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sheshe2

(83,338 posts)
Fri May 30, 2014, 08:08 PM May 2014

My Brother’s Keeper Sets Its Sights on Mentoring, With Help From Magic Johnson [View all]

Three months after launching My Brother’s Keeper, the White House is focused on narrowing the reading gap, increasing universal pre-K and reforming school discipline standards.

BY: EDWARD WYCKOFF WILLIAMS
Posted: May 30 2014 3:20 PM



But in his second term, the president is proving to be more brazen about forming new alliances. And with My Brother’s Keeper, the man who stood in the Rose Garden and said, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon” is now placing political capital behind a program to assist young black men who, with the right investment, could grow up to become president of the United States.

On Friday Obama announced that former NBA all-star and entrepreneur Earvin “Magic” Johnson, along with Joe Echevarria, CEO of Deloitte Consulting, will help lead an effort to recruit more private-sector partners to participate in the initiative.


According to the Department of Education, 86 percent of African-American and 82 percent of Hispanic and Native American boys read below proficiency by the time they reach fourth grade. The high school graduation rate among African-American males was 52 percent in 2010 and 58 percent for young Hispanic men, compared with 78 percent for young white men.

In an effort to address these disparities, the My Brother’s Keeper task force recommended the launch of an initiative to close the reading gap by third grade and to target schools with high dropout rates. The task force’s goals mirror many of President Obama’s long-standing policy objectives, including providing high-quality universal pre-K and improving school discipline standards. The administration also recommends the complete elimination of suspension and expulsions during early learning years—which recent studies have shown have a racially disparate impact on adolescent black and brown boys.

The president’s task force marks the starting point of what will be a long-term effort, and the White House has already secured at least $200 million of investment funds from a long list of organizations that include Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Ford Foundation and the Kellogg Foundation.


Read More: http://www.theroot.com/articles/politics/2014/05/white_house_releases_its_first_my_brother_s_keeper_findings.html
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