Mind the Gap?

Mind the Gap?

Bridging some gaps….

Cam Newton led, as a quarterback of the Carolina Panthers, his team to the Super Bowl 2016. Thanks to his youthful playfulness and beautiful friendly smile, Cam Newton gave the City of Charlotte,

where the team has its home base, a strong boost in identity, as well as a new sort of excitement around the game – he made professional football more family friendly and fun for all.

Cam Newton doing "the dab"

At the same time, he is one of eight black quarterbacks playing in the National Football League (NFL) that has a total of 32 teams. While 67% of all the players in the NFL are black, only a quarter of all quarterbacks are black. Being a black quarterback is still not mainstream, and black quarterbacks are also subject to petty scrutiny. For example, the Charlotte local newspaper allowed a discussion in its editorial on Cam Newton’s “typical African American dance moves” he made after scoring a touchdown that to some were “provocative”. Luckily it didn’t take long for the rest of the country to ridicule the Charlotte local paper for allowing such an unsubstantiated and cliché discussion. At one point, Cam Newton probably had enough and stepped up to the plate to declare that he was finished talking about race.

Race, however, is still an issue in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the heart of the Southern USA also known as “The Bible Belt”. Despite the open proclamations of Christian faith and principles by many in their conversations, weekly routines, and charitable donations, ironically, Sunday remains the most segregated day of the week in this city. Segregated churches reflect a segregated city, city planning and lack of public places where diverse people can meet randomly. Segregation and underlying racism are a reality in this city.

Race is not a problem because of skin color, but because of all the side effects that come with it and which can be best summarized in “the gap”. The socio economic gap, the educational gap, the gap in access to transportation, the gap in income level and wealth, the gap in home ownership, the gap in family stability, the gap in access to opportunities and jobs, the gap in treatment by police force, the gap in jail detention, the gap in mental illness, etc.

The gap is, or rather the gaps are, a result of America’s history from the birth of the country all the way up to past the civil rights movement until now. It is a complicated issue. As opposed to, for example, Austria and Germany’s ”de-nazification” after World War II, there is barely a mention of restitution or even the existence of a word such as “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” (facing and dealing with history consciously and proactively) on how slavery and subsequent treatment needs to be tackled in unison by a country. There is no real system-wide effort. Laws that were passed during the Civil Rights movement are being challenged with voter ID laws and other voter restrictions.

However, there is, in typical American “free market” and democratic fashion, thankfully, an awareness of the problem and individual effort to try and creatively and constructively end the trend of the increasing gap.

Below, strong individuals in Charlotte, North Carolina who are consciously working on decreasing the gaps, some on a small scale and some on a larger scale, but all with a significant footprint.

Please meet:

Reverend Brenda Tapia

The morning after the first riots on dark highways of Charlotte, N.C., protesting the shooting and killing of a black man, Keith Scott, by a CMPD police officer, Reverend Brenda Tapia was sipping a cup of tea at a sidewalk café on Main Street of the quaint college town Davidson, NC, 20 miles north from Charlotte, NC.   I spotted Reverend Tapia like a garden of Black Eyed Susans, bright and resilient in a patch of Piedmont red clay; she was wearing an earthy yellow and brown African shirt that soaked up beautifully her dark skin and contrasted perfectly with the red bricks that lined the streets and houses of pedestrian-friendly down town. 

We were groggy from the news of the night before. Quickly, she informed me that a perturbed friend had called her to ask, “What are you going to do about kids and the riots?” She shrugged her shoulders, leaned forwards and said, “I have been working on that problem my whole life”.

Shortly after that, as if on cue for a celebrity watch, four separate Davidson college functionaries stopped by our table, greeting Reverend Tapia, and chatting briefly. Although in retirement from her Davidson duties for ten years now, Reverend Tapia remains a legend.

