cc >> Jeanan Yasiri: This is
Entrepreneurship in Society, a course that is offered through
the University of Wisconsin School of Human Ecology.
I'm Jeanan Yasiri. As we begin today, I would like
to extend thanks to our partners in supporting this course:
the UW Office of Corporate Relations, the UW College of
Engineering for their technical support, and financial support
provided by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation which is
committed to advancing academic education in entrepreneurship.
Additionally, we'd like to thank our media partners, Wisconsin
Public Television and their University Place crew for taping
today's lecture. I'm quite pleased to introduce
our special guest today, Kaleem Caire, president and CEO of the
Urban League of Greater Madison. Kaleem took the helm of the
Urban League in March 2010. Prior to the Urban League,
Kaleem was cofounder and CEO of Next Generation Education
Foundation, a Maryland based nonprofit organization that
addresses the educational and career development needs of
young men. Kaleem has also held executive
leadership positions with Target Corporation, with Fight for
Children, based in Washington, DC, and the Black Alliance for
Educational Options. He has a deep and distinguished
history of serving various educational organizations,
including the Wisconsin Center for Academically Talented Youth,
the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, and Madison
Metropolitan School District, as well as director of National
Initiatives with the American Education Reform Council.
Kaleem's work with the Urban League and here in the Madison
community has received great attention of late, as he's been
advancing an innovative, if not also controversial, initiative
focused on an all male charter school here in Madison.
And with that in mind, I welcome him to begin our conversation
around social entrepreneurship. Please join me in welcoming
Kaleem Caire. [APPLAUSE]
>> Kaleem Caire: Hello? Is it working?
Okay. How are you all doing?
>> Good. >> Good, come on now.
How y'all doing? >> Good.
>> All right. I like to liven it up a little
bit. So I'm happy to be here with you
all. Again, my name is Kaleem Caire.
I'm the president and CEO of the Urban League of Madison.
I'm blessed to be back in my hometown.
I was born and raised here in Madison.
My family goes back all the way to 1908 here in this city.
Every time I tell people ever where else I've lived or been,
I was in the Navy for a while, I went to Hampton University,
historically black college, that's where I started my
education and finished it here, everywhere I've been people look
at me when I tell them I'm from Wisconsin and they look at you
like, what do you think the question is they're asking me?
Are there black people really in Madison?
In Wisconsin? [LAUGHTER]
And I look at them and I'm like, yeah we're here.
And you know what? One guy told me one time from
Detroit, I remember this company commander I had, white guy from
Detroit, when I was in the Navy, and he was like Eminem for real.
He had this walk. He was real pimp.
I never saw a white guy walk like that before.
And I just tell people that story.
I said, I didn't know white people lived in Detroit.
So here I am back in Madison. Happy to be back.
And what I'm going to talk to you guys about today is this
charter school, but I wanted to start talking with you a little
bit about why we're even doing this and where we are right now
in education, both in this community but also how it
relates nationally, internationally a little bit
too. I've been fortunate, since I
left Madison 10 years ago, to be involved in a lot of national
policy work. I just completed my stint on
December 31st as one of the reviewers for President Obama's
Race to the Top initiative. So I was one of the 45 reviewers
for that. And it was very interesting
being involved with it and seeing what states were
proposing to do to reform education.
And then prior to that, I served a five year stint with the
previous Secretary of Education under Bush appointed me to that
advised him on the evaluation of No Child Behind.
So I have quite a big interest and also history in evaluating
and being involved with this work.
But let me start this with you all, I tell people in Madison
it's very interesting because coming from where my family
still is in Maryland to here, for me as an African American,
it's like a night and day experience.
And the community that I just left, Prince George's County,
Maryland, it's not without its problems, either in education or
socially, but it's the wealthiest African American
community in the nation. It's the only county in America
where the wealth of African Americans exceeds that of
whites. And so it's literally like being
in Madison in reverse in many ways because out there we own
over 50% of the businesses in that county.
There's over 800,000 people that live there.
It's right outside DC so you have Virginia right across the
water. Beautiful homes.
Beautiful cars. You see African Americans
driving Lexuses and Benzes, and they have the big homes.
You go to the areas where all the big mansions are, we're in
most of them. A lot of athletes in the
community live there. There are a lot of prominent
athletes, national number one picks for the NBA, I think three
of the last five have been from Prince George's County.
And so it is just a wealth of African Americans there doing
wonderful things. You come to Madison and you
have, in Dane County, the highest poverty rate among
African Americans in the nation. Right here where this university
sits in this county. You also have one of the highest
poverty rates for Latinos also, children under the age of 18.
You have the highest incarceration rate for African
Americans for a county in the nation, for African American men
right here in Dane County. The university sociology
department had done a study a few years ago and said that
between the ages of 25 to 29, 47% of African American males in
that age group were either incarcerated, on probation, or
under some form of court supervision.
So literally half of young black men in this community.
It's not like that where I come from.
Also the achievement gap is the largest in the nation in the
state of Wisconsin on both the ACT, the SAT, and standardize
tests of achievement between black and white students and
also the largest between Latino and white students.
I was telling a group of teachers and school board
members here recently in an email I sent out because I hear
folks, I have to get used to again being called a minority.
Because out there you just don't hear that word a lot.
