Education

No Excuses for the President-Elect

Ten years ago I wrote No Excuses to prove once and for all that there was no excuse for the failure of most public schools to teach poor minority children. The great lesson of the last ten years is that all across the county there are schools that provide life-saving educations for children whom the system would deem uneducable, but in order to achieve their outstanding outcomes, these schools often have to buck the system, beat the system, or break with the system altogether.

A great thing happened last night: a young black man was elected President of the United States and now young black men the entire country over can aspire to the highest office in the land. In this country, however, tens of thousands of public schools fail to provide an adequate education to over 13 million low-income children—many of whom are young black men.

President-Elect Barack Obama has one of the finest educational pedigrees in the English-speaking world. He has said he wants every child in America to have the same educational opportunity that was afforded to him. I would argue that in order for his fellow Americas to harness the promise of our great nation and pull this land out of its many current and pending crises, we will need Barack Obama’s leadership to buck, beat, or break with many aspects of our public education system—especially those that continue to trap children of any color in their failing local school.

Come this January, Barack and Michelle Obama will be the parents of two young children living in the District of Columbia, whose local school system is among the very worst in the nation. Given that this is true, I for one would never fault them for sending their girls to the elite private schools in the area as did the Gores, and the Clintons before them.

But Barack Obama’s private choice for his family is not what is at issue. What is required is his leadership within the greatest civil rights struggle of our time. The very lives of young black men, among others, are depending on it.

Will this be the No Excuses president, who like former and current lawmakers of African American descent—Kevin Chavous, Dwight Evans, Howard Fuller, Harold Ford Jr., Rev. Floyd Flake—stands up to the special interests of the public education system so that all children have access to great schools in their own generation?

I for one will be working very hard to see that the promise of our new President-Elect brings about a better tomorrow for a country of schoolchildren now looking to him for change.

This entry was posted on November 6, 2008 at 10:51 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.