The Shackles in the Shadows of History - washingtonpost.com

The Shackles in the Shadows of History - washingtonpost.com: In 1619, 12 years after Jamestown's settlement, two British privateers sailed into the James River with African captives for sale. The Africans had Portuguese names; they apparently knew Christianity, according to John Thornton and Linda Heywood, a husband-and-wife team of Boston University historians. Those first Africans came from the kingdom of Ndongo, now Angola, which had been penetrated by Portuguese missionaries and traders who soon stopped praying with the Africans and started selling them.

The settlement of Jamestown would ultimately wither and die, but the American form of slavery born with those first Africans would endure for nearly 250 years. Slavery and America grew up hand in hand, and the African imprint on the new nation is evident to this day -- a fact being highlighted in Jamestown events this weekend in the ongoing commemoration of the Virginia settlement's 400th anniversary.

A Magnetic Force Dynamic Chief Has Driven Boom at UMBC

In his 15 years as president, Freeman A. Hrabowski III has so transformed the University of Maryland Baltimore County with his exuberant, forceful character that people on campus invented a word for it: Freemanized.

Once an afterthought even within the state, a commuter school overshadowed by other campuses, UMBC now grabs national attention. Hrabowski has elevated research and entrepreneurialism on campus and helped lift minority and low-income students, especially black math and science majors, to the highest levels of academic achievement.

Black Caucus Founder Parren Mitchell, 85, Dies - washingtonpost.com

Black Caucus Founder Parren Mitchell, 85, Dies - washingtonpost.com: Parren J. Mitchell, 85, a Baltimore civil rights activist who became Maryland's first black member of Congress in 1970, died May 28 of complications from pneumonia at Greater Baltimore Medical Center. He had been living in a nursing home since a series of strokes several years ago.

A former head of the Congressional Black Caucus and chairman of the House Small Business Committee, Mr. Mitchell worked for years to assure minority participation in contracts let under federal public works programs. He was an original sponsor of legislation approved in 1977 guaranteeing minority contractors a share in public works spending. He also sponsored an amendment to the 1982 Surface Transportation Assistance Act requiring that at least 10 percent of the funds provided under the law should go to small businesses owned and controlled by socially and economically disadvantaged people.

White students drawn to black colleges - U.S. News - MSNBC.com

White students drawn to black colleges - U.S. News - MSNBC.com:... Private, historically black schools cost an average of $10,000 less per year than their traditionally white counterparts, according to the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education.

'Increasingly black and brown world'
The head of the association says lower costs are not the only thing the schools have to offer. Whites who attend the schools are preparing for an “increasingly black and brown world,” said Lezli Baskerville, the association’s president and CEO.

“If you want to know how to live in one, you can’t grow up in an all-white neighborhood, go to a predominantly white school, white cultural and social events, go to a predominantly white university and then thrive in a world that is today more black, more brown than before,” Baskerville said.

White students say they’ve taken valuable experiences from their time at black colleges. Skin color, the students say, is much more of a factor away from the campuses than it is on them.

Higher Education Demographics: University Demographics: Statistics

Higher Education Demographics: University Demographics: Statistics: Twenty-seven percent of undergraduates at Title IV schools are racial minorities; foreign student enrollment in graduate school (12 percent) is significantly higher than in undergraduate (3 percent); and Blacks generally have the lowest six-year graduation rates of any racial group and have a disproportionately high enrollment in for-profit colleges.

This snapshot of the demographics of the nation’s colleges and universities comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, which recently released “Enrollment in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2005; Graduation Rates, 1999 and 2002 Cohorts; and Financial Statistics, Fiscal Year 2005.” The information is based on Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System collection of data from more than 6,457 Title IV institutions and 83 administrative offices in the United States.

Bowie State Students: N-Word Not Welcome Here

Bowie State Students: N-Word Not Welcome Here: "Residents of historically Black Bowie State University’s all-male residence halls are accustomed to watching the news on their communal flat screen television every night between 5:00 and 8:00 pm. They often discuss each other’s entrepreneurial plans. What they aren’t used to is hearing each other use the “n-word.”

“Now if someone says ‘nigga’ everyone will stop and look,” says William “Butch” Tweedle, resident director of Kennard Hall.

Disturbed by how often he heard residents in the 84-bed dormitory using the n-word to greet and refer to each other, Tweedle, three years ago, called a hall meeting.

