These kids deserve far better

Pathways to Education Graduates - Celebrating

Attleboro, Massachusetts, and Uniondale, New York, have something in common. Both are safe, with annual crime rates around 3.5 per thousand residents.

Uniondale, situated on Long Island near New York City, is home to many successful middle class families. Of the households with children, 73% are headed by married couples. The poverty rate is about 6%  and average household income is over $70,000.

Attleboro, quite similarly, has  67% of households with children headed by married couples and an average household income of about $64,000. The poverty rate is below 7%.

Attleboro and Uniondale are remarkably alike in important ways: low crime rate, solid average income, low poverty rate, and a high percentage of children living in married households.

But while Attleboro is predominantly white, Uniondale is  one of the most successful majority black communities in the nation.

Contrast this to Chicago, a majority minority city, where the annual crime rate is over 10 per thousand, more than three times higher than Uniondale. The average household income is $47,000 and nearly 30% of its residents live in poverty.  And those are the averages. For many, it is much worse.

The Chicago Tribune reports that the poverty rate for female-headed households soars to 40%, and over half of the city’s children live in such households.

What is the social cost arising from the cauldron of Chicago’s streets?

In the days since the lamentable events of Ferguson, nearly 200 victims have been shot and killed in Chicago, almost 800 wounded. Seventy five percent of these victims are black, as were the great majority of shooters.

For the year to date, 362 poor souls shot and killed, 2,484 wounded. There is a war going on in Chicago that rivals  our losses in Iraq and Afghanistan. And when you add in Detroit, and Boston, and Los Angeles, and Washington DC, and Miami, the statistics are truly staggering.

Activists, academics, and protestors (ably abetted by the media) have stoked the narrative that there is a war on blacks being waged by police. There is indeed a war being waged on blacks, but it is being prosecuted within their own communities. The greatest danger to a young black male in Chicago is another young black male. While this may be an uncomfortable concept, it is a truth revealed in Department of Justice statistics.

Imagine being a young urban black child, where every outing risks a credible threat of death or serious injury. Imagine the effect on his or her psyche, the damage it causes. The social costs are enormous, the moral stain on us for not responding is shameful. How can our leaders, political and activist, not speak out?

Some are responding.

Carolyn Acker, then the Director of the Regents Park Community Health Center, saw that the children of the neighborhood were its future. They would become its doctors and nurses, administrators and lawyers. But to do so, they would need an education, and the dropout rate in the community was an abysmal 56%.

She collaborated with others to create a program called Pathways to Education in 2001. Soon after Pathways went into action, the dropout rate began to drop – to 10%. This was an enormous success. The Pathways program has been replicated to several other communities with similar results.

How does Pathways operate? It is based on four pillars: counseling, academic, social, and financial.

For counseling, each student who signs up is assigned a counselor. The counselor regularly checks in with the student to see how they are doing. The counselor maintains high expectations and provides the student with encouragement and suggestions for achievement.

In the academic arena, tutors are provided and sessions are mandatory unless the student maintains a grade average above 70%.

The social aspect consists of regular activities with peers where students get to interact socially with other like-minded, academically achieving kids. They will have fun, learn new skills, and develop hobbies in a nurturing environment.

The final pillar is financial, in which students are given financial aid for public transportation. To the kids, it is a big deal to be able to ride the bus to school. But if their grades don’t stay up, or if they skip school, the aid is incrementally reduced.

The students participating in this program are amazingly successful compared to their cohort. They are graduating high school, going to college, and getting good jobs.

Pathways is a great success, albeit an expensive one.

But let’s stop and think a moment. Imagine a child in Uniondale growing up in a household with a caring mother and father. She would be counseled to succeed and expectations would be high. Her parents would assist academically, sitting down to help with homework. She would be enrolled in sporting teams, school band, church choir, and other social activities. And her parent would certainly support her financially.

Pathways works because it operates in place of the family, filling the role of the parents.

Here’s our call to action. Our policies and programs, designed to help and with all the best intentions, have devastated the black family. It is time to think constructively, with open, honest debate and determination to find a better way.

These kids deserve far better. To fail them is a sin.