This week was a time to honor the memory of the Rev. Martin Luther King , Jr., and, for many of us, a time to reflect on the changes he worked to bring about. In a recent Washington Post article, former T.C. Williams High School assistant football coach William Yoast reminisced about the events of 1971, when the two Alexandria, Virginia high schools were combined to complete the integration required by Brown v. Board of Education. BoardBuzz readers may be familiar with the 2000 film, Remember the Titans, which depicted this struggle to bring together a racially-mixed group of kids and turn them into a championship team.  Yoast and head coach, Herman Boone (played by Denzel Washington in the movie) had to go way beyond just teaching football plays – they had to change attitudes and “help correct a mistake…segregation.”  The coaches got to know their players on a personal level, meeting their parents, visiting their homes, and doing all they could to foster an atmosphere of mutual respect. The team went on to an undefeated season and won the state championship.

Titans head coach, Herman Boone, will be the Fellowship Speaker on Sunday, April 11 at the NSBA 2010 Annual Conference in Chicago, Illinois, where he will share his own memories of this historic and inspiring experience.

The achievement gap is one of the eduterms that pops up almost daily in articles, blogs, and research reports.  An article written by the California School Boards Association on the topic last June was off our radar screen until recently, and BoardBuzz thinks it’s worth a look.

The article uses California examples that are repeated over and over in every state, district, and school, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, where the color of a student’s skin is a factor in discipline.  While strides have been taken to end this practice in the last 50 years, sadly, it still happens.  But putting those examples out there is important to understand the context of the following statistics.  While we often hear about the high costs of educating students, especially in urban districts, critics say things like, “the cost of educating a student is too high, $10,000 per year is too much.”  Consider this:

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 20 percent of black men between the ages of 24 and 35 have served time. But among dropouts the picture is far worse, with some 60 percent acquiring a prison record by their mid-30s. More alarming, one researcher calculated that incarceration for a black dropout in California was “practically a certainty” by the time he reaches his 50s. Ultimately, each dropout costs the state almost $400,000 in lost wages, taxes and increased social services over a lifetime, the California Dropout Research Project calculated.

The article continues and demonstrates how parents often become the driving force behind change.  Some parents wind up on the school boards leading those changes, while others orchestrate change in other ways using grassroots support and other means to close “the gap.”  The good news for some of these California districts is they are starting to see their efforts pay off on test scores and higher academic achievement for students of color.  The work continues there, and if your district is struggling with similar challenges, California’s districts may have a lesson plan to follow.