How to save young black men
Youth violence may not have spiked this past year in sheer numbers. But it sure feels like New York City and the country have been suffering from a fresh, vicious wave of teen violence. The alleged perpetrators have primarily been young men of color; the victims, most of them innocent bystanders, range in age from 5 to 92.
We can do something together to break this destructive cycle, but only if we begin by answering a simple yet profound question: Do we really care enough about our young people to stop them from killing one another?
Young men do not commit crimes simply because they have nothing better to do. Their immoral behavior rises out of specific circumstances.
Sometimes, the motivation is to secure their place in a gang, providing a sense of membership that offers them misguided self-esteem. Sometimes, it comes from a tragically misguided sense of power. Sometimes, it comes from being caught up in drugs. Sometimes, it comes from a sense of despair and hopelessness bred by a broken home and grim life and employment prospects.
If we're serious about building a better city for them and a safer city for the rest of us, we must move from describing and lamenting the problem to applying tested strategies to confront it. Now.
I've had my fill of conferences, panel discussions and commissions convened to analyze the problem. Analysis is valuable. But in a time of crisis, action is mandatory.
That time is now. The statistics are alarming. Eighty percent of those dropping out of high school today are boys of color. In New York City, the graduation rate for young minority-group men is below 40%. The U.S. Education Department tells us these boys represent 80% of those nationwide who misbehave in the classroom, 80% of children diagnosed with behavioral problems and 70% of children with learning disabilities.
Yet no program or national approach is being proposed to systematically address the problems facing these young men.
My experience as an educator tells me there are four pathways to success.
The first: We must create public schools that educate only boys. This is the most difficult and challenging population to educate, especially in our urban schools, and their needs are being inevitably neglected in co-ed environments.
Second, we must focus far more resources on boys at the high school level. The reason for this is that most schools give up on high schoolers because they believe that by the time these young men reach this level, the educational die is cast. We cannot succumb to such defeatism.
Third, we must make sure that these new all-boys' schools are located in and take all students from the most troubled and poverty-ridden neighborhoods. We cannot afford to cherry-pick our students either geographically or academically any longer.
We can no longer content ourselves with creating islands of success - it's time to fix the mainland.
Finally, we must enact an all-hands-on-deck approach to educating young men of color. That means linking teachers, parents, principals, after-school and Saturday programs, mentoring and a high level of community involvement.
To succeed, teens need to know - and be reminded again and again from a wide range of responsible adults - what behavior will and will not be tolerated.
One of my former students said it best: "A young man without a mentor is like an explorer without a map."
If all that sounds touchy-feely to you, it shouldn't. At the Eagle Academy for Young Men, two all-male public high schools located in some of the most difficult neighborhoods in our city in the Bronx and in Brooklyn, the evidence is clear that this type of approach can work.
While less than 40% of boys of color in New York City graduate, 80% of ours do - with more than 80% of those going on to college. Citywide attendance rates stand at 84%. At Eagle, we have an average attendance rate of 92%.
We have 11 more hours of school each week, totaling an extra eight weeks of education annually. More school time equals more education, more stability and less time on the streets.
It costs us much less to educate an individual in our society than to pay for them to be incarcerated.
We must start to focus our resources and our energies on our boys if we are to save a generation and reduce youth violence. Do we care enough to take action and not turn away?
Banks is president of the Eagle Academy Foundation.