Black Star Project Will Hold Conference To Improve Education For Black Boys

The North Star News & Analysis

Black Star Project Will Hold Conference To Improve Education For Black Boys

Dr. Alfred Tatum

Chicago, Illinois - The Black Star Project, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization that works to improve children's education with the support of students, parents, schools and communities, will hold a one-day conference with top educators to develop strategies and techniques to improve the education of black boys.

Four of the educators who are scheduled to speak at the conference on Saturday May 14 at the Ramada Inn Hyde Park in Chicago are Paul J. Adams, III, founder and president of Providence St. Mel School, a kindergarten to 12th grade school, and Providence Engelwood Charter School; Dr. Jawanza Kunjufu, founder of African American Images, a Sauk Village, IL-based publisher and distributor of Africentric books. Dr. Kunjufu also the author of 33 books, including Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys, Understanding Black Male Learning Styles and Keeping Black Boys Out of Special Education; Umar R. Abdullah-Johnson, a Philadelphia-based nationally certified school psychologist, who speaks on topics such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADD-ADHD) and black boys and classroom management for teachers; and Dr. Alfred Tatum, associate professor and director of the University of Illinois at Chicago Reading Clinic. Dr. Tatum is the author of Reading for Their Life: (Re) Building the Textual Lineages of African American Adolescent Males.

Dr. Jawanza Kunjufu

Dr. Tatum will train teachers to reconceptualize literacy instruction to help black boys read well above the third-grade level.

Adams will share his ideas about creating exemplary high schools. One hundred percent of the students who graduated from Providence St. Mel have been accepted at the nation's best colleges and universities for the past 30 years.

Dr. Kunjufu will teach principals how to build elementary schools that produce academically high-performing black-male students.

And Abdullah-Johnson will show parents how to keep black boys free from disruptive behavior-disorder labels and out of the stream of special education.

Paul Adams, Jr.

Black boys suffer from the lowest grade point average and lowest graduation rates. They also have the highest school suspension and dropout rates, which lead to high unemployment and prison-incarceration rates. Two reports in the last year have addressed the issues facing young black males who attend the nation's schools. In November 2010, the Council of the Great City Schools, a Washington, D.C.-based coalition that represents the nation's largest school districts, called the lack of black male achievement in America a "national catastrophe."

"And Yes We Can, The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males" reported that only 47 percent of black boys graduate from high school. "Currently, the rate at which black males are being pushed out of school and into the pipeline to prison far exceeds the rate at which they are graduating and reaching the high levels of academic achievement," the Schott Report concluded (http://blackboysreport.org/). The Schott Foundation for Public Education is based in Cambridge, Mass.

Umar Abdullah-Johnson.

Phillip Jackson, founder of The Black Star Project, said the conference is an important step in addressing issues that affect black boys. "When we are able to successfully change the trajectory of education for black boys in America, we will have made America better," Jackson said. "We will have made America stronger. We will have made America more humanistic. And if not, all Americans are to blame."

The conference is from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. The cost per person is $275. For more information about the conference, call 773-285-9600 or visit the website www.blackstarproject.org.

Click here to sign up now for this conference!

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