The Dropout Challenge By Grace Lee Boggs

Books by James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs

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The Dropout Challenge

By Grace Lee Boggs

When students in Detroit public schools are counted this September, the total is expected to be 10,000 less than last fall and 50,000 less than ten years ago.

Each dropout means a loss of nearly $7000 in state funding. This means worsening financial crisis, more layoffs and school closings, and more pressure and stress on the remaining principals, teachers, and students.

Some of these dropouts transfer to charter or suburban schools. Most end up on the streets, adding to the climate of violence and insecurity in our neighborhoods and swelling the prison population.

That's why the dropout issue is a challenge to everyone, whoever you are and whatever you do.

For a visionary, yet practical response to this challenge, I recommend the writings of Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Assistant Professor and Economist in the African American Studies Department and The Democracy Collective at the University of Maryland, whose special interest is exploring alternative democratic strategies for urban development.

I have never met Jessica Nembhard but I keep abreast of her work because, like Jimmy Boggs, she recognizes that the profound changes taking place in our economy and the deindustrialization of cities like Detroit challenge us to make equally profound changes in how we make our livings and how we educate our children.

In a recent article, "On the Road to Democratic Economic Participation: Educating African American Youth in the Post-Industrial Global Economy," Nembhard explains how the new information economy requires not only new technical skills but "people-oriented" skills, like leadership development, team building and collaboration, problem-solving, learning by doing – the skills denied to young people in our factory-model inner city schools.

She also gives examples of programs that both help motivate youth to be academic achievers and provide real world experiences where they learn by doing and participate democratically, developing leadership, advocacy and entrepreneurial skills.

One example is an evening class in cooperative economics given by a young people's cooperative at Roosevelt High School in Gary, Indiana, which became the most popular academic class in the school.

Another is the Youth Warriors Environmental Justice After School Program in Baltimore, MD, which focuses African American 13-18 year olds on learning about and becoming active in addressing local environmental injustices.

Through this program the young people serve the community and develop leadership skills while also learning environmental science and communication skills.

The Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund provides opportunities for African American youth to learn about the theory and practice of cooperatives and business development.

According to Nembhard, the "pragmatic decision by many young people not to invest in schooling" is not irrational. It is because the connection between academic achievement and economic reward has become so remote and because we have not yet found ways to pass on to our young people the African American legacy of cooperative ownership and the black economic empowerment ideas of leaders like DuBois, Garvey and Ella Baker.

Young people can be drawn back into school, she believes, by innovative curricula that are participatory and activist and involve them early on in economic development. "Even more important, school settings can be training grounds for alternative democratic community-based economic development (and for the skills needed to design, develop and manage such enterprises). Students can learn entrepreneurial, cooperative business skills, along with other necessary skills and attitudes, and at the same time have experience building and running democratic economic enterprises in their neighborhoods."

[Jessica Nembhard cam be found in] Chapter 10 in the new book on Black Education: A Transformative Research and Action Agenda for the New Century, edited by my friend Joyce King and published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005.

Source: Michigan Citizen, August 21-27, 2005 // Living for Change: An Autobiography by Grace Lee Boggs

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update 25 July 2008

Grace Lee Boggs is an activist, writer, and speaker whose sixty years of political involvement encompass the major U.S. social movements of this century: Labor, Civil Rights, Black Power, Asian American, Women's and Environmental Justice.

Born in Providence, R.I. of Chinese immigrant parents in l915, Grace received her B.A. from Barnard College in l935 and her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Bryn Mawr College in l940.

In the l940s and l950s she worked with West Indian Marxist historian C.L.R.James and in l953 she came to Detroit where she married James Boggs, African American labor activist, writer and strategist. Working together in grassroots groups and projects, they were partners for over 40 years until James' death in July l993. Their book, Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, was published by Monthly Review Press in l974.

In l992, with James Boggs and others, she founded DETROIT SUMMER, a multi-cultural, intergenerational youth program to rebuild, redefine and respirit Detroit from the ground up which completed its ninth season in June 2000. Currently she is active in the Detroit Agricultural Network, the Committee for the Political Resurrection of Detroit, writes for the weekly Michigan Citizen, and does a monthly commentary on WORT (Madison, Wisconsin).

Her Living for Change: An Autobiography published by the University of Minnesota Press in March l998, now in its second printing, is widely used in university classes on social movements and autobiography writing. -- http://www.boggscenter.org/