.

The bottom line is that the comparison between Howard and Harvard is apt on one level--Howard is the best black law school, and Harvard is the best non-black law school. But on another level it makes much more sense to me to compare Howard as a law school in general to Wayne State. If a student tells me he got into Howard and Wayne State and wants to know which one he should choose? He should choose Howard. Better networking capabilities, better name recognition, probably a better learning experience. If he tells me he got into Howard and Harvard (or a Michigan)? He should choose Harvard.

The Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund

The Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund

Thurgood MarshallThurgood Marshall successfully argued the 1954 landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, ordering desegregation of public schools. He later became the first African-American appointed to serve as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

The Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund (TMSF) was established in 1987 to carry on Justice Marshall's legacy of equal access to higher education by supporting exceptional merit scholars attending America's Public Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). The Office for the Advancement of Public Black Colleges (OAPBC) created TMSF with Justice Marshall's support. [OAPBC is an information and advocacy unit of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC) in cooperation with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.] Today, 47 schools are members of the TMSF, including many of the nation's largest and most prestigious institutions of higher education.

Graduating StudentsTo date, the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund has awarded more than $50 million in scholarships, capacity building and programmatic support. More than 200 Thurgood Marshall Scholars have graduated and are making valuable contributions to science, technology, government, human service, business, education and various communities thanks to the support they received from TMSF.

Alumni of TMSF member schools include civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson; CBS News "60 Minutes" correspondent Ed Bradley; NFL football great Walter Payton; actress Lynn Whitfield; opera star Jessye Norman and astronaut Ronald McNair, who died when the Challenger space shuttle exploded just after it launched in January 1986.

Thanks to TMSF scholarships and programs, public historically black colleges and universities are preparing a new generation of leaders.

Mrs. Coz Gives Some Cash

Mrs. Coz gives a high school some cash:

Camille Cosby gives $2 million to city school
Wife of Bill Cosby lauds Saint Frances Academy for college acceptance rate

The Associated Press

April 4, 2005, 5:26 PM EDT

The wife of funny man Bill Cosby is making a serious donation to a Catholic high school in Baltimore.

Camille O. Cosby donated $2 million to Saint Frances Academy, where 90 percent of seniors are accepted to college.

"If we are looking for solutions to the failure of our schools to educate our children, we would be well served by studying and replicating what Saint Frances Academy is doing," Cosby said in a press release today.

The press release calls Saint Frances a proven solution in America's crisis-ridden educational system. The gift spotlights the coeducational academy founded 176 years ago by the Oblate Sisters of Providence, an order of black nuns.

Most of Saint Frances' 325 students are black and come from Baltimore's lower-income neighborhoods.

College graduation rates for students from low-income households are generally low, but between 1985 and 1998, more than 70 percent of Saint Frances alumni earned a college degree within six years of graduation.