Bringing Community into the Transformation of K-12 Schools: The Impact of Mentors, Local Voices, and Student Entrepreneurs

Hello, listeners and viewers, welcome to Disrupt Ed, where we talk to disruptors and we talk about those things that are being disrupted in this five gs wired workforce augmented technology, interconnected, globally interdependent, AI accelerated, Web3 immersive, pandemic interrupted world of work. Now, if you can say that quickly twice, this podcast is probably not for you. Yep. And community generate. Community generate. If we want to include all this, that's right. So I'm here with Doctor. Cesar, and we're starting something new. We're starting a series on K-twelve education, but this is going to be different than some of the other topics we've covered. Cesar, I want to take it back to the beginning, which for me was, this recent fourth of July, I found your post on Frederick Douglass, his speech on the fourth of July, a pretty intriguing and provocative way to start a real discussion about the real issues that are facing us in education. Absolutely. And so I have this group, Ron, you're part of it, called the Mavericks. It's educators, community people, the whole nine yards. And every fourth of July, I sent out this speech that Frederick Douglass did on the fourth of July. And it talked about why slaves just celebrate the fourth of July, but it goes into a really nice speech, so you should take look at it. Won't talk about it now. But the point of it is, is that Frederick Douglass, if you know his history, he was a slave, and he taught himself how to read under camp. It was against the law, right? So, you can read about that history also. But he didn't have federal government money, right? He didn't have the infrastructures that we have today. And so that kind of sparked it, I've talked around about it, kind of sparked, what do we need to do to develop a community of learners? The UN has been doing this ever since the early 2000s. They go around the world actually with member nations, and they have been promoting this concept of community of learners. So how do that apply to us? How does it apply to our communities? Here in Detroit, for example, we have a heck of an infrastructure. We have community organis- There are so many people working on this. We have educators. I mean, we have the whole nine yards, but we haven't pulled it all together so that we are a potent force. I was talking around earlier about all of the resources that we have to help our children do tutoring, for example. We have the twenty first Century Learners, YMCA, the YWCA. We have all kinds of organizations, but our parents don't know about them. It's like, shit, people don't know about us enough. And so we say, Oh, well, let the schools educate our children. No. Our community has to educate our children. We need to use all of our resources. We need to use the business community. We need the community organizations. Yeah, we need the school infrastructure as well. But we cannot just give our kids to the schools and expect them to educate, to do everything, the social emotional. We need to develop an infrastructure or community of learners so that we can accelerate our student learning that we've been talking about a lot. Right. Accelerate their learning. But we need to do that now. And so that's why we want to launch this new podcast series you know, that that talk about ways the community can participate, and also highlight some of the positive things that our young people are doing. I I was coming back from South Carolina just the other day, I met this young man. He's probably in his twenty, twenty one, twenty two or something. He had these really cool clothes on and a camera doing some podcast stuff. And I asked him, I said, What you do, man? He said, Well, I have my own clothing line and blah, blah, blah. He went on, he was a real entrepreneur. We don't hear enough from them children. And we know a lot of them are doing it, but what we do hear about, however, is how many people did drive by shootings. We need to uplift these children. You can do that through developing an infrastructure of community of learners. Well, we've been using Disrupt That as our platform for developing communities, so I think this is a natural departure. But I think what we ought to do is share a little bit about the first community member that you and I have worked with closely, and that's our friend, Renard Robinson. Absolutely. Renard, just to give the audience a history, I met him when he was fourteen. It was right on the heels of our success with the Career Online High School at McDonald's. And I was feeling really like, wow, I've really done something powerful with McDonald's and thousands of people are gonna benefit from their education at McDonald's. And then I thought to myself, okay, how do I best that? I was in my mid fifties at the time. And so I thought, I've got to see if I can make a difference in one person's life. And so I went to our local Detroit big brothers organization and they matched me up with an amazing young man, Renard Robinson. And so I've been a big brother to Renard since he was fourteen. And when you talk about it takes a village, you talk about community, I think about all the influences that have conspired positively in around Renard just by engaging our own networks. So you started out with Renard. I think your first encounter with him was at the time he was applying for college. He he was college ready. So people helped him to get into De La Salle Jesuit Preparatory Academy. So he's in a good school. He had a lot of attention given to him. He graduate, he's getting ready to graduate and From a HBCU. Yes. So, well, and so you encouraged him to do an HBCU and talk about that. And reason I encourage them, and this is research and history, that HBCU provides more personal development and counseling than their traditional universities. That's one thing that they're really known for. And so, give you exceptional, I want to call it customer service, but exceptional love, right? And it's really cool. And so, people can thrive in those kinds of environments. That's what Renardo's In addition to some of the people that Ron had, Ron's done a fantastic job. You don't want to talk about something a lot on this, but he has done a phenomenal job because not only did he provide mentorship to this young man, he also gathered around him other folk that he knows that could also help him. And not in a patronizing way. I mean, it's definitely not me in a patronizing way, right? Right. Because we tell them the truth the