That meeting led to what is now the “N-Free Zone.” When students move into Kennard or Holmes Hall, the 127-bed all-male freshman dormitory, they become part of a community where casual use of the n-word isn’t cool."

A School Frees Low-Income Boys From the Pressures of the Streets

... A day spent at Jackson shows how it has flourished — by cultivating a culture where boys consider the feelings of their classmates, a sensitivity American culture has too often demanded only of girls.

A nonsectarian school, Jackson now has 116 low-income students, 51 percent of them black, 33 percent Latino and 16 percent Asian. The generosity of foundations and donors covers 92 percent of the school’s bills; though tuition is $12,500, parents pay only a small fraction, and classes are prep-school small.

A visitor is immediately struck by the fact that the boys, wearing ties as if they were corporate lawyers, greet visitors by looking them squarely in the eye and offering a handshake. There’s none of the roughhousing common to middle school hallways.

“You can be ticked at somebody, but nobody has a right to lay a hand on anybody,” is Brother Brian’s watchword.

An eighth-grade discussion of Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” led by a teacher, Kelly Moloney, was on a level that college professors might envy, laced with comparisons to earlier readings like “Macbeth” and “Native Son,” and with every student engaged. When students discussed the symbolism of the flight by the leading character, Milkman Dead, David Marino speculated that “flight is more of a metaphor for going to heaven.”

Challenge Index -- Race, Culture and Education - washingtonpost.com

Challenge Index -- Race, Culture and Education - washingtonpost.com: What roles do race and gender play in how a student does in school? Do black students face ridicule from their peers if they try too hard? What effect do stereotypes have on actual performance?

Prof. Angel Harris of the University of Texas Dept. of Sociology was online Tuesday, May 22 at 2 p.m. to discuss what he's learned from his studies of racial achievement gaps.

Use the link to read the entire transcript.

Parents of Disabled Child Win Ruling - washingtonpost.com

Parents of Disabled Child Win Ruling - washingtonpost.com: The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that parents of disabled children do not have to hire lawyers to sue school districts when they attempt to ensure that their children's special needs are adequately met.

The court found that the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which guarantees children a 'free appropriate public education,' gives rights to parents as well. Parents may represent themselves in federal court when disputes arise between them and a school district over what is best for the child, the court held.

Prisoner literacy: inmate education: prison education

Prisoner literacy: inmate education: prison education: A recent study suggests new prison inmates are more educated than cohorts from a 1992 study, and more of their parents are college-educated. In fact, the literacy scores of Black and Hispanic inmates were higher than those of Black and Hispanic high school dropouts living in society.

The National Center for Education Statistics recently released “Literacy Behind Bars: Results From the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy Prison Survey.” The survey was administered to more than 18,000 adults (16 years and older), living in households in America. An additional 1,200 surveys were also dispensed to prison inmates at the state and federal levels, a sample representative of the nearly 1.4 million adults in prison. The measurement tool assessed literacy through straightforward tasks completely by the test taker. Literacy was measured in three categories — prose, document and quantitative literacy — on a scale of 0 to 500.

Study: Prejudice worsens physical and mental health, ups heart attack risk

Feeling unfairly treated may make you ill - Mental Health - MSNBC.com: NEW YORK - People who report a sense of being unfairly treated face a greater risk of suffering a heart attack and are in worse overall physical and mental health, researchers from the U.K. and Finland report.

The findings underscore that health is a societal issue as well as an individual concern, Dr. Roberto De Vogli of University College London, the study’s lead author, told Reuters Health. “Addressing injustice in the social environment in society can be a way to promote health and to reduce health problems, especially among people in lower socioeconomic positions,” he said in an interview.

Report: Few minorities on U.S. news talk shows - Race & Ethnicity - MSNBC.com

Report: Few minorities on U.S. news talk shows - Race & Ethnicity - MSNBC.com: WASHINGTON - The influential Sunday news talk shows aired by U.S. television networks are overwhelmingly dominated by white men, with women, blacks and Latinos having little presence, a liberal media watchdog said Monday.

About one in five guests on the programs was female, said the group, Media Matters for America, which studied four network Sunday news talk shows over a two-year period.

Blacks made up about 7 percent of those appearing on most of the programs, while Latinos made up about 1 percent, Media Matters said. In all, about seven out of every eight guests in 2005 and 2006 were white, the group said.

Minority population tops 100 million - Race & Ethnicity - MSNBC.com

Minority population tops 100 million - Race & Ethnicity - MSNBC.com: ATLANTA - The number of people in the United States from ethnic or racial minorities has risen to more than 100 million, or around one-third of the population, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report released Thursday.