Reverend Tapia is a Davidson native. Apart from going to Howard University for a degree in psychology, then working as a counselor in Washington, DC, later attending Johnson C. Smith Seminary and working as a pastoral counselor in Atlanta, GA, and before being ordained in the Presbytery of Charlotte in Charlotte, NC, she has called Davidson home most of her life.

She grew up in a large extended family in strictly segregated Davidson. Today, college life and culture spills into the downtown – outsiders have brought in tolerance to diversity that Reverend Tapia initially worked very hard to weave in from within just 20 – 30 years ago. Back then, a “plantation mentality” still hung over the town and college;  “Yes, Missah” she added quirkily to make sure I understood her point. Her great grandmother was born a slave and remained on until she was eight years old in Davidson.

While she grew up in a protective extended family, where as the first grandchild she was “spoiled rotten” with love, her first vivid memories of town life in Davidson are of racism, some of it including Ku Klux Klan violence. She didn’t even know what was going on and her family tried to shield her from the truth, but one of her first memories was getting the newspaper from the newspaper receptacle one morning as a five year-old in the 1950s, and seeing a burning cross planted in their front yard, highly visible facing the main road that lead in and out of Davidson.

The week leading to this event, her uncle was a local host of an international church meeting. He was the only local person in the entire group – as a result, he was also the only black participant. This “odd” situation confused the white folks in a town where everyone knew everyone – why was this black Davidson man being treated like a student and not acting like a servant, as he was supposed to, amongst all these white foreigners? On the last day, one of the participants needed medical attention, so Reverend Tapia’s uncle lead the injured person and some others to a medical office. While in the waiting room, he sat in the colored section. A young Swedish lady thought this was ridiculous, so she playfully (and naively) left her “whites only section” and went to sit on his lap …. and even licked his ice cream.

It didn’t take long for the whole town of Davidson to find out about this “egregious” act. Later that night, at the good-bye party of the event, a bullet whizzed by Reverend Tapia’s uncle’s head. Not long after, the rest of his brothers quickly and secretly took him into hiding. The next morning, the burning crosses were put in the front yard of Reverend Tapia’s house, the Dean’s office and the football field of the college. When I asked if she thought the European church event participants knew of the repercussions to the black man and his family for a young white lady sitting on his lap, Reverend Tapia said, “Of course they never learned what happened; they flew back to Europe the next day”. They had no idea what raw and primitive associations the white townspeople made with the playful gesture and how violently they would react.

But, for Reverend Tapia, that was when her journey started.

That is also why she asks, one to two generations later, “Do the Charlotte rioters of today really know who they are and Whose they are?” Reverend Tapia has suffered oppression, segregation and racism since the day of her birth. She also has a very strong family, and faith in God. Her Afro-centric Christianity tells her that God is everywhere. She hopes the rioting youth understand that, or at least find strength and guidance from either God or family but preferably both.

That is why she started the Love of Learning Program at Davidson College.

In the late 1980s, while she was Assistant Chaplain at the College, she was asked by a Committee to help increase enrollment of black American students up to 100 (up from typically two), and increase the number black faculty from five to ten. The ultimate goal was to “create” black PhDs, who would want to come back and teach to make sure that each student would have had at least one black professor while getting a degree at Davidson.

When the committee approached her to ask if, with that in mind, she could develop a two-week enrichment course for black students, she merely laughed. After she recognized that her sporadic and genuine laugh was a faux-pas in white Corporate America, she couldn’t help but add in her typical semi-humoristic way, “Let me first ask my Boss”, and when her literal boss, who was sitting beside her, gave her a weird look, she pointed her eyes to Heaven. The Board understood she would work on this, but needed to think first how to do this best.

Starting in 1987, she developed Love of Learning, not a two-week crash course, but a five-year intensive four-week summer program, which offered academic enrichment for local black high school students. Based on her personal experience with her parents, as well as with her work as a counselor in Atlanta, she decided the program would have to involve interest by the parents; therefore the students would come back every other Saturday from September to May with their parents, for the family to grasp the meaning of community. She worked on self-love, and self-awareness. She wanted the students to really understand who they were. She wanted them to learn to love themselves as much as God loves them. She also explained the practical, social and cultural realities of racism to them.

