At a time when there were only 25 students in a classroom, imagine if there were only 20 new textbooks at the start of the school year. It would not be stretch for you to figure out what students received the used textbooks. So with used textbooks, along with teachers that didn’t want to engage you, it becomes easy to imagine how poor student achievement began to plague African American children. This, compounded by parents who were now disengaged, and clergy, community and business leaders who were no longer welcomed in the schools, was the recipe for a cataclysmic failure in student achievement.
No African American children attended majority White schools in 1958. However, by 1988, the nation’s public schools were more than 40 percent Black. While some will say this was a monumental achievement in integration, I make the argument that it destroyed African American student achievement and stakeholder engagement in our public schools.
The Quality Schools movement was born to allow stakeholders to take ownership in the outcomes of their neighborhood schools.
Before Brown v. Board of Education, in order for our children to receive a quality public education, the African American community had to be trailblazers in innovation, flexibility, accountability and community engagement.
If you believe this to be true, then you will understand why I believe that the African American community is really the founder of the public charter schools concept. Because with only a handful of schools in a city to educate our children, it had to be “all hands on deck,” and failure was not an option in the African American community before integration.
—david mitchell, founder and CEO of Better Outcomes for OUR Kids