way it is, you know? But that's how our young people can succeed. He developed a community around Renard. Well, I think You know? And I think that was key. Yeah. And I think it's also about trust because when I first started working with Renard, he had a lot of anger issues. His dad had just passed away, and then a month later his grandfather took his own life when he discovered he had dementia. So, Renard didn't have a male in his life. His mom, thankfully, wrapped her arms around him like a tiger mom and made sure that he got into a private school. But one of the leaps that we got Renard to take early on, and this is something that impacts a lot of urban students, so I want you to talk about this, is Renard. I met him at the Detroit boxing gym and the Detroit boxing. Providing mentorship and educational programming to kids. Yes, there's a gym. Yes, you learn about boxing, but what you're really there to do is learn to learn. And Renard went there with a self confessed reading level of like first grade. Right. And he's in middle school. So I think there I mean, I think we had a breakthrough with him because a lot of kids talk to me about this. A lot of kids when they're in middle school and they finally recognize, wow, I didn't get what everyone else got and I I don't know how to read. I don't know how to put the basic frameworks together. What do you do for that kid who's now in middle school, and he can't read it at grade level or can't read it? And, you know, and, you know, and I tell everybody this, is that our children make a decision to drop out of school during middle school. They just have to legally go until high school, until they get sixteen. But the decision to drop out is made in middle school. And that's why we have to wrap services around these young people in middle school, similar to what you were able to do. But not enough children get that opportunity. And that's why programs like the gym, the boxing gym, and other programs are available, but we don't know enough about them. A lot of our young people, a high percentage of our young people, unfortunately, in the fifth, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth grade, are reading way below grade level. How do we change that? No, not just the schools. So get to schools and offer more programs. Yeah, okay, that's fine. But what can we do as a community to help uplift those children? You know what bothers me most is that when I go downtown, the complexion has changed. And yeah, I think we should have a diverse downtown. Black, white, Hispanic, Indian, Native American, all kinds, right? But when the percentages tilt through, that's where I have a problem. And the percentage of young people downtown, young African American people of color, when that percentage change, I have a problem. And what I mean by that, it's not enough of them down here. Need to figure There are a lot of things to do in the city, a lot of things in New York. You'll be out right now at the Innovation Lab. I mean, it's phenomenal. How many of our young people know about this place? Very few. So we need to figure out, even with those young people who are reading below grade level, number one, how do we get them more services? Because there are a lot of opportunities in this city called twenty first Century Learning Centers, one of them, that we can help them read. But how do we get them down there to see what's possible? Stick notes of innovate. I was talking around earlier, and I was looking at the drone technology that they have here. Many of our children don't know about it. Now, is the Black Tech Fridays, Saturdays, that's another opportunity, but we need to figure out how to get the word out. And if we have to, get buses so that they can see what we change their trajectory. Well, know, I think it is all about possibilities, and I'm gonna dig deep here. But one of the original motivations I had for getting involved in providing educational access to the underserved is because of the personal experience I had when I was getting ready to be a parent. And you know this story well. It happened thirty years ago, but my grandmother's life was taken by a fourteen year old high school dropout. Now, you know, when I found that out, a lot of people wanted to throw the book at him. They wanted to, you know, try him as an adult, put him away forever. That didn't concern me. What concerned me is, as I dug into his story and learn more about him, there were so many kids in the city of Detroit alone. Our community, when you talk about building a community, there were so many kids in our community that were not given a road map. And when they got to middle school, they mentally quit. And then when they got to sixteen, they quit. And so I think bringing people back in to school in some way, shape or form is an answer because it provides a sense of possibility. And as long as you have a sense of possibility, you don't do evil things. You don't do depraved things. And I think we have to inspire that kind of hope and that kind of hope and the possibility. And if they see it, right? When you see it, then I know there's this cliche, you can see it, you can believe it. Mean, yeah, that's cool, but we have to take action. That's been my issue, and that's why we're running the series, is how do we take You know? How do we use examples of people that are doing positive things and make sure everyone else knows about it as well? How do we create a database of opportunities and resources that our community can just go to, click on, and investigate, as opposed to trying to search out the world to figure out how to get help. And generally, you don't find it, right? So that's why we need to change the narrative. We, as a community, a community of learners and a community of educators, need to change the narrative. We can't no longer just depend on schools. They're really important. We should support them one hundred thousand percent. I don't care what kind of school, whether private, charter, public, I don't care. They're going to do their job, but we need to provide the resources and opportunity to help them. How many of us really who have children in school, how many of us really commit time to the schools? When I was principal in Las Vegas with Andre Agassi, I used to have my parents come in. They had a schedule where they would come in once a week at whatever time and walk the hallways, right? I mean, just to show their support. They didn't have to do anything else but walk the hallways. Their children went there, right? And this is high school, by the way. So we can do that. And I know people