At Crenshaw High School in South Los Angeles, senior Marquis Andrews (pictured above) says he is struggling to focus and wishes he could drop out like his friends.
Indeed, nearly half of all black males won’t graduate from high school, according to a recent report from the Schott Foundation for Public Education.
Crenshaw High School seniors Gregory Michael Williams and Torreon Johnson interviewed staff and students about students’ attitudes toward school as a part of a Social Justice and the Law Academy at the school in South Los Angeles.
Students and teachers seem to agree; while the situation is far from ideal, strong determination can, and will triumph.
Legacy Roundtable is a cadre of educators, business people and community leaders dedicated to developing educational opportunities for African American males.
For the past three years, the group has focused on improving math skills and increasing college enrollment. The main objective of the organization’s Accelerated Summer Mathematics Academy (ASMA) is to have 500 African-American scholars complete Calculus by 2012.
[iframe http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=104818667044325056541.000463ec6deb168a1de39&ll=34.264894,-118.058567&spn=0.867651,0.601844&output=embed&s=AARTsJrQt-F0CkQdIZL7XdQH6IpU8sJlHw 425 350]
In Los Angeles County, high black male dropout rates are not confined to the inner city. Some of the county’s highest dropout rates for black boys are far, geographically, from inner city areas such as Sout L.A. It’s a problem that has spread far and wide.
By Amber Mobley
The stereotypes are all over Crenshaw High School: black boys in saggy britches talking smack to each other constantly and texting in class; teenaged fathers; boys on house arrest sporting ankle bracelets that hug the outside of their white tube socks and nestle against their name brand sneakers like the latest fashion accessory.
There are the masses that come to school late with McDonald’s in-hand and the ones that don’t come to school at all.
And coming to school means crossing gang territories that rival Crenshaw High’s purported affiliation, a dangerous feat for all regardless of their involvement, said Crenshaw High Dean William Vanderberg.
These are the students you hear about on television and in news reports.
These are the statistics: Across the nation, more than half of black males did not receive diplomas with their cohort in the 2005-06 school year according to the 2008 edition of the Schott Foundation’s 50 State Report on black males.
These are the casualties of the education system.
With a graduation rate of a mere 57 percent, Crenshaw High can seem like your stereotypical “urban” school. And in Alex Caputo-Pearl’s Social Justice and the Law Academy at Crenshaw High, Caputo-Pearl sees an even harsher reality: nearly two-thirds of his students may not be graduating in May he said.
But some of his students, short on credits and often times even shorter on attention, in this newly-formed academy still have goals for after high school: community college, big name schools careers in everything from law to being business owners, social work and maybe even real estate brokers, and big dreams that — statistically speaking — are out of their league.
And despite recent improvements of 5.4 percentage points since 2003, black students continue to lag behind whites and Asians in becoming academically eligible to enter California’s two public university systems, according to a recently-released study by the California Postsecondary Education Commission.
With black males, the statistics are worse: the four-year dropout rate for black males in high school is 46 percent, according to 2006-07 statistics released from the California Department of Education.
Experts blame this state-wide statistic on students’ shortages of required courses and inadequate counseling at high schools, such as Crenshaw High, in low-income, high minority areas, according to a Los Angeles Times article.
So while the statistics may be counting them out, Caputo-Pearl and many of his students still dare to try to be counted in another kind of statistic: those who achieve the American Dream. They dare to hope for lives beyond the borders of South Los Angeles.
Whether or not they’ll get there, well, that’s the struggle.
Black boys in our nation’s public schools aren’t learning. A disproportionate number of them are dropping out of high school and going to jail.
