Community organizer Tina Hone aims to amplify the voices of underserved kids in Fairfax County

By Emma Brown, Published in the Washington Post February 19 at http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/community-organizer-tina-hone-aims-to-amplify-the-voices-of-underserved-kids-in-fairfax-county/2012/02/07/gIQAEgW7NR_print.html

Tina Hone built a reputation during her tenure on the Fairfax County School Board as an ally of parents battling the superintendent over issues ranging from discipline code reform to later high school start times.

Those whose causes Hone championed, however, were not the people she had envisioned representing — low-income and minority parents whose voices are often missing from public debate over school policy. Instead, they were savvy advocates who knew how to tussle for the concessions they wanted.

“I ended up accidentally empowering people who were already empowered,” she said.

So, 12 days after leaving office last year, she returned to the boardroom to announce the creation of the Coalition of The Silence — a group dedicated to organizing and amplifying the voices of black kids, Latino kids, poor kids and kids with disabilities.

“Too often, in the four years I served on the School Board as its only African American member, decisions were made that impacted these students without input from their communities,” Hone told her former colleagues last month. “The silence will be silent no more.”

Hone, 49, said she recognizes herself in the kids she aims to help. She grew up with her mother on the south side of Chicago. She saw her father, a Yugoslavian immigrant, on weekends. His side of the family pitied her as a poor black kid, the product of unwed parents.

“Everyone in his family described me as a tragedy,” Hone said. “They dismissed me.”

But she excelled in school, eventually graduating from law school at the University of California at Berkeley. She ran for the School Board in 2007 to help other kids write similar success stories — and to make sure no one forgot the needs of poor and minority families, even if those families didn’t attend meetings.

Several of her former board colleagues say she succeeded. She was a passionate and sometimes tearful advocate on issues ranging from summer school cuts to admissions policies at the prestigious Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, where black and Latino students account for less than 4 percent of students.

But she took a central role in other fights, too, and expressed outrage so often that some board members sometimes seemed to tune her out, said Michael Hairston, president of the Fairfax Education Association. He said Hone might be more effective now, with a tightly focused mission and an army of parents behind her.

“She has clout in the community,” he said. “That may help the cause.”

The nascent Coalition of The Silence has attracted special-education advocates, members of the NAACP, Urban League and the school system’s Minority Student Achievement Oversight Committee. It also includes parents who have never been politically active in the school system but see the coalition as an opportunity to speak out.

Among them was Rhonda Mustafaa, a mother of three who moved to Fairfax last year. She said it took six months and a “lot of sweat and tears” to persuade school officials to allow her sons to enroll in gifted and talented classes, despite documentation from their previous school.

“It shouldn’t have been that hard,” she said, adding that she hoped the coalition would “highlight these issues that often go unnoticed.”

A decade ago, the School Board had three African American members and one Latino. Now the only minority member is Ilryong Moon (At Large), a Korean immigrant who came to the United States at 17.

Fairfax County, meanwhile, has become more racially diverse, with a greater proportion of low-income families. Arthur Lopez, an advocate for Latino schoolchildren, said he hopes the coalition can offer perspectives to reflect the range of realities that Fairfax students experience.

Chief among the coalition’s goals is bringing new urgency to achievement gaps — between black and Latino students on the one hand and whites and Asians on the other, and between poor children and their middle-class peers.

Those gaps have narrowed in recent years, but there are still disparities in almost every measure, from Advanced Placement exam scores to high school graduation rates. Latino students in the Class of 2011 were nine times more likely to drop out than white students, for example. Black students were four times more likely to do so.

“What do we think — poor children are just genetically stupid?” Hone said. “Fairfax County ought to be big enough and bad enough to take a kid from nothing and educate him into the highest levels of academic achievement.”

The coalition will advocate for the restoration of programs cut during the recession that are particularly important for kids from poor families, including summer school and year-round schooling.

The group will press for closer examination of what it says is the disproportionate suspension and expulsion of minority students and students with disabilities. And it will campaign for new measures to ensure that all kids can read by the end of third grade, a powerful indicator of future academic success.