They call you black or African American, you just don't hear
the word minority. So I was telling them as we were
sitting there talking about the achievement issues, I said my
daughter goes to a school, an elementary school that's 47%
black, 41% white. We chose to live in Prince
George's County, one of the more diverse areas, because the
community is about 70% black, the county is.
And so our daughter goes to a pretty diverse school, and it's
been that way for a while. Those numbers haven't really
changed much, but Maryland was just listed last week as the
number one state in the country for education.
Their standards have been ranked number two for quite a while.
Wisconsin falls between 23 to 26 in rankings of states for our
state standards of education. And so education is a little bit
more challenging out there, but in our daughter's school 96% of
African American students test at or above proficient in read
in fourth grade. Here, it's below 50%.
Out there, 100% of African American and white students test
at proficient advanced levels, Latino kids in our school too.
White students actually perform lower, not much lower, but a
little bit lower at 90% of white students in my daughter's
elementary school test at proficient and advanced levels.
So six points lower than African American students.
So the notion that African American students somehow aren't
smart enough or capable enough or ready enough, it's not
consistent with reality when you go to schools like that.
Now that school is 20% poverty. You have a pretty middle-class
African American community. But remember I said here in
Wisconsin we have this humongous poverty rate.
Poverty has a lot to do with someone's academic performance
because of their access to resources, quality schools, and
people who believe in their ability to achieve.
Those things have a huge impact on that.
People say, well that school doesn't have a lot of poverty.
So then I show them the school that my kid started at.
It's a 99% black school. I think it's 100%, I don't know
where the other percent came from.
The principal's black. All the teachers are black,
everybody. And this school is 45% poverty.
It's called Kingsford Elementary School.
It's in Mitchellville, Maryland. That's the wealthiest city in
Prince George's County, but they bus a lot of kids in from inside
the Beltway who are poor. So at 45% poverty, 86% of their
students, all black, are still testing at proficient and
advanced levels in reading on assessments and against
standards that are far more difficult than we have here in
Wisconsin. So then the question becomes,
why are so many of our kids in Wisconsin not performing
academically? So before I go into my slide
presentations, I want to add some substance to this so when
we start having a little conversation here we guys have a
little bit more depth. I tell people also this: we're
as capable as anybody else. If you look at where our history
started, I tell folks and it's hard for people to hear this
sometimes, African Americans weren't brought here to be
equal. So if you look at the history,
you guys have studied this, 1863 Lincoln freed the slaves.
My grandfather's uncle who brought the family here in 1908,
he was a porter on a train, that was the most esteemed job an
African American man could hold during those days if they didn't
have an university education, and less than a percent of them
had a university education at that point.
He brought his mother here also, Heddy Pierce.
She's one of the oldest people to die in Wisconsin.
She was 115 years old when she died here in Madison in 1944.
She was born into slavery in South Carolina in 1829.
And when they came out of slavery, one thing that our
family knows is that grandma Heddy said they didn't even know
they were free for couple of years because word hadn't been
given to them yet from their master in Florence, Louisiana,
where they were on the plantation together at that
point, her and her husband. So they didn't know, but they
were all very active still even with on the plantation.
When they were freed, the number one agenda item for African
Americans was education. There's a book you guys should
read called Education of Blacks in the South, 1860 to 1935.
It's written by Dr. James Anderson.
He's a full professor down in University of Illinois
Champaign. He has a very significant
background in the history of education period.
But he wrote this book and in the beginning of those chapters
it just captures you because you realize how hard people fought
for schools, and because they couldn't have an education
during slavery, it was against the law, when slaves were free
they still were fighting with the systems down there to get
the schools and the education they needed so they created
their own schools. So for a number of years there
was this great energy around reconstruction period around
what could happen for African Americans in this country.
Then in 1896 because of southern whites in even some northern
states fought against equality, the Supreme Court implemented
Plessy v. Ferguson, which implemented a decades worth
of Jim Crow laws which kept African Americans in a
subservient position all the way up to 1964 when they had the
Civil Rights Act. So even though we had
Brown v. Board of Education to desegregate schools, states
reacted, southern states reacted negatively against that.
You came north, the National Urban League, which I work for
the affiliate here, was developed in 1910 to help
African Americans who were making the transition from the
south to the north get into jobs, get fair housing, etc,
because as we were making that transition we were discriminated
against about where we could live, where we could work, all
those things. Our job was to help make a way
for people. So for years, decades after
slavery, it was just rampant discrimination.
Then you get to '64 and then we have the Civil Rights Acts where
they implemented laws, well they had to have a series of laws and
battles after that all the way through the '80s just to clear
the record of some of the racist policies in American society.
Well what happened in education was all during that period, our
kids went to schools where they had educators back during
segregation who loved them but they would get the worst
textbooks. They would get textbooks, I
remember seeing my grandmother, one of her small textbooks that
she had still and her name was like ninth down on the list.
I think it was all the way up to seven that was white kids.
So they had that book seven years before black kids got it.
So that's how education was provided to us.
So you come all the way up to the '80s and people are like
you're talking all this race stuff Kaleem, the reality was
our education wasn't equal. So you go, you read Savage
Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol, different people who wrote about
urban schools in the '80s, these schools were schools that just
educate folks to work in factories, not to go to college.
