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How One Woman Made Good on Her Extraordinary Pact to Send a Classroom of 1st Graders to College
by Oral Lee Brown, Caille MillnerThis article relates to The Promise
Oral Lee Brown was born in
Mississippi in the early 1940s. She is the ninth of twelve children
born to 'old-fashioned farming folk' who grew cotton and corn. Today
she lives in Oakland, California.
Although California reports an
official graduation rate of 87% to the Federal Government using a Federal
formula, on the Dept of State website they say the rate is closer to 71%
(based on the % of freshmen who enter high school and go on to earn a
diploma four years later). That number is troubling enough, but things
look even worse when broken down by ethnic group - according to
The Civil Rights Project at Harvard the Californian graduation rate for African-Americans is 57%
(50% for boys) and 60% for Latinos (54% for boys).
The Manhattan
Institute for Policy Research (which tracks public school graduation
rates across the nation) reports a similar picture across the USA, based on
its 2000 data: 69% overall, 53% Hispanic, 55% African-American, 76% White,
79% Asian.
According to the US News & World Report, the USA ranks 16th among 20
developed nations when comparing school graduation rates.
Link: The
Oral Lee Brown Foundation.
Filed under Society and Politics
This article relates to The Promise. It first ran in the April 6, 2005 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.
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