They will also aim to dismantle subtle barriers that make it difficult for some parents to chime in on public debates.

For example: People who want to speak before the School Board are asked to register in advance. Sign-up is online and begins at 6 a.m. three days before each meeting. There are 10 slots available for public testimony, and sometimes they’re filled in minutes by savvy advocates who set their alarm clocks.

Hone and her supporters don’t begrudge the work of those more established activists.

But “let’s take a step into reality,” said Lolita Mancheno-Smoak, an Ecuadorean immigrant who heads the coalition’s Latino working group. “How many parents that are holding two or three jobs can do this?”

Families who don’t have an Internet-connected computer at home can’t compete with networks of organized advocates, she said. Unless that changes, she said, “Who are you going to hear? Only certain voices.”

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Tim King: With You When You're Right: The Anti-Deficit View of Black Male Achievement

From Education on HuffingtonPost.com by Tim King can be found at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-king/with-you-when-youre-right_b_1285082.html

Whenever my father passionately agrees with something I say, he shouts, "I'm with you when you're right!" After reading the recent report byShaun R. Harper, Director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for the Study of Race & Equity in Education titled Black Male Student Success in Higher Education, I've come to see a deeper meaning in my father's catch-phrase. The report examines Black male college success in an effort to learn what works, what's right, and to then replicate those factors more broadly. Harper calls this an anti-deficit approach. I call it a change in focus that is long overdue.

Educators love to debate about whether targeted interventions can help at-risk populations, or if factors like poverty and being raised in a single parent household are too powerful to be overcome by schools alone. Some believe there is little to nothing that schools (K-12 as well as colleges) can do to prevent one third of Black men born this decade from spending time in prison; or to keep half of them from dropping-out of high school; or even to address that fact that just one in forty Black males will earn a bachelor's degree by the time they are twenty-five.

This view, however, is wrong. There is much and more that schools and colleges can do to boost high-school and college achievement levels for Black males, and we can start by changing our focus. When we speak solely of deficit-model statistics, we risk flattening the landscape and obscuring the successes of students who are able to achieve in spite of all of the obstacles facing Black males. We also risk perpetuating systems of inequality by turning observation into expectation. Ultimately, our conception about what it means to be a young Black male doesn't just limit our focus, it can limit that of our students as well. The innovation of Harper's research has been to turn this data upside down and, instead of asking what's wrong with the students who are failing, to ask what's right with the Black males who see success. According to many of the subjects of Harper's study, it was the first time anyone had bothered.

In interviewing 219 Black male "achievers" who were either attending or had graduated from college, Harper found the most common thread was that successful Black males are supported, both within their families and in their schools/communities, with relationships characterized by high expectations. Successful Black males often spoke of at least one extremely influential teacher who helped instill belief in their potential, whether or not the young men believed it themselves. These individuals, writes Harper, helped students seek out "educational resources to ensure their success -- tutoring and academic support programs, college preparatory initiatives, and summer academies and camps." According to Harper's study, these commitments to education were solidified in high school and college when Black males joined student organizations -- particularly when they took on leadership roles -- that anchored them to academic communities.

The idea that strong relationships impact student success shouldn't be anything new to educators. But the implication -- that race, background and gender are not destiny, and that focused interventions produce tangible results -- is enormous. Specifically, by taking an anti-deficit approach, we light the way towards discovering and implementing educational interventions targeted to meet the specific needs of Black male students. When the dominant presentation of Black males shows them dropping out of school and spending time in prison, students who might already be unsure of their place within an educational environment feel further pressure to follow the expectation and disengage. This isn't to say that we should ignore or sugar-coat the issues facing poor Black males today. But instead of fixating on these negative factors, we should balance them by holding up as examples young people who have successfully completed their education and earned degrees.

Perhaps the most remarkable finding in Harper's report is that the majority of the Black male graduates he interviewed stated that the biggest factor separating them from peers who didn't make it through college was serendipity. In other words, the achievers didn't view themselves as smarter, more persistent, harder working, or more economically advantaged than their friends back on the block. The achievers felt they were just lucky. Lucky to have people in their lives who were with them when they were right. Everyone should be so lucky. And, with the right kinds of schools, everyone can be.