It wasn't until Goals 2000, which was implemented in the
early '90s by Bush Sr's-- dad's administration that we
starting talking about states having standards of education
that we should be ensuring all young people meet.
And then they had implemented No Child Left Behind, which I was
fortunate to be a part of on the evaluation side, where they said
now we're going to hold schools accountable, states accountable
for educating all kids against those standards.
So for 100 and almost 50 years, there was really no
accountability to educate poor children in America,
particularly black and Latino youth.
So here we are now trying to fight against that system still
and ensure that people have opportunities so Madison Prep,
which I'm going to tell you about, is a way for us to open a
door for those opportunities for young people.
We don't want to hold people hostage to the past, but we want
to help them understand why are we at a point still in American
society where we're trying to open doors for people 150 years
after we think the door really opened.
So today Urban Prep is getting a lot of press.
You guys are from Chicago, you may have heard about it.
They're getting a lot of press nationally.
They are an all male school. They have three campuses now.
Started by a young man named Tim King, a phenomenal gentleman,
but they announced today that they had another, this is their
second class of graduating seniors.
And 100% of these young men were admitted to college.
100% of their graduates for a second year in a row.
So their first graduating class was last year, this is their
second. And these are their young men.
All of them are going places. So in Madison we're trying to
recreate an experience like this.
So I'm going to flip to something here.
I'm going to take you through this PowerPoint pretty quickly
because there's a number of slides but there's slides to
educate you on a few things, and then I'm going to open up to
questions so we can have a dialogue.
So here's a poem by Langston Hughes.
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore and then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over
like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load. Or does it explode?
So you think about a dream deferred.
How long, and my family would tell you, has a dream been
deferred of equal opportunity for us.
I can tell you we are still are experiencing this first in our
family to go to college. I was first in my immediate
family to go to college. My cousins were the first in
their family to go to college. My grandmother got her high
school diploma after she died in 2008 from the state.
She's a prominent lady in the community here, but she couldn't
go to school beyond sophomore year or 10th grade year down in
Arkansas because they didn't have school close enough to her
and she had to stay at home and help her mother.
So, you know, what happens when we have young people who dream
of becoming something but they don't have the opportunities to
get there? So I'm going to give you some
background. I'm going to talk about our
educational program at Madison Preparatory Academy.
I'm going to skip that alignment part of it.
That just talks about how it aligns to the school district
here. So let's go into this.
I don't know if you guys, how much you know about charter
schools but they're public schools.
They are chartered by an entity that we call an authorizer.
All states that have charter school laws, and most do now,
all have some entity that is responsible for chartering a
school, it's a contract. It's an agreement with either a
school board, a state agency, a separate quasi-state government
or local government agency. Where I'm coming from in DC,
they have the DC public charter school board.
It's a whole separate entity that both the mayor of the city
and the US Secretary of Education appoints the board.
They have their own staff. All 60-plus charter schools in
DC are chartered through them, and they are held accountable by
that agency. And if those schools don't
perform, that's that agency that actually takes their charter and
closes the school. So they are public schools that
are designed to provide young people with a public school
education but in a more innovative format.
Charter schools were developed to take innovation outside of
the public school system to educate young people, try to
find the best ways to educate them and then bring them back
within the public school realm. But we haven't seen much of that
happen. Wisconsin established its
charter school law to foster an environment for creativity and
innovation. They wanted to do the same
thing. We said, you know what, we want
to have people, good people, good teachers, good people,
smart people develop schools implementing new models for
education where we can find out how to better improve student
achievement while at the same time preparing kids for this
global future that we have. And then once we learn of who
does the best of it, our goal is to replicate that either within
a traditional public school system environment or replicate
them themselves. Now, law was established in '93.
Again school boards are the primary authorizer in the state
of Wisconsin except for in Milwaukee where the city
council, the UW Milwaukee, and MATC, their technical college,
can also authorize charter schools.
In 2009 there were 5,000 charter schools in the US enrolling
1.5 million students. There are 223 charter schools in
Wisconsin in 2009 and 2010. 540 public schools in the United
States now. Now that the laws for Title IX
have been relaxed in the early 2000s by the Bush Administration
there are 540 public schools offering a single gendered
education program, and 92 have an all male or all female
enrollment. So what we're doing is not
genuine, it's not authentic, but there's a resurgence of these
types of schools. At 12 public schools in
Wisconsin that are offering single gender classes or
classrooms, we'll be the first, unless Milwaukee College Prep
opens up its school, we'll be the first all male public
charter school in the state. The mission of the school, or
the Urban League, excuse me, is to eliminate social and economic
barriers for African Americans and we say other people of color
and economically disadvantaged. We serve everybody.
If you came to my office Monday through Thursday when we're
operating our workforce training program, you'd see a collage of
people in there because our goal is to help people reach their
dreams and reach their goals regardless of who they are, but
the history of our organization has its roots in helping the
African American community. We've had a 42-year commitment
to education, the Urban League of Greater Madison.
We started a tutoring program, college awareness and summer
jobs in the '70s. The organization was founded in
1968. We focused on a black student
achievement initiative in the 1980s when one of my early
predecessors and mentors, Betty Franklin-Hammonds,
organized a community because they found out how poorly our
kids were doing academically in Madison, and Madison didn't even
know it. They just didn't research it.