The minorities figure stood at 100.7 million, up from 98.3 million a year earlier. Within that, the Hispanic population was the fastest-growing, at a rate of 3.4 percent between July 2005 and July 2006.

Hispanics were also the largest minority group, accounting for 44.3 million people on July 1, 2006, or 14.8 percent of the overall U.S. population, which, according to census data released in October 2006, stood at more than 300 million.

About One In Three Americans Is A Minority - News Story - WRC | Washington

About One In Three Americans Is A Minority - News Story - WRC | Washington: ... America is becoming more diverse, with minorities topping 100 million for the first time in 2006, according to Census Bureau figures being released Thursday. About one in three Americans was a minority last year, a slight increase.

In 2006, the nation was 67.6 percent white, non-Hispanic; 15 percent Hispanic; 13.4 percent black; 5 percent Asian; 1.5 percent American Indian or native Alaskan and 0.3 percent Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander. The percentages add up to more than 100 in part because some people identify with more than one race and Hispanics can be of any race.

Finding Ways to Better School African American Boys - washingtonpost.com

Finding Ways to Better School African American Boys - washingtonpost.com: A new report by a statewide task force that paints a grim picture of how African American male students are faring in Maryland's public schools and universities recommends strengthening mentor programs, encouraging more black men to be teachers and providing more academic support for those who need it.

Two of the more controversial proposals are suggestions to place troubled students at black-majority high schools into single-sex classes and to encourage nonviolent offenders to be mentors to students.

Push to achieve tied to suicide in Asian-American women

... Asian-American women ages 15-24 have the highest suicide rate of women in any race or ethnic group in that age group. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for Asian-American women in that age range.

Depression starts even younger than age 15. Noh says one study has shown that as young as the fifth grade, Asian-American girls have the highest rate of depression so severe they've contemplated suicide.

As Noh and others have searched for the reasons, a complex answer has emerged.

First and foremost, they say "model minority" pressure -- the pressure some Asian-American families put on children to be high achievers at school and professionally -- helps explain the problem.

"In my study, the model minority pressure is a huge factor," says Noh, who studied 41 Asian-American women who'd attempted or contemplated suicide. "Sometimes it's very overt -- parents say, 'You must choose this major or this type of job' or 'You should not bring home As and Bs, only As," she says. "And girls have to be the perfect mother and daughter and wife as well."

High School Dropout Problem “About Class and Race,” Says Summit Participant

High School Dropout Problem “About Class and Race,” Says Summit Participant: WASHINGTON, D.C.
With only half of minority students graduating high school on time, U.S. secondary schools need more funding, rigor and accountability to address the “silent epidemic” of school dropouts, national and community activists said at a special Washington, D.C., conference Wednesday.
Organized by MTV, the National Governors Association, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others, this “national summit” sought answers to a dropout dilemma that prevents many African-American, Hispanic and American Indian students from ever accessing higher education. While policymakers offered plans to improve a lackluster track record, it was a group of students and community activists who provided stark pictures of the problem.

Asian Panel Debunks “Model Minority” Myth

Asian Panel Debunks “Model Minority” Myth: College Park, Md.
When early news reports about the Virginia Tech shootings last month indicated the alleged perpetrator was Asian, Yixin Li, a University of Maryland freshman, said he prayed the shooter, Seung Hui Cho, would be Korean or Vietnamese and not a fellow Chinese.
That distinction didn’t matter to some observers because “after the incident people started calling me Cho,” recalled Li Wednesday at a forum, “The End of the Model Minority Myth: Reflections on the Virginia Tech Tragedy from Asian American Perspectives,” sponsored by The University of Maryland, College Park Asian American Studies Program and others.
Li said family and friends didn’t want him to attend the forum, preferring that he stay quiet, but he attended so that he could get an understanding of why he was facing the personal backlash from the tragedy.
“I was praying, which I knew was wrong of me, that he was not Chinese. I was praying that he would be Korean or Vietnamese,” said Li, an economics major. But he added, any wholesale comparisons between himself, Cho or any other Asian is wrong.

