This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, K-12 education, postsecondary educational attainment, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, environmental issues, and Ethnic Studies at the state and national levels. It addresses politics in Texas. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
Thanks to Dr. Blandina "Bambi" Cardenas for her wonderful reflection on last Wednesday evening's Zoom meeting with UT Austin Educational Leadership and Policy Professor and Department Chair Dr. Victor Saenz, Texas A & M Professor Dr. Luis Ponjuan, and Executive Director Dr. Emmet Campos and their graduate students—some of whom we in Nuestro Grupo share—associated with Project MALES. Relatedly, the Chronicle of Higher Education just posted a piece titled, "The Male Enrollment Crisis." As Dr. Cardenas well describes, they are doing God's work.
I should add that our gathering began with a wonderful reflection by Dr. Emilio Zamora on what it means to follow one's destiny as a combination of getting swept up by the times and the decisions we all do or do not make to follow those paths that open up before us in our lives. As a happy recipient of one of the few endowed chairs that University of Texas has to offer, his was a soulful, reflective message of hope that allowed us all to celebrate his recent success.
Last Wednesday evening was so incredibly fulfilling, deepening connections to all our work in the Austin community and beyond. Speaking on behalf of Dr. Cardenas and all the members of Nuestro Grupo, the community-based organization that founded Academia Cuauhtli, we could not be happier.
-Angela Valenzuela
A Personal Reflection on the importance of Project MALES
by
Dr. Blandina "Bambi" Cardenas
Last night I had an incredible experience with Nuestro Grupo, convened by the incredible Angela Valenzuela and including a collection of brilliant UT graduate students, faculty, activities and a few of us who occupy the role of ELDERS. What made this so compelling is that we were joined by Dr. Victor Saenz and his colleagues, Dr. Luis Ponjuan and Dr. Emmet E, Campos who have for more than 9 years developed and sustained Project MALES, a school based peer and near-peer mentoring program that encourages and empowers middle and high school male students of color for student success and advancement to post secondary schooling.
Schools are falling FAR FAR short in reaching all males, but particularly males of color. I urge you to google Project MALES to learn more, especially if your professional mission intersects with young men whether in education, criminal justice or human services. Even as we rejoice in the triumphs of so many of our children and recognize that much progress has been made in many areas, we only need to listen to the news, look at the data and take a clear look at the prevalence of violent crime to come face to face that we need to be smarter about how we support all of our children, but particularly males, in their path to constructive adulthood.
This morning I was responding to a memory from Andy Porras, a friend from my home barrio of San Felipe in Del Rio, who recalled how when Little League (LL) first started in DR, it was exclusively Anglo. His Dad went to the LL organizers and asked that they integrate MA boys into the league. He was challenged to organize LL in the barrio and proceeded to do just that. I remember him well.
The teams remained segregated, but we had the benefit of some pretty spectacular African American players like Sidney, Roger, and Larvell Blanks who went on to professional sports careers. The LL games brought the community together and a number of men who would not have normally taken on leadership roles were right there with Mr. Porras, encouraging the boys and serving as parent/mentors to all the boys. I would venture to say that every single one of the boys involved in LL went on to productive lives, many went on to higher education and leadership roles, others went in to the military. I am sure many of you of my vintage can remember heroes similar to Mr. Porras in your communities.
But the truth is that much has changed since that time. So many of our families are led by single females and many do not have the benefit of the extended families and close communities we once enjoyed. As one of those females who raised a son, I stand with these strong, valiant women--but I also recognize how very hard that is, even with all the resources I had in my life. Boys just simply need good, loving, relevant males in their life, especially during the critical middle school years. But more and more our of schools are overwhelmingly female.
Teachers are as much as 85% female. Are they superbly good at the jobs, yes! Do they make great Principals and Superintendents, YES! But we still have to figure out how to best support male students. Our children are influenced greatly, whether we admit it or not, by social media, video games that glamorize aggression, the continued objectification of women and the glamorization of celebrity, visibility and the material. Moving into manhood has to be confusing, frightening and too often isolating.
Project MALES is one exciting, promising program. Undoubtedly other strategies specific to conditions on the ground in our communities would do much good. What is important is for us to not be blind to the need to reach out to boys beyond our own nuclear families, put an arm around a shoulder and say,"Andale Mijo! You can do it! Let me show you how!"
This story is included with an NYT Opinion subscription. Learn more »
LOS
ANGELES — “ANYTHING that makes life harder for women makes life harder
for families and makes life harder for children,” President Obama told an approving crowd last month, at a White House summit meeting on working families.
