Giving Minority Students a Push Along the Path to Leadership Roles
A Better Chance and similar organizations are wonderful programs -- I support one and a good friend of mine at Northfield Mt. Hermon was an ABC student -- but they certainly speak to the failures of our public schools for low-income, minority students. This woman is exactly right:
The former president of the group, Judith Berry Griffin, worried so much about talented students who had been rejected that she left the organization in 2003 and established a new nonprofit group, Pathways to College, to help them.
THE fact, she said, is that most public middle schools serving urban youth simply are not preparing children for academically challenging high schools, public or private. Even if they were, there are not many seats available in the elite private schools, or enough scholarship money to support the students who need financial aid, she said.
“There are just not enough places,” she said in a telephone interview from her office in Englewood, N.J. “It’s like musical chairs. We simply have to come to grips with the fact that we are throwing away hundreds of thousands of talented children. We don’t even know what talent we are throwing away.”
Rather than helping a few students get coveted spots in a few schools, she now tries to help children in low-performing public high schools, like Barringer in Newark, get the skills they need to attend college by offering after-school writing courses and college guidance. “My real goal is to bring about systemic change in the public schools,” she said.
On a recent cold Saturday, when most children around the city were relaxing after a week at school, 320 boys and girls, ages 10 to 13, filed into Nightingale-Bamford, a private girls’ school in a stately brick building on the Upper East Side.
posted by Whitney Tilson at 12:01 PM
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