Famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass once said that it is "easier to build strong children than to repair broken men." But how exactly do you build strong children?
A new report out from UCLA's Black Male Institute explores that question. Researchers surveyed more than 200 black and Latino teenage boys living in L.A. County to find out how they defined success and how they feel they achieved it.
For more on the study, Take Two spoke to Tyrone Howard, director of the Black Male Institute at UCLA.
Highlights
There's an interesting line in the introduction to this report from Robert Ross, president of the California Endowment. He writes that civic leaders tend to suffer from something he calls "deficit attention disorder," focusing only on what's broken. Can you explain that?
I think Dr. Ross' point is so critical because I think we get conditioned to always see the glass as half-empty and not seeing that it is half-full. And I think, when it comes to black and Latino boys, we really do that.
I think we are so locked in on what we think they can't do, what they don't do, where they fall short, where they're not reaching certain standards, that I think part of what we have to do is re-shift our focus and change our paradigm to not look only at those challenges that many of our young men have, but to also identify, look at and further understand how they're striving: how they're showing uncanny resilience, and how they're overcoming lots of obstacles to do some really amazing things. That story's not told as much as it needs to be.
You identified about 200 of these young Latino and African American men. What sort of questions did you ask them? How did you go about ascertaining how they define success and how they achieved it?
We basically wanted to find out from them, you know, tell us your story. You've been identified by teachers, or administrators, or counselors as young men who really were doing well in school in multiple ways. Not just with test scores and grades, but also in terms of leadership, in terms of volunteering in their communities, in terms of working jobs as well as being full-time students. So we asked them, 'how do you define success in your eyes?' And they gave us a lot of different ways in which they define success.
We wanted to find who they credited their success to and we found some really powerful things. These young people felt like they were the products of other people's expectations. That they had supportive and loving and nurturing homes. That there were parents or grandparents who played a big role in their success. There were also school personnel in that success: teachers and administrators who really saw something in them that many said they didn't see in themselves.
I think it speaks to the importance of expectations. Whenever we set these expectations at high levels for any group of students, especially those who have been historically marginalized, I think we can begin to see that they will rise to the occasion.
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