Black Pride was also a component of Love of Learning. She decided to bring to her group of students what she thought had been lost with de-segregation of schools: an academically stimulated and caring all-black community. She explained that when her all-black high school closed and she went to academically challenging classes in majority white schools in the 1960s, she witnessed how her former black teachers and principals were demoded to petty jobs, and also that her white teachers did not bother to critique or even correct her work – instead it merely received a quick grade. She felt the humiliation for herself, her family and her former teachers and principals. She also felt lost, for while her parents set high standards for their children, they were not sure how best to relay it – by default they neglected the components of love and pride.

Love of Learning would bring back to her flock of students stringent critique, but also tough love, and black pride, as well as sense of black community with an intellectual and moral elite they could look up, so that they could tackle and excel later on in academia  – be it black or white. Her program was a success; her alumni cherish her professionally as much as personally.

As one of her first students, Thea Rhinehard, explains, “the most important feature of Love of Learning was an environment where we encouraged to embrace our blackness as a positive. Remember, the world tells black children that they must minimize their blackness, keep it quiet, and gain respect by assimilating into the larger, white culture.

“Brenda tried to teach us that blackness wasn't shameful, wasn't a liability, wasn't something to swallow to make white people be nice to us. She taught us that we could be proud of our history, our heritage, ourselves. We learned about black luminaries, social structures and all sorts of things that aren't taught in schools. History books are written by the victors, not by marginalized people; some black churches try to fill that gap, but Brenda went all out to help us see a richer, more complete view of ourselves and a more fleshed out understanding of our country.” 

Reverend Tapia developed hatred for white people when she had to be transferred to a majority white public school in North Charlotte – there she felt ignored by white teachers. Then, she developed hatred for black people while attending Howard University by experiencing racism by some other blacks against her own very dark skin – she even made me note that she was so black, her lips and palms were black; in some black cultures being very black is asset but in others – most- it is a liability. As she grew, she realized that a part of racism comes from a lack of spirituality, which to her is basic love. If we find love, first in ourselves, we can heal individually and then as a group when we can learn to come sit at the Table together – in the Biblical but also worldly, real and practical sense: not just Jesus’ Table, but also the corporate board room table, the surgical, classroom or dinner table.

Reverend Tapia has also had very practical (and somewhat absurd) racial instances to deal with. She learned from those experiences, and repeats that we can turn “stumbling blocks into stepping stones”. With the 2016 Davidson College Homecoming Queen and King being black and sporting “Black Lives Matter” sashes at the Half Time of the football game, we can trace the stepping stones leading to the success of many black students in and from Davidson, directly back to Reverend Tapia.

Reverend Tapia never boasted the quantitative success of her Love of Learning program, instead, Thea Rhinehard states, “Brenda can count many PhDs, attorneys, community leaders, political operatives, etc. amongst Love of Learning graduates. But the degree count isn't what's most important to me.”

After sitting with Reverend Tapia for almost three hours, her approach, accomplishments and status become alive and impressive. While the topics covered come from sad and deep places, it is her special light and twinkle that you carry away most from her; she is the kind of person you want to steal horses with.

Stephanie Range: Principal of Barringer Academic Center, a partial magnet, partial neighborhood elementary school

"Yeees Jesus loves me, yeeees Jesus loves me!" the four little girls sang softly right by the Principal's office in the administrative section at the front of Barringer Academic Center's (BAC) building. The girls ranging in age probably from three to five then wandered off to the front of the room and squatted down to play harmoniously another game. They were obviously welcome here and felt at ease surrounded by adults getting on with school administrative work on this grey June day when regular school was out, but the office was bustling with adults.