We formed a tutoring program called Project Jamaa in the
'90s. If any of you guys have heard of
Schools of Hope tutoring program that program was Project Jamaa.
The United Way got behind the program and helped grow it into
what is now called Schools of Hope, and we still operate the
middle and high school portion of that program.
And then our major focus was on that tutoring program in 2000.
But what we're focused on now is transforming that Schools of
Hope tutoring program into more of a scholars program, which I
tell you at another date, and then also establishing Madison
Prep. So we've been telling people in
the community that the future of our boys of color is uncertain.
We're losing generations of these young men now.
But they have huge aspirations. This is the Washington Post did
a major, major initiative on highlighting the issues among
black men in 2005-2006, and what they said was that of the big
study they did with the Kaiser Foundation, 87% of young black
men reported that being successful in a career was
important to them compared to you see the numbers there for
black, white, white men and white women.
Huge aspirations. So think about that dream
deferred. What happens to a dream
deferred? These have big goals.
Student achievement. In 2009 just 52% of black males
and 52% of Latino males graduated on time in the Madison
school district. Half.
Remember I said half of them are incarcerated, on probation or
under some form of supervision. We know that 85% of these young
men that are incarcerated don't have a high school diploma or
they earned it in prison. So direct correlation between
dropouts. In 2010, just 7% of black
seniors in this community and 18% of Latino seniors were
deemed college ready by ACT standards.
And ACT says that that means you have a 75% chance of succeeding
with a C or better in your entry level college courses.
So even though we say Madison we have great schools, this is what
Madison is producing. Social challenges.
A black man with only a high school degree has a 30% chance
of having served time in prison by the time he's 30 years old.
During the previous two decades three times as many black men
were added to state and federal prison systems as were added to
higher education. Why is it that in the last three
decades we've had this enormous surge of African American men in
prison? It's as though somehow 30 years
ago we started committing just goo-gobs of crimes.
And all the years before that we didn't really do a lot of that.
Why is that? The war on drugs was completely
targeted at our community. Completely.
I remember growing up in Madison they had something called
blue blanket. And it was developed in the '80s
around the war on drugs, and the police could actually come in
your house if they suspected you had something going on there
drug related. Imagine if they went into
suburban areas or rural communities, right, and could
just boot stomp your house down at any given time.
They might find some stuff, too. So a lot of us, I believe this,
that there was this round up of African American men.
If you think about where prisons were established, this is
something for you to think about for another time, how many
prisons are in urban communities?
Jails? Prisons are in rural areas.
And there are a lot of us in the black community who feel that
prisons are rural welfare. As industries declined all over
the country, started in rural areas first, what was the
industries that they brought to these communities in order to
help provide jobs for people? Prisons are all over rural
America. So that's something for you guys
to think about. Cradle to prison pipeline, I'll
just tell you what this is here. You might be able to read that,
but in 2009-2010 Madison schools levied 2754 suspensions against
black male students. And there were only 5,370 black
male students in the school district.
So half of those students, some of those kids were suspended
multiple times, but if you just look at the number, half are
suspended compared to these other rates.
They accounted for 72% of the suspensions for the entire
school district. Again, as though black males are
just that bad. In 2006 an estimated 32% of
black men, this is where I told you, were under supervision of
the Wisconsin Department of Corrections.
A third of black men in this state between those ages and
that 47% there for Dane County. So when people ask me, Kaleem
why are you doing this? Why is the Urban League focused
on it? It's a matter of equity.
This is just something for you to think about very quickly.
I put this together for business people in DC because I was the
one who started, led the effort to start the school voucher
program there with the Charter School Association and a lot of
the money that Michelle Rhee and others were able to access
through Congress, that was a lot of my hard work and the hard
work of others, but they didn't know where they could weigh in
to help schools. So I basically said the bottom
is a foundation of schools. If you have good public policy,
a lot of community support for great schools, kids are coming
to school ready to learn, families are engaged in their
learning and your school board knows what the heck it's doing,
you can build a great school system or a great school on top
of that. At the middle level, you have a
good leadership, if you have a good leader and some good
teachers, and you really only need about 60%-70% of your
teachers to be really, really good because they can bring the
others along and you can always lose 10%.
But you need a majority of these folks to be great.
Educational program, at Urban Prep their whole focus is on
college readiness. They make these young men
believe that they are going to school and everything that they
do, they say that the first field trip we take is to
Northwestern University and everything they talk about,
their creed they recite every day, everything is about social
engineering them to be ready for college and clearly it's
working. Facilities, you have to have
good facilities. You go to some urban or rural
school systems and their facilities aren't set up to help
these kids be competitive. And then health and safety,
depending on the issues within a community, higher income
communities they tend to have issues with their kids, drugs,
alcohol. Poor communities tend to have
issues with physical health problems, dental, hygiene,
eating, kids coming to school well fed.
So if the school can provide some of that, they help these
kids actually prepare for the future, and then the blue area I
told people is where a lot of kids just completely fall
behind. If you have a parent who's been
to college and succeeded in high school, they can help kind of
steer you themselves. But in the black and Latino
communities, and even in some poor white areas, you still
don't have a lot of parents who have that experience.
