Atlanta School Board’s Courtney English says cure for dropouts begins in infancy

courtney english

Courtney D. English was hailed as the youngest elected official of any capacity in the history of the city of Atlanta when he was appointed to the Board of Education at 24 years of age in 2009. Since then, the Morehouse College and Columbia University graduate has gone on to help implement a number of wide sweeping changes. His recent election as the Chair of the Board of Education makes him one of the youngest to ever hold this position.

So when the Atlanta native and Frederick Douglass High School grad speaks about children’s education, people tend to listen — and they did very intently at the Morehouse College “Black Men Summit” in Atlanta.


“One of the things that I see as a policy maker is really the total system approach to lowering the high school drop out rate, particularly for black males.”


“This is a critical conversation,” English began as he spoke about how to curtail and greatly reduce the repugnant high school drop out rate. “If I had to go to one thing, when we talk about the drop out problem, [it] really starts before a kid walks through a door for school.

“One of the biggest focuses for me as the president of the Atlanta School Board and our new superintendent is early childhood education. And that’s different from pre-K. We want to start at (age) zero,” English continued.


English, who was a founding teacher at B.E.S.T. Academy, the first all-male school in Atlanta in 60 years, said that it is critical for the board and superintendent to work with parents before the child is even born, “making sure that we’re providing proper prenatal care;  that’s first and foremost,” English said resolutely. ” Then, we want to make sure that the child has a productive learning environment and begin to prepare them in the forward stables of their minds.”

One of the biggest reasons for high school drop out rates, English says, is that kids become discouraged because they begin school behind their white counterparts and the chasm widens as the years go along.

“The achievement gap that people talk about between whites and blacks and poor and more affluent backgrounds, when it’s really a literacy gap, and that gab begins long before the kid hits the door for school,” he said. “And so when we talk about the pipeline (from high school to prison), it really begins much earlier than that because the kids can’t read by the third grade and they’re coming to school 30,000 words behind or a million words behind.”

“So we have to have a different conversation about true universal access to early childhood education,” English demanded.

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