Thursday, May 29, 2008

School Leadership!!!

By: Bill Clinton (*Former President of the United States)
--- excerpt from his book My Life pg. 318

“… I had become convinced that school performance depended more on the quality of a principal’s leadership than on any other single factor. The years ahead only strengthened that conviction …”

B. Brown’s thoughts: Education is one of the most precious things that we all can obtain if we work for it and apply ourselves. Once we receive our degrees and certificates and certifications, we are able to pursue areas that are otherwise closed. But we have also seen amazing cases of very smart and determined individuals that did not finish high school or college create, develop and establish great companies that have impacted local, state, national & international business.

Everything starts at the “head” and when you have an effective leader and leadership team, you will see a school that is running smooth, deals with discipline issues promptly & effectively and high academic achievement.I believe all children have the ability to learn in some capacity. It is the school system’s job to educate our children. Educational Leadership has to properly place students where they need to be so that these students may receive the education that they need. You have verbal learners, you have visual learners. Everything starts with discipline and when a student knows that they have to walk a straight line, and then you best believe that they are going to walk a straight line. Students only do what teachers and administration allow them to do, bottom line!

We must get back to basics and start truly wanting our children to learn and want are kids to be able to think. We need to reevaluate our National Legislation on Special Education and stop putting all these kids in Special Ed. Programs just to pass them through school. The school gets terrorized by these students because these students are allowed special privileges to skip classes and tear up the school. These students do not have the proper foundation of education needed to achieve. Let’s put them in smaller, one-on-one type atmospheres that will help them obtain the basic foundation of learning and watch how they achieve.

Our Leadership in Education must take firm & positive action to improve the performance of our students and schools. Let’s take control of our schools and connect with the parents of these students. Leadership cannot be afraid of parents that have children that do not come to school to learn. Parents and leadership must put students in position to learn at whatever level that child is currently working at, and Leadership must invest more money and resources in Vocational Training and Military Training for our students that need to go another route other than a Liberal Arts-College Prep educational route.

Educational Leadership, I challenge you!!!

Thursday, May 15, 2008

The New Black Youth Culture

By: Bakari Kitwana

For our parent's generation, the political ideals of civil rights and Black power are central to their worldview. Our parent's generation placed family, spirituality, social responsibility, and Black pride at the center of their identity as Black Americans. They, like their parents before them, looked to their elders for values and identity. The coreset of values shared by a large segment of the hip-hop generation - Black America's generation X - stands in contrast to our parents' worldview. For the most part, we have turned to ourselves, our peers, global images and products, and the new realities we face for guidance. In the process, the values and attitudes described above anchor our worldview.

Our parents' values maintain a strong presence within our worldview. But in cases where the old and the new collide, the old - more often than not - is superseded by the new. For example, Black pride is still an important part of this generation's identity. In fact, the hip-hop generation has embraced the idea of Blackness in ways that parallel the Black consciousness raising of the late 1960's and early 1970's. The popularization of the Afrocentric movement from the late 1980's through the 1990's, pro-Black lyrics on the contemporary rap scene, as well as traditional hairstyles (dreadlocks and braids, for example) adopted by many hip-hop generationers all speak to this. Regardless of whether this is a brand of hard-core nationalism or a lukewarm, flash-in-the-pan bou-gie nationalism, the fact remains that when many hip-hop generation youth have to choose between personal financial success at the expense of what the older generation considers communal cultural integrity, individual gain generally comes first.

Hip-Hop Youth, Education and Parenting!