In 44 public schools in Chicago, not a single student is performing in math at grade level. In 24 Chicago schools, not a single student is reading at grade level.
In Baltimore, not a single student at 13 of its public high schools — 40 percent of the city’s high schools — was grade-level proficient in math last year.
This pattern is repeated in a majority of public school systems throughout the country, even though some of these same schools have among the highest expenditures per pupil. People cast blame all about — for example, at systemic racism or dysfunction within families. But what is the answer? It can be found in one of the poorest states in the union: Mississippi.
At a little school in the state’s Pine Belt, Black children excel regardless of family income. Students are accepted to colleges at rates of at or near 100 percent.
That should intrigue us. Why do some kids from challenging circumstances succeed, while others struggle? More than merely piquing curiosity, it ought to stir us to action. If the failures of Chicago and Baltimore are not inevitable, then neither are they acceptable.
The Piney Woods School has been a bright spot, a hub of educational and moral excellence since its founding more than 100 years ago. Students from the same backgrounds as those struggling through Chicago and Baltimore public schools flourish here.
That’s partly because the school is a community of teachers, staff and students committed to a particular mission, not an experiment imposed upon it from the outside. It is also, in part, because the school provides a comprehensive moral and intellectual education.
The centrality and effectiveness of fostering relationships based on agreed-upon morality has already been demonstrated amply by community-based efforts to reduce crime. The best solutions to a community’s problems will be found within, not without. The same goes for raising levels of educational achievement.
Most education reformers focus on top-down factors that are easier to measure. The variables considered are curriculum quality, discipline standards and teaching methodology. The outcomes measured are students’ standardized test scores, college admissions and possibly lifetime earnings.
But the Piney Woods School’s success comes from so much more than their particular curriculum or even the specific language of their code of conduct. When students are fully bought into a culture of excellence modeled by teachers they love and trust, the particular textbook used becomes a secondary consideration.
The “No Excuses” education reform trend of the 1990s largely focused on charter schools helping low-income students and students of color achieve higher test scores in a strict setting. It fell out of favor when people realized that academic achievement in low-income communities was a little more complicated than simply invoking a two-word mantra. But the Piney Woods School did not accept excuses in 1909, and it doesn’t accept them now.
Good educational policies that allow for parental choice are necessary, certainly, but they’re not sufficient to raise achievement. That’s because policies can’t reach into the hearts of children and inspire them to greatness. Effective leadership doesn’t just spring out of a master’s program; it occurs when men and women with moral authority form character in their students, not by lecturing about it, but by living it out in front of them.
Piney Woods models virtue for its students, and helps cultivate it in them. It is built and run by men and women who have personally faced and overcome hardship, and who teach students to do the same.
These values of resilience, perseverance, and self-determination have been a key part of indigenous Black institutions for generations now. No Piney Woods student waits for an outside force to rescue him or her from a challenging situation; they have all cultivated the skills and character to overcome whatever life may bring.
The students who attend Piney Woods often make great sacrifices to do so. These students suffer hardships at home, yet they attain excellence. They realize they are not victims. They are victors, after the model of Piney Woods founder Laurence Jones, who built a successful Black school amid vicious discrimination at the height of Jim Crow in Mississippi.
A new Hulu documentary tells the magnificent story of this school, and I hope it will spur interest in other schools like it. We don’t need another education reform fad. Our children don’t need to be coddled. We need to empower community leaders, and produce more of them. We need to cultivate a commitment to excellence, self-sacrifice and virtue.
We have a blueprint for success in schools like Piney Woods, as well as in legendary educators like Marva Collins and Jaime Escalante, who never made excuses for the difficult circumstances of their students.
We can offer children from even the direst of circumstances the hope of a rigorous education and a life of true self-government — and because we can, we must.
Bob Woodson is the founder and president of The Woodson Center and the author of “Red, White, and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers.“