Ms Stephanie Range in her office

Mrs. Stephanie Range stepped out of her office after a meeting in her bare feet and a white and red shirt that exuded positive energy, even on this drab day. She excused her bare feet explaining it was her summer uniform and led me past the four girls to her office. She was working full-time even in the summer, had a building full of adults and children  - 500 coming over the summer for free meals and 200 coming for summer school - but she was thoroughly enjoying the "lighter load" of summer work, as she explained with a refreshing smile on her face.

Range is the Principal of BAC, partial magnet school for talented and gifted children and partial neighborhood elementary school of Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools (CMS), located in a low income neighborhood in West Charlotte. It had been a full neighborhood school until the 1990s, then was converted to a full gifted student magnet school and, in 2003, got its current status of partial neighborhood-partial magnet for talented and gifted elementary school.

A native New Yorker, Range gets straight to explaining what the ultimate purpose of the school is: to provide education that meets all children's needs of two very different populations, with in fact very different needs, under the same roof of one building.

She started her educational career as a high school teacher, moved on to administration within CMS, where she worked as Talent Development Director, and then landed at BAC as a Principal in 2013. Although she has been on the job for three years and prior to that worked as Talent Developer, she admits to still be figuring it out every day.

"It" being dealing with two totally different populations, meeting their needs and trying to merge the two with the purpose of reducing traditional academic gaps along racial and socio-economic lines.

To "figure it out" every day, she insists on conversations with teachers and with parents of both populations, as well as on conversations between teachers and between parents. This helps with the "intentionality" of the process.

The biggest challenge is getting the children of the two different populations - one of low income primarily African American neighborhood and the other of academically advanced typically white or Asian middle class -  to understand each other. To overcome the challenge, she experiments with new methods every year, such as classroom layout, joint activities, such as recess,  field trips (even overnight), team building games, lunch, outsider presentations, fifth grade graduation and their guest speakers, and character building and academic awards and ceremonies, to name some. The idea is to blend the students together as much as possible during non core courses.

When asked what the successes are, she explains that simply having conversations with and between both populations is a big success. These conversations can't happen in schools with homogenous populations. Especially the conversations between the parents of both groups make a difference - the volunteer activities the parents are involved in bring the parents more together and force them to build relationships and thus an understanding of their different needs, wants and expectations of life and their children's lives.

Another success is that both student populations are progressing at a good level academically. The achievement gap that the African American student body had been suffering was reduced by 33% in 2016 and academic growth is on track. And this although the groups do not tangibly feed off each other academically. But she is toying with the idea of changing that...

For the first time in the school year 2015-2016, Range decided to reach beyond the usual non-instructional opportunities to blend the students of both populations by experimenting with a project where both groups would merge during instruction, namely in science. The four fifth grade teachers, who typically teach specifically only neighborhood, talented or gifted students, got an equal mix of neighborhood, talented and gifted students together to prepare for the End-of-Year (EOG) exams. The result was that from the previous years, the EOG science score on a whole went up by 23 points (from 53 to 76) from the previous year. She seemed excited by the results of that academic experiment.

Range concludes that she has learned a lot about herself as a person, a teacher and a leader through this dual program school. She kind of knew what she was letting herself into when she got the job as Principal, but, she explains, one can only truly appreciate and understand the challenges and successes, the trials and errors, when one is actually dealing with this dual program with such fundamentally different needs of children and their families.

While she can rattle off numbers and data related to academic performance measures of the school as a whole, or of the separate student populations, she shows that her heart is as committed as her brain and curiosity to this job when she hugs students, offers her cooled car after a long field trip in the heat, or asks inquisitively a colleague about her new hair style.

Jeff McNeely: The Role Model  - professional baseball player turned Dean in a public middle school

Jeff McNeely in his RMS office adorned with his pro baseball trophies

When I asked a student how to obtain permission to snap a picture of Mr. McNeely “in action”, the student explained, “In Action? There is no action around Mr. McNeely. He is just present, and with his presence, everyone knows to take care of business silently”.