And so if somebody doesn't step in and help them, they have to
be resilient enough and smart enough to just navigate their
own way or a lot of times they just don't go.
And then you have the extended learning opportunities.
We operate a tutoring program. The more programs and things
like that you can have that help young people perform better, the
better off they're going to be and the better off they're going
to be able to compete. And then college and career
access. If you have a lot of poor kids
whose families can't pay a dime to send them to college, if you
don't provide some ability to access that, they're not going.
So that's where a lot of kids get left behind.
So our purpose is pretty much to just prepare these young men for
college, period. Some people are like all young
men don't need to go to college. Well tell that to somebody else,
you go to somebody else's school.
Because all of our young men are going to college.
They're going to be prepared for it, they're going to know
they're being prepared for it. If they decide they want to go
into military, they want to do something else, that's on them,
that's great, we'll help them too.
But they will be prepared to go to school whenever they want to
go to college. We tell people our school will
be a demonstration of what you saw on that map.
We're going to demonstrate to people that we can produce high
quality, highly successful young male students who are
academically ready to sit here with you all.
Leadership and governance, we'll be the ones that establish the
school. It will be a non-instrumentality
charter school which means that it will be a school that the
school board will charter as a contract with us, but we will
not have teachers that will be part of the teachers union.
Our principals will not be part of a union, none of our staff
will. They will all be under the
offices of the Urban League, and we will provide them with a
great salary and benefits and etc, but we want complete
autonomy to do the things that are required for us to be
successful. And then we'll also have a
strong and influential active board and an exceptionally
talented head of school or principal.
Mission again is to prepare them for a four-year college.
Also to help them understand what service to the community
means. Our philosophy, they have to
have a depth of understanding that leads to a level of
learning. Our students are best served
when they have a real solid grasp of their purpose in life.
We think it's important to have a purpose-driven life.
You kind of know where you want to go, and the way we'll get
there is exposing our young men to a variety of opportunities so
they can settle into something, they'll be able to identify what
they're good at and what they're interests are.
And also a school that fosters the above two attributes with
value-driven culture. And then have cultures of
accountability that are driven by adults who love kids.
A lot of people work in schools and they lose the level of
students or they love teaching but they don't necessarily love
the kids they teach. Our teachers have to love the
kids they teach or they can't teach at Madison Prep.
Student performance objectives, I'll let you look at those.
90% of our students will score at proficient and advanced
levels after three years of enrollment in our school.
We know we're going to get a lot of young people who are
academically behind, but as Urban Prep told us yesterday on
the phone, they said, Kaleem, we took a young person who started
with us in ninth grade who was reading at a sixth grade level
and they scored a 30 on their ACT and they're going to
Stanford next year. So we can do it by the amount of
support we provide, and you can see these other measures that
we're hoping to implement there too.
The destination plan is just having a plan for your future,
where are you going, what are you going to do to get there.
If your goal is to just go to college, we want to have a plan,
a map that you start building as soon as you start with us in
sixth grade to get you there. Our educational strategies, all
male student body. International baccalaureate
curriculum. It's one of the few curricula
out there that has been proven through research that it truly
prepares young people for college, and it prepares them to
compete and participate in a global learning and an academic
environment. College preparatory educational
program, everything we talk about, everything you see in our
school will be geared towards that.
A hardness teaching method is a roundtable method of teaching,
not theatre style. So you come into our school, if
any of you all have heard of Exeter or even Andover or some
of these other schools, some of you may have went there, it's a
more participatory oriented, smaller classroom environment
that allows you to not get lost in its class and also helps us
feed off the competitive energy of boys in that classroom.
And then coach and mentoring and community support.
If you're a teacher in our school, you're going to be like
that KIPP school teacher who has that cell phone on until 7:00 PM
every night because, forget the tutor, we'll have a tutor but
the person who should be answering that parent and that
child's questions about school should be you.
And so we have to pay people, but they're going to work a
longer school day, 7:30 to 5:00. They're going to have a longer
school year. Instead of 196 days of schools,
they'll be in school for 215 to 220 depending on how much we can
afford. And they will be that child's
mentor in school. And then, last thing, and then
I'll open it up for questions, is we're going to have a prep
year for our young people too. There's no way I would take a
young person that's more than one year behind in school and
drop them in a classroom where they have to compete with kids
at grade level or better. Because what happens is they
struggle. They feel they're drowning or
you have a teacher that has to teach them in an environment
where other kids are trying to move faster and they're slowing
them down. And those are the young people
that often act out, they zone out, they don't want to
participate. So we're going to tell parents,
if your kid comes in here they're going to go through prep
year. They'll still be a part of this
school, but we're going to identify and assess their
academic performance, look at where their issues are and we're
just going to focus on that for that one year.
So if you guys know athletes, a lot of athletes go to that fifth
year of school so they can qualify to get into a college
somewhere or if you go into one of the academies for the
Military you go to a prep school to get ready to go into an
academy. We're going to take that fifth
year and just float it so whenever a kid comes into our
school they can do an extra year whether they come in 10th grade
or they come in sixth grade, they can do an extra year.
So our school will be sixth grade to 12th grade.
We'll start with the sixth and seventh grade.
90 students, 45 students a grade level.
We'll start that school next fall, 2012-2013.
