Willene Wallace`s wide-eyed class of second-graders begin their day reciting The Motto: ”I know I can; I know I must; I know I will. If it is to be, it is up to me.”
Three more self-affirming recitations follow, then 90 minutes of oral sentence analysis and problem-solving. Throughout, Wallace, a firm, nurturing presence, walks the room selecting answers from a tangle of waved hands.
On the wall behind her, large hand-cut paper letters spell out, ”I WILL NOT LET YOU FAIL.” Toward that end, Wallace is scheduled to make 36 home visits to her pupils` homes this year, something unheard of for most public school teachers.
This is Victor Berger Elementary School on Milwaukee`s near northwest side. It is the city`s first African-American immersion school.
It is also what has become of the proposed all-male black academy that drew national attention two years ago.
A man, preferably black, was to have been standing in Wallace`s place. Another man was to have been in the office occupied by principal Josephine Mosley. And Wallace`s well-behaved classroom of 6-year-old boys and girls were to be all boys.
But the proposal, a desperate response to a numbing accumulation of school and crime statistics on young African-American males, foundered after a legal challenge in Detroit.
Single-sex public schools appear to violate the Constitution`s equal-protection guarantees and those of Title IX of the 1972 Education Act.
In place of the black male academy, several public schools across the country are directing a variety of efforts toward keeping black males in school and seeking to shape their early values, perceptions and self-esteem. Like Berger, most are coeducational and have Afro-centric mentoring and gender-identification programs.
But a sense of loss and disappointment lingers with many supporters of the all-male academy, who have not given up on the idea. They say black boys are better taught by men who can impose firm discipline and give them the positive male role model that many do not have at home. They also say black boys are best taught in a setting away from girls, whom they want to impress and who often outperform them in the classroom.
”We needed to find out what one could do to improve the achievement levels for African-American males in a public school setting,” said Detroit school board member Frank Hayden. ”Now I`m not sure if we will ever be able to determine that.”
Some educators say the conclusions that support the academy proposal are arguable, and not all blacks support the concept. The NAACP has taken a position against all-male black schools as a form of segregation, and an invitation to white supremacists to open their own schools.
In Milwaukee, constitutional objections made school board members decide against an all-male school. But black educators in Detroit forged ahead with their plan to open three all-male, black, Afrocentric academies this fall; the academies opened, but not without the court-ordered presence of girls.
The National Organization for Women`s Legal Defense and Education Fund-which, with the American Civil Liberties Union, brought the suit against the Detroit school board in August-says there is a history of denying girls access to quality programs. And the drop-out rate for black girls in Detroit is only marginally behind that for black boys-55 percent to 45 percent.
”What that suggests is an education system that isn`t serving either,”
said Walteen Grady Truely, director of NOW`s project on equal education.
But black girls in Detroit still graduate at a rate twice that for boys, say proponents of the academies. ”And the boys are the ones who end up killing each other,” said Spencer Holland, director of the Center for the Education of the African American Male at Morgan State University in Baltimore.
Some black educators, such as Hayden, take heart in some confusing signals on the legal and political front. In June, a federal court judge in Virginia ruled that Virginia Military Institute, a publicly supported institution, was justified in its men-only admissions policy. And in September, President Bush said he liked the idea of all male academies and might support efforts to make such programs legal.
But for the most part, Larry Cuban, an education professor at Stanford University, believes administration support ”will be whispers, winks of the eye and a pat on the back. It has all the virtues of reform on the cheap, from the administration`s point of view-people helping themselves.”
That may not be enough to encourage school districts to pursue the academy idea. ”They saw what Detroit had to go through,” said Jawanza Kunjufu, a Chicago-based education consultant, author and lecturer.
There is an option to the all-male black academy: the all-male black classroom. Holland works with two boys-only classes at the Robert W. Coleman elementary school in Baltimore, where he says student achievement has soared. The longest all-boy classroom experiment in a black public school is at Baltimore`s Matthew Henson elementary school. At Henson, now in its third year, and at Coleman, boys and girls share the same resources under the same roof, but in separate classrooms.
Some black educators see the all-boy classroom as the least legally objectionable approach to achieving the objectives of the all-male black academy idea.
Proponents of the all-male academy and classroom argue that all kinds of single-sex, special-use schools and classes exist now: for pregnant girls
(allowed under Title IX), borderline incorrigible boys, even gay students
(at one school in New York City). And within coeducational schools, there are special-education and remedial reading classes that are almost exclusively populated by boys.
”The argument that special programs exist for special needs is already there in the law,” said Carol Ascher, a senior research associate at the clearing house on urban education at Columbia Teachers College. Ascher would argue that black boys are a special-needs population who aren`t being served in public schools ”as they exist.”
In any case, a dire shortage of black male teachers is a major obstacle to the all-male black school concept. They now make up less than 2 percent of all teachers, and the shortage is expected to worsen in years ahead, according to calculations by the National Governors Association.
At Victor Berger school in Milwaukee, there are only two black male teachers on a staff that is two-thirds white and mostly female. Neighborhood girls make up half the enrollment.
But just about everything else except the all-maleness of the original proposal has survived. Children attend late-afternoon and Saturday ”rites of passage” classes designed to ease the transition to responsible manhood and womanhood.
Intense teacher involvement is combined with traditional curriculum, homework and an emphasis on critical thinking, with mentoring, character-forming activities and gleanings of African culture and African-American achievement woven in.
While it`s too soon for testable results, or even a sense of how well the mentoring works, Mosley and others say they already see a difference.
”In 10 weeks we see our kids are more interested in and excited about learning,” she said. ”It`s more meaningful to them.”
Teachers are required to stay with their students through several grades, and take 18 credit hours of African and African-American history and culture. Most have a sense of commitment that, like the required home visits, makes that easier. Teacher Thomas Bell urges kids to call him at home at night if they`re having trouble doing their homework.
”It is truly child-centered,” said middle school principal Kenneth Holt, who was co-chairman of the task force that conceived the plan and one of the leading proponents of the original all-male black academy idea.
”We didn`t lose,” Holt said.