But this seemingly obvious point is not reflected anywhere in the president’s signature initiative on race — My Brother’s Keeper,
a five-year, $200 million program that will give mentorships, summer
jobs and other support to boys and young men of color, most of them
African-American or Hispanic, and that entirely omits the challenges
facing their mothers and sisters. At a meeting
in Washington last week to announce new commitments to the program from
corporations, school systems and nonprofits, Mr. Obama gave a
perfunctory shout-out to “all the heroic single moms out there,” but did not utter the word “girls” even once.
Mr.
Obama has told us why men of color are his focus. His moving story of
the Kenyan father he knew for a month and the Kansan mother who went on
to raise a president speaks volumes about his passion. But My Brother’s
Keeper highlights one of the most significant contradictions of his
efforts to remain a friend to women while navigating the tricky terrain
of race. It also amounts to an abandonment of women of color, who have
been among his most loyal supporters.
Perhaps
the exclusion of women and girls is the price to be paid for any
race-focused initiative in this era. “Fixing” men of color —
particularly young black men — hits a political sweet spot among
populations that both love and fear them. Judging from the defense of My
Brother’s Keeper by many progressives and the awkward silence of their
allies, the consequent erasure of females of color is regarded as
neither politically nor morally significant.
Gender
exclusivity isn’t new, but it hasn’t been so starkly articulated as
public policy in generations. It arises from the common belief that
black men are exceptionally endangered by racism, occupying the bottom
of every metric: especially school performance, work force participation
and involvement with the criminal justice system. Black women are
better off, the argument goes, and are thus less in need of targeted
efforts to improve their lives. The White House is not the author of
this myth, but is now its most influential promoter.
The evidence supporting these claims is often illogical, selective or just plain wrong. In February, when Mr. Obama announced
the initiative — which is principally financed by philanthropic
foundations, and did not require federal appropriations — he noted that
boys who grew up without a father were more likely to be poor. More
likely than whom? Certainly not their sisters, who are growing up in the
same households, attending the same underfunded schools and living in
the same neighborhoods.
The
question “compared with whom?” often focuses on racial disparities
among boys and men while overlooking similar disparities among girls and
women. Yet, like their male counterparts, black and Hispanic girls are
at or near the bottom level of reading and math scores.
Black girls have the highest levels of school suspension of any girls.
They also face gender-specific risks: They are more likely than other
girls to be victims of domestic violence and sex trafficking, more likely to be involved in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, and more likely to die violently. The disparities among girls of different races are sometimes even greater than among boys.
Proponents of My Brother’s Keeper — and similar programs, like the Young Men’s Initiative,
begun by Michael R. Bloomberg in 2011 when he was mayor of New York —
point incessantly to mass incarceration to explain their focus on men.
Is their point that females of color must pull even with males in a race
to the bottom before they deserve interventions on their behalf?
Women
of color earn less than both white men and their male counterparts from
the same ethnic or racial groups, across the spectrum. Even more
disturbing: the median wealth
of single black and Hispanic women is $100 and $120, respectively —
compared with almost $7,900 for black men, $9,730 for Hispanic men and
$41,500 for white women.
In its defense, the White House points to
the Council on Women and Girls, the Lilly Ledbetter pay equity law and
efforts to increase participation of girls in science, technology,
engineering and math — “it’s not either/or,” says
Valerie Jarrett, one of Mr. Obama’s closest advisers — but those
efforts aren’t remotely comparable to a now $300 million public-private
initiative focused on boys.
Moreover,
the presidential memo setting up My Brother’s Keeper requires
government agencies to monitor outcomes and to recommend best practices
to enhance life chances for men and boys of color. The exclusion of
girls of color from data collection means that there will be fewer
“evidence based” interventions for girls — because there was no interest
in marshaling evidence to support interventions for them in the first
place.
Supporters of My Brother’s Keeper use the analogy of “the canary in the coal mine”
to justify both a narrow focus on individual-level interventions — as
opposed to systemic policies to narrow the persistent racial gaps in
education, income and wealth — and the exclusion of women and girls.
Black boys are the miner’s canary, the argument goes, and so efforts to
save them will trickle down to everyone else.
But
the point of the canary’s distress was to alert everyone to get out of
the mine, not to attend to the canary and ignore the miners. Implicit in
rescuing only the males is the idea that the mine itself isn’t the
problem — and that females are resilient enough to survive the toxic air
or can hold their breath and wait. What needs to be fixed are not boys per se, but the conditions in which marginalized communities of color must live.