We'll graduate our first class in 2017-2018.
By then we'll hopefully have 315 young men.
We are looking at doing a girls school as well, but we led with
the boys school because of the need.
You'll hear us start talking about the girls school once we
get this school authorized, probably later this year.
Early next year we'll start to put that together so it will be
a comparable school. We hope to have a wonderful
facility. There's a lot of people getting
behind this in Madison. And I know that you all taking
this class, there's a whole lot of innovation going on out
there, you all. This whole focus on
traditionalism in school, I think Madison schools are so
significantly far behind. There's people in the schools
that excite me, but the schools themselves do not.
It's boring. How many of you all just loved
your high school experience? You loved it?
Raise it high. So less than high.
How many of you all who loved it went to a private school?
How many went to a public school?
All right, how many of you all went to a public school where
there were black students? Okay.
And how many of you loved it? Still less than half.
So I don't think that schools are as exciting as they should
be nor are they preparing us to be competitive now
internationally. Forget locally.
So this is what we're trying to do at Madison Prep.
Thank you so much. I will take your questions.
>> Thank you, Kaleem. The students know that I'll be
passing the mic, and I can already see hands.
>> My name is Dylan, and I was wondering if the
students have to pay to go to your school, or if not, where
does the funding come from? >> Good question.
Charter schools are public schools, they're free.
So any kid that applies, they are able to get in this school
up to our level of enrollment. So if you guys have seen movies
like The Lottery or Waiting for Superman, we'll have 45 seats a
grade level for sixth and seventh grade.
So if at sixth grade 46 children apply, then we have to go to a
lottery to select those 45. But we can't select who gets in,
and once they get in it will be free education for them.
They'll have to pay for some things, uniforms, a few student
fees here and there, but for families who can't pay we'll
cover that cost for them too. >> Hi, I'm Kevin.
And I was wondering how, if you are recruiting students or how
people hear about it? >> Yeah, we'll start recruiting.
We didn't want to be too presumptuous that we're going to
be authorized. We expect that the board will
authorize us. It's a needed school.
But we'll start, once we get authorized, start marketing this
school. First in the areas that have the
highest need students around the Madison Metropolitan School
District area, and we'll start that a week early and then after
that week we'll start a more open enrollment process for
everyone else. So, again, any young man that
wants to come to this school will be able to apply.
>> Kaleem, I can see a couple of other students with their hands
up. I want to ask if you could just
ground us in where you are with the initiative because you're
talking about it in terms of opening, but you've also
referenced that there's still an authorization process.
So where are you at? >> We are, see I always get
people focused on it will happen.
So I don't actually talk in possibilities, but we are in the
planning process right now where we actually have to work with
the school board to submit a planning grant for the school to
the Department of Public Instruction.
And if we get that grant, which we expect that we will be
successful in doing, then we would have a certain number of
months to plan the school for then in the fall of this year
the school board would vote to approve our contract that we
would work on between then and now to actually operate the
school. And once that contract is
approved, probably sometime around October, November of this
year, then we would hire our head of school, we would start
the process of hiring teachers and then open that school in the
fall of 2012. So we still have some hurdles to
cross. We're raising money.
We have a great team, facilities team that's working with us, and
we expect still, though, to be successful.
>> My name is Rhea Harvey. I have a question about being an
all male school, is there any plan to address sexism just
because if people are not regularly on a daily basis
interacting with the opposite sex, I don't know if you have
thought of that as a problem or if it's not something that's
really a concern. >> They'll have teachers and
staff who are women. We're going to make a serious
effort to ensure we have male teachers in our school and male
presence because these young men a lot of them won't come with
that in their family or daily lives.
But through that they'll have a responsibility to learn about
authority, but also we're going to do things, we'll have a
women's day and in the girls school we'll have a father's
day. And we'll bring women in from
the community to talk with these young men about their
experiences. They'll be from people who are
prominent in the community, people who just might be
prominent in their neighborhood or in their personal life.
So they learn what it means to respect women.
We won't hold back that we are doing some social engineering
here too to make sure that our young man understand that they
are on an equal playing field with women.
They don't rise above. So they'll understand that also.
>> Hi, my name is Jewel. Coming from an inner-city school
myself and from a very low income family, if not below the
poverty line family, I wanted to see how you are going to address
the issue of a lot of minority groups, especially young black
men, in schools across the United States they're told and
led to believe all their life that the only way they're going
to get out of that situation is through sports, some type of
athletic capability. So they strive to be very
talented at either basketball, football, baseball.
How do you guys plan on addressing that?
Do you guys have a plan for mentoring where it leads that
sports are good, recreation is good, especially for today's
youth being so technology based, how do you guys plan on
addressing that? >> I appreciate that question,
a good honest question. That is an issue that we have
where if you look at what's on TV, you guys all watch TV, how
are black men in particular projected on television?
They're on all the cop shows, not usually the cops, they're
usually being arrested. So we tend to have an attitude
in some urban area communities against the police, and we're
showing athletes and entertainers all day long, we
don't see a lot of other things. And how we're going to counter
that is ensuring that they do see people who are reflective of
these other areas and places they can go.
Imagine all of you in this room that you are in a community
other than anyone who looked like you, there was nobody else
because you can be like that in Madison, Wisconsin, as an
African American. And you don't see a lawyer,
doctor, anybody that you can identify with.
