This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Sept. 12, 2011 - Imagine driving through a low-income, high-crime neighborhood when you spot a group of hard-looking black teens hanging out on a street corner. It's midday, chances are they're high school drop outs. Would you park and approach them? Would you ask why they weren't in school? Would you ask about their hang-ups, challenges or other aspects of their lives?
"Is there a father in your house?"
"Do you sell drugs?"
"Where do you see yourself in the future?"
Would you ask?
Most of us probably wouldn't. Getting cursed out or something worse would probably convince most of us to keep on driving. We'd go on our way, shaking our heads at the apparent statistics of failure we've just passed.
On Tuesday, Sept. 13, the symbolic car stops for about an hour. The questions are asked by talk show host Tavis Smiley and candidly answered by black boys from Philadelphia, Chicago, Oakland and Los Angeles.
In "Too Important to Fail," a Tavis Smiley special PBS report, faces are attached to statistics, stereotypes become human beings. The camera takes viewers into homes, classrooms, along urban streets and into the lives of the demographic most likely to fail in our nation's schools.
A group of teens locked up in a California juvenile detention center -- one on his way to San Quentin on his 18th birthday -- explain the distractions and interactions that made school irrelevant for them.
A young man, who saw his sister shot dead when he was 8 years old, speaks of the trauma that nudged him along a hazardous path.
Another emotional juvenile detainee recalls the 4th grade teacher who told him he'd never amount to anything.
As part of the team that worked on the e-book that will accompany the PBS show, I was able to review footage from the upcoming special report. The facts that less than 50 percent of black boys graduate from high school and that half of the 2.2 million Americans in prison, on probation or parole are African American males wasn't news to me. Yet, after watching the show, the pre-school to prison pipeline that flushes black boys into jail cells became painfully obvious. The program forces us to acknowledge an undeclared crisis in our educational system. Consider these facts from the Children's Defense Fund's "Portrait of Inequality, 2011" report:
- Black children are two and a half times as likely as White children to be held back or retained in school.
- Although Black students comprise only 17 percent of all students in public schools, they represent: 35.6 percent of all students who experience corporal punishment; 37.4 percent of all students suspended and 37.9 percent of all students expelled.
- Black youth are more than four times as likely as White youth to be detained in a juvenile correctional facility.
- Black youth (10-17), constitute 31 percent of all juvenile arrests.
- Black males born in 2001 are more than five times as likely as White males to be incarcerated some time in their lifetime.
Smiley also talks with dedicated educators and visits schools such as Urban Preparatory in Chicago and the Promise Academies in Philadelphia. We meet boys on the crossroads and some on pathways to promising futures. We learn that the single most important factor in reaching and teaching these boys is a caring adult, one who refuses to let them fail.
"Too Important to Fail" attaches personalities, voices and faces to dire statistics. It dissects the crisis, detailing how racial attitudes, over-crowded and under-funded schools, poverty, lack of positive male role models, inattentive adults and economic stagnation all contribute to a problem that impacts low-income children, specifically black boys.
The PBS special also zeros in on solutions.
We see boys thriving at schools where their social, physical and mental needs are addressed.
We see the empowering difference an African American male teacher or curricula that speak to the lives and experiences of black boys can make.
Most important, the special revokes our spectator license. It illuminates the roles of educators, parents and regular people can play in the reformation of possible statistics. The show allows us to see ourselves and the contributions each and every one of us can make if we dare to declare that black boys are indeed to important to fail.
Sylvester Brown Jr. is a freelance writer and founder of When We Dream Together, a local nonprofit dedicated to urban revitalization.