My male cousins on my mom’s side of the family are doing okay. One lives in Manhattan with his wife and 3 kids. Another, he moves around a lot, but once when he worked for the state of NC, his salary was like a quarter of a million dollars a year. I think he left to make more money elsewhere. He’s a finance guy. Their parents, my aunts and uncles, were teachers and civil servants raising their kids (my cousins) in Afro-American middle-class bubbles. I like their results and would like to re-create that for my own son.
Education was a part of their success. Not being Humanities majors also helped, as they were math and science people who currently have math related careers. So I attended a meeting about Black education in the city, wondering if I might learn something that I could use to help re-create and re-affirm my son’s membership in the middle class and beyond.
ehhhhhh, not really. But what I did get out of it was a hope that the Charter vs DCPS fight might die and find a way to work together. Kids like my son, who have two involved parents and live economically stable lives, aren’t a priority, or even a consideration. And why would they be when a large number of African American students struggle because of their neighborhood and or home life?
So I will have to go my own way and find a different path for Destructo-toddler, since I’m the only one interested in him. This may even mean figuring out how to create our own bubble.
I’ve been playing around with school data. Charter school data, DCPS data, parochial school data, random group data, and think tank data. I’ve come to the conclusion that we’ll need to start saving money in a 529 for private high and maybe middle school. Next month over at the City Mom’s Blog I’ll go into a little more detail about the reasons why. To sum it up, I’ve concluded the outcome for black males is better in private school. But even that has its own problems, besides cost of tuition.
I feel no one is asking, ‘what is Black academic success and how do we replicate it?’ I feel that the question is ‘how do we support this institution’ with the assumption that if the institution or if a certain profession is supported then academic success will follow.
I’m rambling. I’ll stop here.