How far are you going to dream, how high do you think you can
go in your life? And so we have to bring that
into the space, and then guard our young men from the things
and images that they see and also educate them that there are
ways that black men are depicted and projected in American
society and help them break it down, that it's wrong.
We hope to have a fair number of white males in our school too.
The way that they and other African American males and other
kids are depicted, the way women are depicted in society, we want
to have some rationalization of that and some sensitization of
some of those things. So, again, when I said social
engineering, that's going to be a big part of what we do is help
them think appropriately. So we'll expose them as much as
we can. I hope that Madison will help us
with some of that. It's funny, I walk into
workplaces around and people are like it's bad, everybody thinks
it's going to be a school for all black males, and I trip out
because I'm like, man, you guys should be out on the street
picketing with these people downtown then because I can walk
in many, many places in Madison and there's no black people.
It's all white people working. Whether it be a coffee shop, a
business place, a huge business, you might have one person at the
reception desk but nobody making decisions.
So we have to bring that from somewhere in order for our young
people to see it. >> Hi, my name is Jackie.
You may have just kind of alluded to my question.
I actually was on a committee that put in a grant proposal for
a charter for children with disabilities, and one of the
things that we were getting kind of feedback from the community
was that that's not an inclusive model.
And so I was curious whether it was like, some of the feedback
was it's taking a step backward, people have worked hard to
include this population, I'm wondering if you've gotten any
kind of feedback from the community that says segregation
is not what people have worked hard for?
>> Yeah, I've had that. I've had people say that, I've
read some of the comments people have written on some of the news
articles and things. Some people have called me a
racist or Urban League racist or we're trying to segregate.
And I've actually had people in forums ask me that, and I just
ask them how many black friends do you hang out with?
Because usually white people ask that question.
How many do you have? And then they look around the
room. Are you guys advocating for
diversity in your workplace? Is it okay to work anywhere in
America right now, anywhere where you don't have people who
look like me? So that's my response to people
is we're doing this because the doors haven't been open, and
there's a whole lot of social issues within the communities
that are stemmed from long-term abject poverty.
Lack of access to resources. So blame that on American
society, not on us for trying to fix it.
So in your special ed school, there are a lot of kids, we over
identify special ed kids. Do you know that in Madison at
Toki Middle School, 44% of the black males there are in special
education. And Wright Middle School, 49%.
Where president Obama launched the Race to the Top initiative,
Reverend Wright's name, 49% of the black males there
in special ed. It's ridiculous.
So because we have those conditions we have to fix them.
So our job is just to tell people, look we didn't create
the problem but we'll solve it. >> Hi I'm Jacquesha Hunt, and my
question is basically around the same thing, how do you foresee
Urban Prep being integrated with white males or other minorities?
If the model is successful then I'm sure that other people will
kind of bang at the door, like we want we in too, how will you
kind of combat that or expand to allow others in as well?
>> We're going to have a challenge because we are an
organization that has an history of folks in an African American
community even though we deal with a lot of people.
We have a very diverse board. My staff is probably the most
diverse in Madison. Equal number of black as white
employees. Asian, Latino, I have 43 people
that work for me. But people are still going to
see color, and so if you look at the trends of Madison school
district right now there's a tremendous amount of
middle-class and white flight leaving the city.
In any city in America where there's a certain number of
black students, whether they're poor, in case of here, or
middle-class, in the case of Prince George's County where I
came from, white folks do not like being in the minority.
So I don't know how many students, that's one of our
concerns is how are we going to get white students, white males
to come to this school? And then the mix between black
and Latino. The Latino community here are
under assault everywhere. It's like if you're Latino,
somehow you're not American. It's like we've cast that shadow
over people when most of these people are American citizens,
and I truly believe their parents are working and paying
taxes their kids should be able to go to college like everybody
else. So we want these young people in
our school, but those racial divisions, we're going to have
to try to work through those as best we can.
So we're concerned about getting certain groups.
We're not concerned about getting African American males
but getting some of these others we are.
And we're going to do our best to try to recruit.
>> Kaleem, you've been involved in these kinds of initiatives
elsewhere in the country, specifically you mentioned
Maryland and the east coast, what's different here in Dane
County? What are you experiencing in
terms of interaction, opposition or perhaps help in Dane County
that might be reflected as something different?
>> I'm very known to just kind of say what I feel.
so I'm glad, that you say what you feel.
It's 2011. You guys shouldn't be afraid to
speak on issues of race no matter what your thoughts are.
Madison, Wisconsin is just a white state.
It just really is. You go to a Badger game, I got
to put on some shades. [LAUGHTER]
Seriously, just to feel included.
You know what I'm saying? They got to be a darker hue so I
can kind of see a little bit, or some kaleidoscope glasses.
So I can see athletes on the field and it's a little
disappointing too to see so many white people, 80,000 in the
stands shouting to watch these, not all black males, but skilled
players running down the field. And I'm like, man, will you
shout for us to get a good education at where we come from?
Will you shout for us when we now graduate and need a job?
I can tell you a number of black athletes in this community that
everybody was screaming about, there have been several that
have come and talked to me about needing a job.
Why is it that the UW Madison would make so much money off
these black athletes and not see that they have an opportunity to
get a job once they leave school?
