Education

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This is a message to all high school seniors (and their parents). If you were planning to enroll in college next fall — don’t.

You’ve already had some precious parts of your senior year stolen from you by this virus — sports championships, the prom, graduation. And if you’ve spent the past few years of your life looking forward to starting college in the fall of 2020, it’s understandable that you are still hoping it will all work out somehow, and you’ll be able to go.






Part I: Northside Achievement Zone: Return on Investment doesn’t add up to success

Again in 2014 – using the formula below, NAZ cites, “The social return on investment in NAZ is $6.12 for every dollar invested, with a net benefit to society of $167,467 per participant. The return on taxpayer investment is $2.74 for every dollar invested. Society gains $200,178 in benefits for the average NAZ participant, but spends only $32,711 to implement NAZ solutions with that participant. These benefits result from: Increased net earnings as a result of increased educational attainment, career counseling, and increased productivity ($147,794) Improved health outcomes ($28,281); Increased tax revenues ($15,943); Other public savings due to lower crime rates, reduced need for special education, and fewer public assistance and child welfare cases ($8,160); The total social gains from NAZ total more than $16.7 million in net.


Minneapolis Initiatives and Community Love is Fake

I cannot attack or be upset at EMERGE, or its leader Mr. Mike Wynne for being responsible for $4.2 million dollars and having every vulture in the community at his door step to present a plan for a payday. Mind you, this payday is not for the community – but a continuation of a multiyear, politically-skewed funding stream that accommodates the needs of the few while the needs of the many are left at homeless shelters, welfare lines and the Twin Cities middle-class that live from paycheck-to-paycheck worrying if the drive home will be safe, or if they will become another statistic by a stray bullet from another black man or woman that has lost the luster for life, love and liberty and chosen the streets.


MCTC’s Student Life: Being Colorblind won’t help the majority

I wrote this many years ago. It was originally posted on February 2, 2012 by City College News in Letters to the Editor. With the hiring of Sharon Pierce, President of Minneapolis Community and Technical, there is a need for an immediate change in the politics which reject the success of the black body. President Pierce must reconfigure the Student Life department and bring the basketball program back to the community college; it saved lives.


The Segregation of Cultural Competence in the Training of Teaching Education

If you were to ask me what is the main challenge in educating black males in the K-12 public school system, I would have to answer, “the teacher’s training the teachers.” Although I cannot use this as a generalization because I am product of the Minneapolis Public School system, my experience was a lot different.