Jeff McNeely is Dean at Randolph Middle School (RMS) with Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) in Charlotte, North Carolina. He has a whopping career of 19 years with CMS first as Behavioral Modification Technician at Sedgefield Elementary School and now as the Dean of students at RMS. His presence and monitoring of the bus lot at the end of each day with his prominent physical posture, steady step, and focused gaze hint that before he worked with school children, he had a career as a professional athlete. And that he is in control.

Before he worked for CMS, he was a professional baseball player, an outfielder for the Boston Red Sox. He grew up a talented athlete playing both football and baseball. When having to chose one of the sports, he picked baseball. The reason was very practical, and typical for an African American who faced realities of not exactly equal opportunities – while his white friends’ parents could afford the tutors required to bump up SAT scores to get into college football, he had to forego that option and went for the sport, in which he could go pro more quickly. He also preferred the longevity of baseball vs that of football.

He enjoyed the life of a professional athlete, including the fans, the perks, the lifestyle… Unfortunately, he was injured ten years into his career and had to quit the sports. That is when he returned to his native North Carolina and did motivational public speaking for inner city and high poverty children. At these speeches, he declared, “I don’t know what God has in store for me, but I hope it helps children”.

With that quote, he was hired by the Principal of Sedgefield Elementary School: the Principal was looking for an African American role model for her high risk students in her diverse school.

When asked how he experiences the effects of  “the gap” amongst the high risk students he deals with, he matter-of-fact explains, “When I call the home of an African American student, typically a grandmother picks up the phone; the parents of the child lost custody and it was handed over to the grandmother. When I call a Caucasian household, either the mother or the father or usually both are on the other end of the line. It doesn’t just end there, the grandmother is raising the child alone and she is so much more removed from today’s math than the parents of the Caucasian child; she is challenged not only with discipline but in supporting academically.” It just gets exponentially harder for the high risk African American student to not fall further into the gap.

Because of the lack of parents and especially father figures, McNeely was officially hired as a role model for the high-risk African American students in a public school - a subtle but important tool in efforts to guide some kids with (statistically) less chances.

In addition to this full time job, McNeely has founded Charlotte Megastars, a baseball club that trains athletes to become college or even professional baseball players. This program has given so far 300 students the opportunity to go to college on a baseball scholarship. McNeely knows how important education is to expand young men’s opportunities, especially for African Americans. He makes it clear that the program does not only offer opportunity but important life skills that not all players have when they start the program: self worth, self value, team effort and ability to commit.

While McNeely mentions in passing the talents required to be an athlete – speed and strength – he enjoys a lot his special gift of being able “to deal with kids” and make a difference in their lives, be it either by putting them back on track after misbehaving while in school or by offering them a world of opportunities thanks to baseball.

Eric Davis: The public school board member who is initiating cross sectional thinking to fight poverty clusters

Eric Davis at Ms Aycock's class at Rama Road Elementary School

When explaining that he was two generations and his wife only one generation removed from poverty, he became teary eyed. He further insisted that compared to his parents and grandparents he “hasn’t accomplished much” but that instead he has been “just benefiting from the sacrifice of his parents and mill working grandparents”.

Eric Davis is, however, a very accomplished person, and usually does not show or use emotion when tackling sensitive and controversial issues related to the school board, where he represents district five of Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools (CMS), even when heated discussions flare and he is personally insulted.

As a graduate of the military school West Point, he is sharp, level headed and likes to work with data.  While he juggles both a full-time job in real estate with a large bank in Charlotte and his intense position on the school board, he not only makes it look easy, but acts with humility - rare for an elected official.

When talking about the issues he faces on the school board, he cites facts, historical developments, studies, stake holder moves, and adds context to make a clear picture of his priorities and objectives for the school system. While he represents a white and wealthy district within CMS, his goal is to improve the school district for all, to decrease the gap in academics along socio-economic and racial lines.