We Want to be Included, Say Women Tribal Leaders

We Want to be Included, Say Women Tribal Leaders: Four women from American Indian tribes came together in a panel organized by Spelman College on Wednesday to ask Americans not to forget about them in conversations about diversity and race.
As part of the Fourth Annual Leadership Conference for Women of Color, Spelman featured its first Women to Watch panel about American Indians, called “Funny, You Don’t Look Indian.”
“If this was going to be a true representation of women of color, we felt the need for having Native Americans on the table,” says Dr. Jane E. Smith, the executive director of Spelman’s Center for Leadership and Civic Engagement.
The American Indian women said they have no questions about their identity in a world where it seems everyone else is questioning who they are.
“We know where we come from, who our ancestors are, and we have great pride in that,” said panel moderator Beverly Wright, president of the consulting firm Soaring Feather, which is based in Martha’s Vineyard. “We were there before it [the Vineyard] became the ‘in’ place for rich families to vacation in.”

USA TODAY Salutes the Nation's Charities - USATODAY.com

USA TODAY Salutes the Nation's Charities - USATODAY.com: Hispanic College Fund
The Hispanic College Fund (HCF) is dedicated to developing the next generation of Hispanic professionals. Its mission is to provide Hispanic students with the resources needed to attain successful careers and become community leaders. Through programs like the Hispanic College Fund Scholarship Program, Hispanic Youth Symposium, Latinos on the Fast Track (LOFT), HCF Connections and the Hispanic Young Professionals (HYP) Leadership & Development Program, the Hispanic College Fund is enriching lives of our future leaders.

Andrew Young hailed in honor of 75th birthday - Race & Ethnicity - MSNBC.com

Andrew Young hailed in honor of 75th birthday - Race & Ethnicity - MSNBC.com: ... Young, who turned 75 on March 12, was lauded for his role in the civil rights movement, as a U.N. ambassador and as mayor of Atlanta. He was also praised for a legacy that is still being written, as he continued to champion democracy, peace and prosperity for people around the world more than four decades after his friend, Martin Luther King Jr., was killed.

Angelou, who was also an SCLC lieutenant recruited in 1959 by King, was coquettish in her recollections of younger Young.

'Each time he spoke, the bells rang,' Angelou said. 'Each time he appeared, he brought the dignity, the sincerity, the devotion and the dedication of African-Americans brought here in 1619.'

She thanked him for being a brother and recited her poem 'And Still I Rise.'

Documenting American Indian Success

: In light of their new report on American Indian college student achievement, leaders of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium were stunned to hear that the U.S. Department of Education cited “insufficient data” and “results not demonstrated” as explanations for a huge cut for tribal college funding in President Bush’s proposed 2008 education budget. Tribal colleges are funded under Title III of the Education Act, which provides aid to developing institutions. Bush has proposed cutting their funding by 20 percent, to $18.6 million.

AIHEC says the new report, “American Indian Measures for Success,” is an innovative, comprehensive data instrument that defines and measures the success of American Indians at the nation’s tribal colleges. The report, presented to a number of federal agencies this year, details the systemic and culturally based approaches to American Indian student success, according to AIHEC President Cheryl Crazy Bull. The report, she says, includes information that numbers alone cannot convey. In addition to standard information on student enrollment, retention and graduation, AIMS examines how effectively tribal colleges work to meet their individual missions, which include revitalizing local cultures and improving communities’ economic and traditional well-being.

First Woman Selected for Top Computer Science Award

First Woman Selected for Top Computer Science Award: The Association for Computing Machinery has named Frances E. Allen the winner of the 2006 A.M. Turing Award for her work in computer science. Allen’s research has helped improve computer capacity for problem-solving and has enhanced the use of high-performance computing. Named for the British mathematician Dr. Alan M. Turing, the award is considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in computing and gets financial backing from Intel. Allen is the first woman to receive the award, which also comes with a $100,000 prize.

Microsoft Awards $5 Million Digital Divide Software Grant To National Urban League

Microsoft Awards $5 Million Digital Divide Software Grant To National Urban League: National Urban League officials say the $5 million software grant announced by the Microsoft Corp. will focus largely on education and tutoring assistance administered nationally by 102 local affiliates of the nation’s oldest and largest Black organization. Last month, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, announced the grant at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash., during the 16th annual Blacks at Microsoft Minority Student Day.

The grant is supposed to help further the National Urban League’s goal of empowering Black communities.

“We’ll be able to better assist the over 600,000 African-American children and families we serve nationwide and help them to acquire the necessary skills to close the digital divide that still exists in America today,” says Marc H. Morial, the National Urban League’s president and CEO.