It's ridiculous. It's why a lot of them don't
give back to the Alumni Association if they're
struggling to get black athletes to give back because they were
here and everybody was cool with them while they were athletes.
I had that experience in high school.
White kids loved me when I was an athlete, right?
But after the season was over I kind of blended back into the
background. So my question to you all is how
are you all going to change that?
Madison is interesting, to answer her question, Wisconsin
is. It's an option for white people
to know me because there's few of us.
It's an option for them to see me as a value to hire me and
give me a job or an opportunity no matter how gifted and
talented I am. It's an option.
For us, it's not an option. So I think that it's different
in Maryland because they've been there since slavery, they've
been together so much. Race in my child's education,
that wasn't the issue for my wife and I, honestly.
Our issue was the quality of the teacher.
And they had black and white teachers.
Even with the white teachers it just didn't feel like you had to
address that issue. Here, because we're so much in
the minority and we're talked about as a minority, it's like
you have to defend yourself racially here.
And that's what's different about Wisconsin.
It's not a place where African Americans have been able to
achieve breakthrough. So I have come back to Madison
because unlike most people my family has been here over a
hundred years, and we have been deeply involved in this
community, and so I look people in the eye and I dare them to
tell me that we can't break through these doors or they're
not going to open one when my family has been here to fight
for so long to get it. And so it's door opening time.
We're breaking down those doors. Not talking about people, not
pointing fingers at who's wrong and who's right.
We've arrived. It's 2011.
It's our time too, and we're going to be here to shine like
everybody else. So Wisconsin is hard to shine.
We're going to dust off that rust and make it so.
>> Hi, Jewel again. You briefly brought up that
you're going to help the students with social issues, how
are you going to do that? Because a lot of the students,
just judging by the pool you're going to be pulling these
students from, a lot of them are going to have severe social
issues. A lot of them are not going to
know how to deal in group situations or even by
themselves. Do you guys have any types of
programs? >> That's where we rely on young
people like you. You guys are part of the
solution. Make a way.
Open a door. Be a friend.
Be a part. Challenge your own issues of
engagement with students that don't look like you or don't
know you. Even if they're white kids,
right, they just come from a different community.
Challenge yourself to get engaged with people and with
each other. We can do the part about opening
door, the opportunity, but it's those people who they have to
interact with that have to help us make that experience
meaningful. I think it's a crime when I ask
black students on campus, all these black athletes running
down the field and they can't even afford to get in the game.
And the university is not making a way.
It really ticks me off. I love this university, but
they're not making a way for the young people who are here to get
into those games. How do you feel like you're a
part of the university if you can't take part in those things
that make the university what it is, the culture among students?
Make a way. Participate in the activities.
Talk to people as you walk down the thing, just nod, say hello,
do something. That's how we can help people
feel engaged. And then every time you hear
something about what a black students wants to do, they have
black student union, they have all of this, why they have
black, black, black, black, black?
Because white kids you have white everything.
Am I wrong? It's just not called that.
You guys don't say white fraternity, right?
Or white social group. Am I right?
See.
We call it that so people know where to go find it.
If we didn't have a black student union and it was just
called student union and I come to this campus, man, where do I
find people that look like me? Seriously, that's a lot of it.
That's why we name certain things what they are so that
young people know, our students know this is a place where if
all else fails you can come and feel included in something.
So we want to break down those barriers, we need all of you in
this room to make that happen. And I think in 2011 with y'all,
we can make it happen. >> I see a final question over
here. >> Hi, I'm Melissa.
One of the first slides that you showed us was an advertisement
for Urban Prep, and the tag line said 100% are going to college,
and then you expanded by giving us the story about the kid that
came in as a sixth grader in ninth grade and they helped him.
He got a 30 on his ACT and then went to Stanford which is a
great story and Stanford is a huge name, obviously, I don't
know that 30 is normal for ACT, but the point is, is that your
school you're trying to emulate that school.
Do you think that you're going to focus more on trying to get
the kids into brand name schools that will look good for your
school or your focus is more on putting them in an environment
where they won't struggle because you told us that on a
class level you'd rather keep them another year so they don't
zone out and they don't struggle.
How are you going to apply them to the college level and sending
them off? >> Great question.
We're going to try and make it, it's really dependent upon the
student, what's best for them. My son, in my oldest son's case
he wants to go to the Air Force Academy.
He's really not academically ready for that so we're going to
try to get him into the prep school.
And if he goes to any college it will be a smaller school for him
where there's more structure. So an academy would be good for
him. My second child, he doesn't want
to go, he wants to go to a big school.
So we have to look at those things and are they ready for
that, expose them to a number of options so they have some
relevant experience with taking some college tours, and then
it's really dependent upon then what program do they want to get
into and helping them determine how to evaluate what's best for
them. So our counselors, and that's
where our teachers will be coaches too, they will have a
cohort of young people that they're just responsible for.
So they'll have enough help to navigate that, but we won't
decide for them. We'll just expose them to a
range of options and hope that they settle on something that's
going to be best for them. >> Well, I want to conclude this
session first by thanking our students for some exceptional
questions and engagement with you, Kaleem.
And I know the students join me in thanking you
for joining us today. [APPLAUSE]