Why We Must Listen to Young Black Males

Originally posted online at the Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-thompson/black-males-education_b_1263934.html by John Thompson

When my father died, only one group offered more heart-felt consolation than black female teenagers. The most emotional condolences came from my black male students and basketball buddies. Almost all of them volunteered their feelings about intense father-yearnings and often said they were watching for insights about the ways that intact families deal with suffering.

In Tracey and Abby Sparrow's "The Voices of Young Black Men," in Phi Delta Kappan, ten black males expressed feelings similar to those that thousands of my students have articulated. The Education Trust's Amy Wilkins, however, also used her family experiences as evidence to condemn the Sparrow's excellent piece.

No other organization has attacked teachers in a way than has upset me more than has the Education Trust. But, if for no other reason than respect for her father, Roger Wilkins, I will do my best to respond constructively. I believe, however, that Wilkins' attack on "The Voices of Young Black Men" illustrates how No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which embodied the Education Trust's faith in standardized testing and distrust of teachers, has caused extreme unintended damage to poor children of color.

The best way for Ms. Wilkins and other accountability hawks to help black males is to start listening to them. Teenagers' wisdom will confirm the social science which shows that kids learn from people who love them and the key to educational success is building trusting relationships.

NCLB has prompted an unflinching focus on the academic weaknesses of our most vulnerable and isolated children. Instead, we need to build on their strengths. As with other kids, among their greatest assets are profound emotional and moral consciousness, and a desire to communicate and contribute. Yes, I suspect the ten young men cited by the Sparrows were generous, perhaps to a fault, when saying their teachers were not to blame for the failure to undo toxic effects of peer pressure, but Deon, for instance, must have been honest in praising his teacher who took him in when he was kicked out of his home.

Rasean also has a point when claiming that it all comes down to his choices, "if I want to be in the streets, its me. If I want to get an education, its me." We need schools where a full diversity of the adult community can remind Rasean, however, that we are with him.

Damon adds, "if the people they (black males) hang out with are bad ... they stop doing good in school." After listening to hundreds of poor children of color describe themselves as "bad," I continue to hear them out and then reply that it pains me when the students I love describe themselves as "bad." Students, who tend to be their own harshest critics, need adults to help them inventory with much more precision the things that they do that are "good." I am haunted, however, by one such conversation where we discussed the student's belated understanding of his or her potential, but my young friend was stabbed to death an hour later.

Jovante offers the best single observation explaining why we need schools that foster profound conversations. The dropout explains, "If I could have been graded on my conversations and understanding, I would have been an excellent student. At first listen, Jovante sounds like he left school because of an inability to delay gratification. Part of his impatience, however, was due to seeing his mom struggle and he could not wait any longer before relieving part of her economic burden.

I have been privileged to participate in hundreds of conversations with black males that were inspired by Roger Wilkins' wisdom, as expressed in PBS documentaries. Whether I was teaching Black History or Government, I tried to use Roger Wilkins, who contributed so much wisdom to that amazing programming, as a virtual co-instructor. Type "Roger Wilkins" into the PBS web site's search engine, and 5570 links appear. But, in my experience, data-driven accountability has driven most of those types of engaging lessons from inner city classrooms. If it is "not on the test," it is not taught anymore. Teachers are under the bubble-in testing gun and pressured to do non-stop test prep, and not allowed to deviate from their paced, teacher-proof pacing mandates and, thus, we cannot attempt lessons that the students love.

And that brings me back to my complaint with Ms. Wilkins and the Education Trust. She cites seven friends and family members as sources, but complains about an article that cited ten voices. Her organization, however, cites a tiny number of schools that "beat the odds" and combined standardized testing with engaging and respectful instruction. They should listen to the vast majority of inner city teachers and our students who recount the humiliations imposed upon us by test-driven accountability. We can explain why education is primarily an affair of "the Heart," not "the Head." Education must be a conversation. Yes, we must debate the things that we see as wrong with our opponents, but we need our primary focus to be building on what is right with our kids.

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