Urban League officials say rollout of the three-year, $5 million grant will provide the organization with the technology system assessments and software to improve its adult and youth programs as well as to encourage kids to pursue careers related to math and science. The grant will also provide the organization’s office with tools to integrate data systems and more effectively communicate with affiliates and volunteers across the nation.

Fighting Environmental Racism

: BATON ROUGE, LA.

The National Conference of Black Mayors unveiled a partnership Friday with environmental consultants Envirosource and Historically Black Colleges and Universities aimed at studying the impact of landfills on African-American communities.

Robert Bowser, mayor of East Orange, N.J. and president of the National Conference of Black Mayors, said that 2,800 of the 3,000 landfills in the U.S. today are located in African-American communities.

“There’s a lot that can be done, as far as cleaning up the landfills that we already have,” Bowser said. The National Conference of Black Mayors is having its annual convention in Baton Rouge this week.

In addition, Bowser said the HBCUs and minority-owned Envirosource are looking at alternative disposal methods that are a lot cleaner that traditional landfills. The catch is that the alternative disposal methods require more volume than smaller cities can generate, he said.

Educators re-examine who belongs in special ed classes - CNN.com

Educators re-examine who�belongs in special ed classes - CNN.com: WASHINGTON (AP) -- Many children in special education classes may not belong there, the government says.

A new policy is aimed at intervening early with intensive teaching to give struggling students a chance to succeed in regular classrooms and escape the 'special ed' label.

There are nearly seven million special education students in the United States, and roughly half have learning disabilities. Most of those are reading related, such as dyslexia or problems in processing information.

The Bush administration, following passage of a broad special education law, issued rules in October that rewrote the way schools determine if a child has a learning disability.

States have largely relied on a 1970s-era method that looks for disparities between a child's IQ and achievement scores.

'The fundamental concept here is unexpected underachievement,' said Tom Hehir, a special education expert at Harvard University. He said a child with a normal IQ who is lagging behind in learning would generally be identified as having a learning disability.

Fewer Americans call themselves multiracial - USATODAY.com

Fewer Americans call themselves multiracial - USATODAY.com: The share of Americans who identify themselves as multiracial has shrunk this decade, an unexpected trend in an increasingly diverse nation.

About 1.9% of the people checked off more than one race in a 2005 Census Bureau survey of 3 million households, a meaningful decline from two surveys in 2000.

'There's no overall explanation' for the drop, says Reynolds Farley, a research scientist at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research who analyzed the trend.

The data show that the nation continues to wrestle with racial identity even in the face of growing diversity, he says. 'We're a society where we still basically assume everyone is in one race,' he says.

Study: HBCU Graduates Earn Less Than Black Graduates of TWIs

: "A study by two economists gives more reasons for Blacks to attend traditionally White institutions over historically Black colleges and universities, further fueling the debate about the relevancy of the HBCUs.

The economic gains earned by Blacks who attended a historically Black institution, as opposed to Blacks who attended traditionally White institutions, declined dramatically from the 1970s to the 1990s, according to “The Causes and Consequences of Attending Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” by Drs. Roland G. Fryer and Michael Greenstone.

Fryer says data he and Greenstone collected seems to lean toward improvements by traditionally White institutions in educating Blacks being a big part of the reason why the decline in wages for HBCU alums exist.

“We tried to explore a lot of ways [this could be possible] in the papers,” says Fryer, an assistant professor of economics at Harvard University. “We looked at funding. That’s not it. Then we looked at the types of students. That’s not it. The only thing that seems even plausible is that historically Black institutions have not declined, it’s that traditionally White institutions have enhanced in educating Black students.”

Just the Stats: Can High School Counselors Prevent Drop-Outs?

Just the Stats: Can High School Counselors Prevent Drop-Outs?: A new report by the National Center for Education Statistics suggests a strong relationship between the number of credit hours a high-school student earns as a freshman and their likelihood to drop out. With this information, could school administrators identify potential dropouts early enough to intervene?

Based on an analysis of the outcomes of a cohort of students who were in the 10th grade in 2002, the report, “Course Credit Accrual and Dropping Out of High School,” “examines the timing of dropping out and its relationship to the number of credits earned by high school students.”

In 2004, roughly 5 percent of the 10th graders from 2002 dropped out, 2 percent were still enrolled, 12 percent graduated early or received their GED and 82 percent graduated from high school.

Researchers found that the dropouts had failed to earn enough credit hours in their freshman year to put them on path for an on-time graduation. The trend continued each year, with students failing to earn the same amount of credits as graduation-bound students.