While in the ten years since a North Carolina judge accused CMS of “academic genocide”, CMS has closed the achievement gaps faster than any other district in the state. To achieve this, the school board took a risk of defining its education approach from “compliance” to “performance” oriented. With that, teaching talent, leadership and resources were shifted around. Principals were given a new sense of “ownership” over each one of their students. As a result, high school graduation rates among African American students rose from 51% to 76%. 

For Davis, this is not good enough: too many schools are still clusters of poverty along racial lines, and in those clusters, underperformance still dominates. He is clear about what he wants to accomplish for CMS: to reduce the concentration of poverty, to preserve what works and especially to tap into parents’ desire – the constituents of his district are educated and vocal and he has to work with what motivates the parents since at the end of the day, he represents them.

To eliminate poverty clusters, racial desegregation is necessary. Mandatory desegregation in CMS schools -started in the early 70s and ended in 2001- is no longer possible, not only because it was shut down with a lawsuit, but because too many parents oppose it. Magnet schools became the alternative to busing to generate desegregation, and namely in a voluntary manner. Magnet schools provide for a specialized education that will attract a number of families to the school for the specialization, such as language immersion, a science or arts focus, or enriched academics; the magnet schools are therefore purposely housed in traditionally underperforming neighborhood schools; with the magnets, parents become willing to send their children to a school in a low income neighborhood and thus low performing underprivileged students will mix with higher income and higher performing students. All studies indicate that such a mix will elevate the performance of the low income and/or low performers while not decrease the performance of the high performers, and the academic achievement gap should be reduced.

Tinkering with the idea of increasing and expanding magnet schools within a new student assignment plan is one way how CMS plans to break up the poverty clusters, re-desegregate the schools, and thus close the academic and achievement gaps. 

However, Davis knows CMS can’t carry the burden of solving poverty alone. So far, CMS has been run in its independent silo, although funds come from the state and the county. Because the city and county as a whole are afflicted by the same problem of clusters of poverty and has been ranked 49^th city in upward mobility for low income children, Davis has taken the logical (yet counter-intuitively) risky initiative to start informal talks on tackling poverty together with city and county officials.  The goal would be to create cross-sectional and cross-institutional policy that tackle comprehensively economic mobility, transportation, housing, and education.

Davis also does not shy away from reaching out to institutions of faith, although CMS has to adhere to clear separation of church and state. He cites examples of effective cooperation between McClintock Elementary School and Christ Lutheran Church. He explains in logical simple terms that public schools and churches have the same mission, the same sense of community, same goals, just maybe from a different direction, so we should embrace cooperation of this sort.

He is pragmatic with his belief in joint goals of public schools and churches: recently at a meeting of a church congregation he told the crowd to take a close look at themselves and noted that, “Sunday is most segregated day of week in Charlotte”. He is on a mission to create an awareness of segregation and the gaps that come with it throughout as many communities of Charlotte as possible: with politicians, churches, voters, etc

When asked if he thinks the poverty he grew up in was maybe simpler than today’s poverty, he switches the issue to the fact that not so much poverty has changed, but rather the understanding of the negative implications of poverty on personal development, job options, wealth creation. Based on the data on poverty, as well as the demands competitiveness forces on 21st century citizen, Davis feels even stronger about his goal to reduce the achievement and academic gaps along socio economic and correlated racial lines within CMS and North Carolina.

And he reminds me, just as he reminded a congregation, “We need to understand that giving my neighbor’s child a better education will give my own child a better education.” The current trend is to think selfishly only about one’s own child’s education. This individualistic thinking and handling is not what he grew up around in North Carolina. He seeks to show North Carolinians that trying to improve CMS for every student is not only the right thing to do as a citizen, but actually benefits us as a society as well as each one individually. He longs for the communal North Carolina spirit he grew up with.