“You don'thave to be a Black male educator to teach Black students. You just have to loveBlack male children and believe that they have unlimited potential andopportunity, and they’re just as smart and capable as anyone else and caring.And it’s hard. Sometimes you have to go the extra mile,” said Michael Tubbs, anextraordinary young leader and teacher who is part of the Children’s DefenseFund youth leadership development movement. “It takes school, church,neighborhood, government, partnerships. It takes relevant curriculum. It takeslove. It takes trial and error. It takes being creative. It takes messing up.It takes getting back up. It just takes everything we're not doing now.”
MichaelTubbs earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees last year from StanfordUniversity, where he became a Truman Scholar, interned at Google and the WhiteHouse, and was awarded the Dinkelspiel Award, the highest award given to aStanford undergraduate student. A few months later he became at age 22 theyoungest city councilmember in the history of his hometown of Stockton,California, earning more than 60 percent of the vote. Today, in addition toserving on the City Council he is an adjunct professor at Stockton’s LangstonHughes Academy. He shared lessons fromhis first year of teaching and many years of mentoring young Black men at aJune symposium on “Black Male Teens: Moving to Success in the High School Years”convened by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and CDF at the National PressClub. This was the third in a series ofETS-CDF symposia on Black males. The first addressed their needs from 0-9; thesecond the middle school years. A final symposium on the college years isscheduled for June 2014.
Michael’s own backgroundmight have made him just the kind of Black boy for whom some people would havehad very low expectations. He spent his childhood in poverty and was born to ateenage mother and a father who has been incarcerated Michael’s entire life.Yet the adults who surrounded him still helped make education a priority forhim from the very beginning, aided by the support of some safety net programsthat are under siege in budget battles today:
Number one, my mom,
grandma, and aunt, even though they weren't educated, they valued education and
created a space where excellence was a requirement. It was never okay to bring
home a B, despite the fact my mom had me at 16. She said, ‘I don't care what I
did. You have to get A’s because you can
get A's.’ I would say the second thing ... a lot of these government
entitlement programs under fire are the things that made me who I am, so it was
Head Start that the government paid for that put me on the path ... to reading at
an early age. It was people from the
church giving me books when I was little that taught me how to read and read at
a very high level. It was quality magnet programs in public schools that really
pushed me to achieve academically, and then it was Pell grants that helped me
get to college. So I think all these government programs we fight for are
really important and are really testaments to why I'm on this stage today.
These kinds of criticalsupports in childhood helped shape the young man Michael went on to become -- astudent who succeeded despite cultural, economic, and academic challenges inone of the nation’s 1600 high-poverty low-performing high schools known as dropout factories. He was the only Black male in his rigorous InternationalBaccalaureate high school program, an undergraduate who soared at Stanford, anda rising political and educational leader already for whom the sky is thelimit. But who knows how many millions of other Black boys have not had thechance to live up to their potential because they never received the same kindof family, community and government support?
This wasthe latest in a series of ETS-CDF symposia focused on best practices forhelping Black boys succeed at different developmental stages. At this symposium policymakers,practitioners, and advocates focused on research, strategies and college- andcareer-readiness models aimed at creating high schools where opportunities forBlack males prevail. Speakers highlighted the unique challenges facing these youthsand examined the most effective practices schools and communities should adoptin order to help close achievement gaps as well as foster college and careersuccess.
Michael was part of the openingpanel, “Lived Experiences: Young BlackMale Leaders Set the Stage,” chaired by Cedric Jennings, the director of theD.C. Council's Office of Youth Programs and the subject of the nationalbest-selling book A Hope in the Unseen:An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League, by Pulitzer Prizewinner Ron Suskind. It chronicles Cedric'slife growing up in Washington, D.C., and attending Brown University beforegoing on to pursue master’s degrees from Harvard and the University ofMichigan. Michael and the other young Black male leaders on the panel werepassionate about continuing to expand opportunities for Black young men andsharing their ideas about what worked -- and what didn’t -- in their own educationalexperiences.
Michael is working to changethe odds for children in Stockton today -- and he was joined at the symposium by overfour hundred others who are changing the odds for Black boys across thecountry. I will be sharing theirsuccesses with you in future columns because we know how to make a positivedifference in the lives of so many poor Black males. But we have to close thegap between what we know and what we do. We don’t have to keep doing the things we’re getting wrong. We can learnfrom what’s working. As Michael says, one starting point is to changeeveryone’s expectations about what young Black boys can become: “We have tochange the whole narrative ... We have people in these schools teaching thesechildren who have no understanding about what these children can be becausethey haven't been exposed to what the children can be, just like the childrenhaven't been exposed oftentimes to what they can be ... Dream big.” Raisingexpectations combined with raising resources to get children what they need isa powerful recipe for Black boys’ success.