Saturday, March 14, 2009

Good News and Not-So-Good News

From Episcopal Cafe's The Lead comes this update about a tutoring program that's raising reading levels and reducing (we hope) dropouts in the future:

LAST WEEK The Lead mentioned a children's circus performance. Looking more deeply into the program behind the event, we find that the Diocese of NY and Trinity Wall Street have funded a program called All Our Children. The Rt. Rev. Catherine S. Roskam, bishop suffragan, and Joyce Coppin Mondesire, who is on the faculty of the City College of New York and a member of Trinity Wall Street’s vestry, created the program. All Our Children asks that parishes commit 40 hours per year for five years to public education by becoming tutors, advocates, etc. Parishes are already making a difference in partnership with local public schools. Bishop Roskam says of the children, "Since participating in [these programs] their overall grade average has sky rocketed."

Roskam continues, "On a visitation to St. Ann's in the South Bronx in 2005, I was given a a copy of Jonothan Kozol's book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. I was shocked to learn that not only are American schools as segregated as at the time of Brown vs. the Board of Education, but that the worst offenders are not in the south, but in the North, including New York, Michigan, Illinois and California. Schools in poor areas often operate without the basics, without adequate classrooms, no textbooks, inexperienced teachers. It is no wonder that minority students fare so poorly compared with their white counterparts. And most insidious is the school to prison pipeline, by which some states build prisons based on projections from third grade reading scores. As a society we seem reluctant to spend the $15,000 per year to support a child adequately in school but are more willing to to spend the $150,000 per year to keep that same child in prison when the schools fail him.
[Emphasis mine; this applies in Arizona as well.]

"It seemed to me that all the anti-racism training we were doing in the church was meaningless if we could face this level of racial inequity and do nothing. So All Our Children was born."
More information here and here.

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