The Black Star Project, USA

Doubles for Black Boys; Long-Term Gains for Kids Leaving Poor Neighborhoods; Blacks, Latinos and Poor Borrow Most Money for College; Scho

The Black Star Project, USA

Suicide Rates Doubles for Black Boys Long-Term Gains for Kids Moving From Poor Neighborhoods Blacks, Latinos and Poor Borrow More for Colloege Scholarships for Athletes with Asthma Atlanta Public Schools Did Well Without Cheating Positive Black Men Needed Mass Black Male Graduation Links: The Black Star Project's website: blackstarproject.org Black Star Journal: blackstarjournal.org Become a Member: Click Here Make a donation: Like us on Facebook: Follow us on Twitter: Suicide Rates Doubled Among African-American Boys  Ages 5 To 11 Since 1993 (What is it that African American boys see about the world in which they live and their futures that causes them to kill themselves?  And to kill others?) Image: John Vachon/Wikimedia Commons May 23, 2015 Researchers have found that rates of suicide among African-American children, specifically boys, have doubled since 1993, surpassing for the first time the rates among white children which dropped over the same period. The study published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics Tuesday, was based on data obtained from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which gives a breakdown of causes of death in 657 cases of suicide among children ages five to 11 between 1993 and 2012, 84 percent of whom were boys. Researchers were surprised to find that suicide rates among black boys ages five to 11 nearly doubled between 1993 and 2012, rising from 1.78 to 3.47 per million. This happened while the rates among white boys of the same age group decreased from 1.96 to 1.31 per million. Jeffrey Bridge, epidemiologist at the Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital, Columbus, Ohio, who led the study, told CNN that the results were surprising because suicide rates have historically been higher among whites across the age groups. "Suicide rates in the U.S. have historically been higher among white individuals across all age groups. We were very surprised to see higher suicide rates among black children over time." "I was shocked, I'll be honest with you. I looked at it and I thought, 'Did we do the analysis correctly?' I thought we had made a mistake," he said. To confirm the trend, the researchers waited for a year until the 2012 data was released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The data only confirmed the trend they had observed. Click Here to Read Full Story Click Here to See JAMA Report Long-Term Gains Seen for Kids Who Leave Poor Neighborhoods Researchers cite role of school leniency By Liani Heitin May 19, 2015 The younger children are when they move out of impoverished neighborhoods, the better their long-term outcomes are, including college-attendance rates and later salary levels, according to two studies released this month. Those results may derive in part from the likelihood that children in low-poverty neighborhoods are more liable to be given second chances in any number of situations, said a researcher who worked on one of the studies. "There are less permanent consequences for youthful indiscretion in better neighborhoods and modestly better schools," said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard University and co-author of a new analysis of the Moving to Opportunity program, a federal anti-poverty initiative from the mid-1990s in which families were randomly selected for vouchers to move to higher-income neighborhoods. The relative leniency of schools and authorities in lower-poverty areas may have a positive effect on educational outcomes even if the academic programs don't differ significantly, researchers suggested. Previous analyses of the Moving to Opportunity program were unencouraging. Moving from a high-poverty to lower-poverty neighborhood, they found, had no positive effects on parents' earnings or on students' academic achievement. But the new analysis by Harvard University researchers Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Mr. Katz indicates that the community where children live has a significant impact over time-and the longer they live in low-poverty neighborhoods, the more opportunities they'll have as adults. The researchers linked the data from the Moving to Opportunity experiment-which was conducted from 1994 to 1998 and included about 4,600 families from Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York-to federal income-tax records. They found that children who moved to low-poverty neighborhoods before age 13 earned an annual income as adults that was $3,477, or 31 percent, higher than their counterparts who stayed in high-poverty neighborhoods. They were also more likely to attend college and attend a better college, and less likely to live in a low-income neighborhood as adults as well. The women were also less likely to be single parents. "This overturns the conventional wisdom on the effects of the Moving to Opportunity study," said Adam Gamoran, the president of the William T. Grant Foundation, which funds research on how inequalities affect U.S. children, though it was not involved in the new studies. "It's leading us to believe that moving to a new neighborhood does have effects on longer-term outcomes." Click Here to Read Full Article Minorities and poor college students are shouldering the most student debt By Danielle