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| The Documentary Beyond the Bricks Hits Chicago 10-City Educational Tour Huge Success | | | Change is in our hands
and in the minds of our youth. 
The Beyond the Bricks project looks to be a driving force for social change, especially in the communities where our boys are most vulnerable, by creating a grass-roots debate that challenges all the stake-holders; educators, parents, policy makers, community members & the children themselves, to examine their roles as role models and community citizens. The Project will bring together students, educators, community groups & policy makers to promote positive communication, and to create solution-driven actions
around the problems black male students and their communities are facing. Saturday October 30th, 2010
University of Chicago
International House
1414 East 59th Street · Chicago, IL 60637
If you would like to register for the Community Engagement Workshop for Chicago CLICK HERE Panelists - Mr. Salim Muwakkil, Senior Editor, In These Times
- Dr. Cathy Cohen, Professor of Political Science & founder of The Black Youth Project, University of Chicago; author of Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics
- Dr. Waldo E. Johnson, Jr., School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago; editor of Social Work with African American Males: Health, Mental Health, and Social Policy.
- Mr. Bryan Echols, Executive Director, MAGIC Inc.
- Shayne Evans, Director of the University of Chicago Woodlawn Charter School
- Mr. Jonathan Lykes, Black Youth Project Blogger, University of Chicago Undergraduate Student
- Mr. Trevor Wilkins, Youth Filmmaker, Princeton Undergraduate Student
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| Jail time for Detroit parents that miss school meetings? Hard times call for desperate measures. Something has got to wake up these parents as to the importance of their children's education and if they can't be persuaded with reason, maybe a little jail time will do the trick. | |  Don't Attend Parent-Teacher Meetings? A Detroit Prosecutor Wants You in Jail
 | | Prosecutor Kym Worthy |
By Jam Donaldson, Oct 22,2010 Well, well, well - all of you who blame our current crop of hellion young people on bad parenting, now have a chance to put your vote where your mouth is, at least in Detroit. Prosecutor Kym Worthy has had enough of these little monsters and their trifling parents and wants to propose jail time for the neglectful parents who have shown no interest in their children's education. Worthy's proposal would require a parent to attend at least one parent-teacher conference a year or face up to three days in jail, according to Maria Miller, Worthy's press secretary.
The proposal, which Worthy presented this week at a Detroit City Council meeting, would exempt parents whose children are performing exceptionally well or who are otherwise actively engaged with their children's teachers. Parents who are unable to travel for health reasons also would be exempt. In an interview with George Stephanopolous on Good Morning America, she explained that jail time would not be mandated for simply missing one parent-teacher meeting. A parent would have three chances to make it to the conference and missing a conference could even be replaced with a phone call. In other words, if you can't find time to drag your lard-a*s to the school to talk about your barely-literate child, and then can't even squeeze in a phone call to the teacher in between happy hours, then you should be dealt with harshly. The prosecutor's point is largely that the majority of crime committed by juveniles generally have two things in common. The child has a history of truancy and the parents or parent is not involved in the child's education. I personally think she has a point. This is a proposal clearly designed by desperation. Our cities are just fed up with parents who take no responsibility for their children and their education, because in the end, greater society ends up paying the costs. More simply: When Lil' Man has no parental support in his education, he eventually loses interest himself and ends up hitting me upside the head in order to steal the $2 in my wallet. Children who have no education are destined to be a burden on society whether in the form of public assistance or the prison system. In the 21st century, there is no place for an uneducated child. Our neighborhoods can't check out of the educational process and then scream about 29% unemployment in their communities. Unfortunately, as tempting as this proposal is, you can't legislate parental interest in children's education. Personally, I would love for Detroit to implement this law to serve as a test case for the rest of the country to see what impact it has. Hard times call for desperate measures. Something has got to wake up these parents as to the importance of their children's education and if they can't be persuaded with reason, maybe a little jail time will do the trick. | | ARTICLE HEADLINE | | 
Judy Masterson: Everyone should sweat ACT fallout
Oct 22, 2010 All I remember about taking the ACT eons ago was the sweaty hand that gripped my pencil. My son, who is now sweating his own ACT scores, recently asked about mine. Like I'm supposed to remember such unremarkable numbers from so long ago. How long ago? Jim Croce was singing about Bad, Bad Leroy Brown, and President Richard Nixon was insisting "I am not a crook." While the ACT college entrance exam links the generations through a shared experience of anxiety, it also reveals a devastating educational inequality. The nonprofit, Chicago-based Black Star Project recently publicized national average ACT composite scores for 2010 by race/ethnic group. Asians earned the top score, 23.4, followed by Caucasians at 22.3, Native Americans at 19 and Hispanics at 18.6. Where are African-Americans? Scraping bottom at 16.9. That's an average that parallels and predicts - Black Star argues - low college admission rates, high unemployment rates and high incarceration rates for black youth, and especially for black males. The dismal performance comes as no surprise in the context of a 2010 report by the Schott Foundation for Public Education, which tracks achievement by kids of color in public schools and highlights the resource disparities that exist in schools attended by black males and their white, non-Hispanic counterparts. Schott found that half of the states in this country are graduating black boys at rates below the national average. Illinois is one of the worst offenders. In 2007-08, the overall graduation rate for African-American males attending U.S. public schools was 47 percent. High school juniors and seniors will forever sweat the ACT. But it's the entire country that should rea |
| Black students nationally score at rock bottom on SAT and ACT with no outcry or action from leaders or parents. These scores predict and parallel low college admission rates, high unemployment rates and high incarceration rates. Black students are in trouble! | | | National SAT scores by various categories for class of 2010 - 1721: Students reporting family incomes
of more than $200,000 a year - 1714: Students who had taken AP
or honors courses in natural sciences - 1636: Asians
- 1580: Whites
- 1558: Students who took core curriculum
- 1546: Students who previously took PSAT/NMSQT (a pre-SAT)
- 1523: Boys
- 1510: Students reporting family incomes
of $60,000 to $80,000 a year - 1509: National average
- 1496: Girls
- 1444: American Indian
or Alaskan natives - 1407: Students who did not take
core curriculum - 1400: Students who did not take
PSAT/NMSQT - 1369: Mexican and Mexican Americans
- 1363: Latinos (excluding Mexicans,
Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans) - 1349: Puerto Ricans
- 1329: Students reporting family incomes
of less than $20,000 a year - 1277: African Americans
Source: SAT 2010
National Average ACT Composite Score by Race/Ethnic Group, 2010
Asian American/Pacific Islander 23.4
Caucasian American/White 22.3
American Indian/Alaska Native 19.0
Hispanic 18.6
African American/Black 16.9
Source: ACT 2010 | | Get Your Beat "On" and Get Your Dance "On" and Support The Black Star Project At the Same Time | |
This Thanksgiving, give thanks by giving back to the community! You can support The Black Star Project on Thanksgiving weekend while hearing the finests in global percussive arts! Purchase tickets to see any one of the 4 performances through Global Rhythms 6 and you can receive a 10% discount and The Black Star Project will receive 50% of your ticket price as a donation! Just enter the partner code CHRP-STAR
 Join The Black Star Project at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance
