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Black Parents Deliver Workable Plan to Eliminate the Racial Achievement Gap

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The Black Star Project
Phillip Jackson and Black Parents Deliver Workable Plan to Eliminate the Racial Achievement Gap 

Parents and Community Must Be Involved to Successfully Educate Black Students in Chicago Public Schools
 
 
(Chicago) -   Phillip Jackson, executive director of The Black Star Project, and one hundred Black parents presented a plan to the Chicago Board of Education on Wednesday, November 14, 2007.  They asked Rufus Williams, board president, to join them in an effort to successfully educate Black children, as well as all children.  Williams agreed to work with Black parents to fix this problem.  In 2003, less than 30% of Black 11th-grade students passed the Prairie State Achievement Exam in reading.  Five years later in 2007, that number dropped to 27%.  That means one out of four Black Chicago public school students cannot read at grade level as they prepare to graduate from high school.

We've Got To Save Our Black Males At Black Colleges

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Tom Joyner, Guest Columnist
Every year, I visit more than a dozen black college campuses, giving graduation speeches and helping them raise money. It makes me feel good to see all those students' smiling faces, but there's something missing. As much as I like to see all the African-American women graduating from HBCUs, and enjoy getting all those hugs, I'd like to get more firm handshakes from young brothers in caps and gowns. In other words, I'm not seeing enough black male's faces at these graduations, and that's got me worried.

Garvey's Birthday And Lessons In Learning

ImageIt is quite clear that African people in America continue to be mis-educated. This problem is discussed in a variety of ways in conversations everyday in our communities throughout America.



From time to time we should consult the wisdom of those who have addressed this problem whom we may have forgotten. One such person who addressed this problem is the Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey, when he presented his formula for learning in his courses on African Philosophy in the 1930s. I think it is only appropriate to review Mr. Garvey's formula for learning as we continue to build the Reparations Movement and seek specific guideposts to our development as a people.   

Muhammad Nasserdeen -- A Life Dedicated To Black Economic Empowerment

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Anthony Assadulah Samad, Ph.D.
The founder of the most credible black economic empowerment movement in Los Angeles, and maybe the country, died last week. Muhammad Nasserdeen, President and Founder of Recycling Black Dollars (RBD), started a movement based on a very simple premise -- putting the black dollar in another black hand -- and for the last twenty years, advocated for the building of black businesses and black economies nationwide.

Complicity Has Its Cost: An Open Letter to the Mayor of Jena

Black Agenda Report
Dear Mayor Murphy McMillin,

I hear that you're angry. Me too. But it appears our outrage is directed at decidedly different targets.

I, for one, am angry at the three young white men in your town who, last year, hung nooses from a tree after a black student dared sit under it, thereby touching off several months of racial tension. And I'm mad at their parents for whatever it is they taught their kids - or failed to teach them - that would allow their children to believe such a thing appropriate.

But it is not these persons who have elicited your anger.

Will Globalization Destroy Black America?

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The Black Star Project
The lack of response to globalization by Black America is frightening and troubling. While much of the world has adapted to the new-world economy and new-world standards of existence, most of Black America is still operating much the same way it did in the 1950s and 1960s. But now, throughout Black communities in America, there is a whisper campaign by Black people who don't know each other and Black people who live in different parts of the country, saying to each other, "We are in trouble!" We know it and the rest of the world knows it! Black America, as we know it, is in danger of not surviving globalization.

The Role of the Black Elite in Outreaching to the Black Lower Class...

...And How It Relates to the National Leadership Level of the NAACP

Black Commentator
Black Commentator
Recent events affecting the national leadership level of the NAACP brought vividly to my attention the question of the 21st century Black elite role in “outreaching-to-Black-lower-class-crises.” After just under two years as executive officer of the NAACP, Bruce Gordon resigned from that office in December 2006. On March 6, 2007, Bruce Gordon presented a “Memo of Resignation” to members of the NAACP National in which he discussed the core reasons underlying his resignation....

I received a copy of Bruce Gordon’s resignation memo in mid-July and after reading it, I had no doubt about its significance to the issue of the role of the 21st century Black elite sector in “outreaching-to-Black-lower-class-crises.” Or to put this matter in the conceptual terms that are implied in Gordon’s resignation memo, his memo relates to the issue of fashioning a new post-Civil Rights Movement leadership identity for the NAACP, an identity that interconnects that great organization’s historical “civil rights advocacy function” with a 21st century “Black social-crisis reformation function.”