Douglas-Gabriel May 19, 2015 A day away from crossing the stage at Montclair State University's graduation, Evangelia Stone reflects on her journey from community college, the "amazing" professors she met along the way and the $50,000 in student loans she took out to get a bachelors' in sociology. Stone, the first in her family to graduate from college, qualified for the maximum award in Pell Grants, the federal program that provides money for the country's poorest students to attend college. The free aid was enough to cover all her costs at Atlantic Cape Community College in southern New Jersey, but it barely paid for a quarter of the more than $20,000 in-state tuition, room and board at Montclair. The school offered Stone no scholarships or grants, but she received several thousand dollars from the New Jersey Commission for the Blind and Visual Impaired. It wasn't enough. "Nobody should have to spend this much money, period. But in-state students going to public universities...the fact that I'm leaving with this much debt is absurd," said Stone, 25, who plans to pursue a master's degree in social work at Rutgers University this fall. "Higher education is supposed to be a public good, not just a private purchase that wealthy students get to enjoy." Amid state cuts in higher education funding and modest increases in federal grant aid eclipsed by rising tuition, African American, Latino and low-income students like Stone must borrow to get a degree, according to a new reportfrom liberal think tank Demos. Eighty-four percent of college students with Pell grants graduate from four-year public schools with debt, compared with less than half of students without the need-based grants, the report said. While less than two-thirds of white graduates from public schools borrow, four out of five black graduates take out loans for college. And black students who do borrow come out with more debt than their peers. "We have now entered a new phase where student borrowing is now the primary way young people pay for college," said Mark Huelsman, a policy analyst at Demos and author of the report. "This shift places an unequal burden on communities that have historically been denied an opportunity to gain and leverage wealth." Click Here to Read Full Story  An estimated 100,000 Black teachers were retired, fired, removed from or "structured out" of education in America since 1990.  After the "Atlanta Massacre", few Black students will want to become teachers and schools won't want to hire Black teachers.  Is the plan working? - Phillip Jackson, The Black Star Project -------------------------------------------------------------------- The Atlanta Cheating Scandal:  Students Were the Victims, but the School System Suffers Too By Eric Cooper and Co-authored by Phillip Jackson May 19, 2015 Eric Cooper Over the last 13 years, Atlanta students have made significant progress on another test -- the widely respected National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), administered through the U.S. Department of Education and considered the "gold standard" of educational testing in the United States.  In a comparison of grade 8 reading assessments for Black students in Atlanta, in Georgia and in the United States between 2002 and 2013, the U.S. percentage of Black students at or above grade level increased from 13 percent to 16 percent, and the Georgia percentage increased from 14 percent to 17 percent. But Atlantic Public Schools' Black student scores increased a stellar 10 points, from 5 percent to 15 percent. If these NAEP scores are any indication, then Atlanta educators under the leadership of former Atlanta Superintendent Beverly Hall, who died of cancer in March, did something right. We're not spending enough time figuring out what it was and how other districts can duplicate those results. "The bottom line in this entire discussion," Smith wrote, "is that for the most part, the gains for Atlanta schools from 2003 to 2011 are for real!" Besides, if the APS system had massive cheating, as prosecutors claimed at trial, then it would follow that grades would have spiked during the cheating, then gone back down once it stopped. After a small dip, however, scores continued to rise. We believe the groundwork, momentum, and high expectations for the students and educational reforms instituted in Atlanta had something to do with that. Other schools and school districts can benefit from Atlanta's teaching methods and experience. What worked on the NAEP ought to be shared. Approximately 100,000 African-American teachers have retired or been terminated since the late 1990s. Yet experts continue to call for more "minority" teachers in the classroom who can better relate to an increasingly diverse student population. The Atlanta cheating case may be responsible for just a handful of those terminations, but the damage it does to effective teaching and our system of justice is profound. Click Here to Read Full Story and to "Like" Our Page Positive Black Men Asked to Volunteer as Mentors  at  Wentworth School 1340 W. 71st Street Chicago, Illinois Any Day in May 2015 Call 773.535.3394 Recommend a Black Male High School Graduate for The Mass Black Male Graduation Ceremony on Satruday, June 20, 2015 with Keynote Speakers Attorney James Montgomery and Hip Hop Artist Jasiri X. Call 773.285.9600 to register the young Black men at your high school and in your life.

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