205 E. Randolph Dr.
Chicago, IL 60601 Click here for ticket information and please use The Black Star Project's promo code: CHRP-STAR. |
Join Us for a Business Luncheon The Black Star Project is inviting Black businesses and Black executives, vice presidents, directors, managers, accountants, lawyers, real estate brokers, bankers, construction contractors, retailers, sales associates, or other business people to learn about and to support the work of The Black Star Project. | | | Lunch at
The Black Star Project Wednesday, November 17, 2010 12:00 noon - 1:30 pm 3509 South King Drive Chicago, Illinois  
Please RSVP to Jami by
Monday, November 15, 2010 at 773.285.9600. |
| America Chooses Segregated Schools The drumbeat of resegregation data has played to an indifferent nation since the 1990s. The world's richest nation remains arrogantly comfortable with a system hurtling backward toward a modern apartheid. | | Apartheid in our schools
By Derrick Z. Jackson
Globe Columnist/September 21, 2010
 WHEN PRESIDENT Obama took office in January 2009, the UCLA's Civil Rights Project reported that segregation patterns in public schools "were far worse in 2006 than in 1988.'' Eighteen months later, a new study has shown how much worse the patterns are. Diversitydata.org, supported by the Kellogg Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health, has published figures compiled by Northeastern University researchers that found "gross levels of disparity.'' Mocking any rhetoric about democracy and equal opportunity, the new study says children of color "continue to attend very different schools than white children.'' That is a polite way of saying we are reverting to what the Kerner Commission Report on urban unrest found: "two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal.''
In Chicago, the average black student goes to a public school that is 74 percent black while the average white student goes to a school that is 6 percent black. Boston was among the 10 worst major metropolitan areas in its ratios of segregation for African-American and Latino students, and third for white students having the lowest exposure to fellow students in poverty.
Diversitydata.org found that 43 percent of both Latino and African-American students attend schools where the poverty rate is more than 80 percent. Only 4 percent of white students do. The report said, "issues of persistent high racial/ethnic segregation and high exposure of minority children to economic disadvantage at the school level remain largely unaddressed.''
There is no surprise in these results. The drumbeat of resegregation data has played to an indifferent nation since the 1990s. The world's richest nation remains arrogantly comfortable with a system hurtling backward toward a modern apartheid. Nothing need be done as long as families of means, who are disproportionately white, can secure K-12 educations in the suburbs and private schools, or commandeer elite public schools such as Boston Latin (which killed affirmative action years ago under the threat of lawsuits).
The most curious thing about the interval between the UCLA report and the new one is the silence from the White House. This has led to growing disenchantment from education experts. Richard Kahlenberg, senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, said, "There are school districts out there that haven't given up figuring out legal ways to integrate their schools, but they're not getting any support from Washington.''
Civil Rights Project director Gary Orfield said, "Obama has hired good people, but they're not getting the job done. They're not coming up with imaginative proposals.'' Diversitydata.org research analyst Nancy McArdle said, "We're not seeing the mobility strategies at either the national, state, or local levels that could break these patterns. Proven programs in Massachusetts, like Metco, keep getting cut or level funded.''
It does not take long to realize why there is no leadership yet from Washington. Three years ago, the Supreme Court, in a bitterly divided 5-4 decision, threw out voluntary school integration plans in Seattle and Louisville. The Bush administration, which actively sought to kill affirmative action in education, jumped on the ruling and had the Education Department issue a memorandum saying it "strongly encourages the use of race-neutral methods for assigning students.''
The memorandum made no mention of the opinion in that case of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who voted with the majority. But he also said "the problem of de facto resegregation in schooling'' may allow districts to make a case for "avoiding racial isolation'' with narrowly-tailored plans that include race as one component.
Education advocates hoped the Obama administration would have by now offered its own, more helpful guidance on voluntary integration programs. In an administration that feels that some racial issues are a third rail for an African-American president, this has not happened. Obama's big education speech this summer to the Urban League made no mention of school resegregation. He talked plenty about his Race to the Top contest to fight the achievement gap, but racial desegregation is not part of that fight. Children of color continue to be exposed to disproportionate disadvantages that make the gap almost impossible to close. Until Obama publically connects the two, consider the issue "unaddressed.''
| Click on links below for more information about the great programs of The Black Star Project | | For more information on our other programs and how you can get involved, click on these links below or please call 773.285.9600: |
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