work, but there's other ways that we can contribute. There's so many ways. Yeah. There really are. And you think about it. Cesar, you spent twenty five years in the Detroit public school system, and you went back and got your PhD from the University of Michigan. So you've been an educator and you've been a thought leader in this particular space for a long time. When you look at what happened in Detroit and you look at what's happening now, let's use this platform, this podcast to get real with people. There are real problems with our schools in this city, and there are real problems. You even, you know, you were talking about what do you do with a failing school? I mean, parents go to the community school. That's what they They love their community school. In fact, we're putting out a question. Would you close a failing school? What would you do with it? So, I'm putting out this question, it's going to be in a better format, but we're going to start putting out questions for you to answer. And we're not necessarily going to take a position, but we want to hear what you think. Yeah, that's a great, that's really Yeah, we want to hear what we We want you to get disrupted with us, right? We want you to give us your comments and your feedback because this notion of taking it back to the community is so critical. And the second one you mentioned just in passing, but I want to go back to it, is user generated content. You were talking about the kid in the airport who was creating user generated content. We have to do that. We have to shake our age and figure out how this new world of media works. And we have to get a community built to be able to talk about these issues in a real way. Yeah. We have to support our children that, that, I mean, I know some people are aged like myself, you know, and can't get into the TikTok revolution, but why can't they develop TikTok and use that media, that platform to send a positive message? And I'm not for all this nonsense, so that's out. But a lot of the content that is on there is really good content. A lot of the content that children are developing around on YouTube absolutely right. Good content. A lot of the things, products, and stuff that they're developing just shows their entrepreneurial spirit. We need to figure out a way to support that. But we're talking about developing a whole ecosystem of learners, and that's part of it. And we need to begin to support that, government officials, community members, educators, so that we can start building up our communities. Okay. So one of the ways we're gonna build this community is we're gonna use our platform. D- Disrupt Ed now has a platform of over twenty five thousand people who are listening to us and over five thousand people who are subscribing to us. So obviously people are listening. And this is just not a Detroit thing. No, it isn't. Right? This is an American thing. And that's why I think wherever you are, whatever community you're in, you need to hear from the people that are in that community and get them involved in the process. You don't have to agree. You don't want them to be involved. But at least that's showing that we can go to another level and not just depend on them providing funding for our various programs. I know everybody's upset about all the funding, blah, blah, blah. I don't even wanna talk about that. Know what I always talk about? It's what we can do. Yeah. We've gotta be able to control the narrative that we do. And we're not right now. We're not controlling the narrative. We're kind of laid back. So let me correct that. I know some people are really fighting, so I'm not saying. But the majority of us are waiting, and that's my problem. Let's not wait. Let's take some action. Let's help the programs that are already developed in the community, that are doing great things to support our children. Let's take action and support those. I know the churches are doing phenomenal job. Let's support them in helping our children, in helping our schools, in helping our communities, and not wait around. So that's going to be our message. And we're going to look at a lot of different topics. In fact, we want to hear from you. We want to hear what topics that you have that you want us to talk about, and we want to have you on our program. Yeah. Absolutely. We're not looking for famous people. We're looking for people who are famously energized about doing better by our kids. That's all right. As we wrap this session, Cesar, give our audience a taste of what topics are gonna be talked about on this show. That's great because one of the the original one of the topics that ticked me off today, this article I read was, Would you close a failing school? And see, that topic in and of itself gets you to think about, you? What would you? I mean, what would you do? Do you want to still operate? You know? And, and, and another one is, is, and this is a simple one. How can you support your schools? Because if the school was failing, then what were you doing during the process of failing? Right. Absolutely. Those are just some topics to help generate it. And what we really wanna do, and we're gonna put this out there, is that we wanna create this database that has all the resources, electronic database, that had all the resources for the community support, like tutoring and business development, where our communities can go to one place in that city and say, Okay, I want tutoring for my child and help. How do I get it? Or, I wanna set up a business. Why do I have to go over here to set it up? We need to think about the infrastructures that we need. Everything is there. The supports are there. How do we begin to develop that? So we're gonna be asking questions like that, and some more provocative, clearly, you know, but we need to get you to really think and contribute, because our goal is for you to contribute to what we need to As we close this first episode out to our relationship has lasted twenty five years now. We've written papers. We've gone to conferences. And I think one of the one of the things that published fairly early relationship is how to talk about things that people are uncomfortable talking about, and race is a big one. And I think the construct that we came up with of cultural cataracts is a great way to bring more people into discussion because it's not that people are inherently biased or prejudiced or discriminatory, it's that they don't know any better. And so they're walking around as though they have these cultural cataracts on their eyes. They don't see things as clearly as they need to. But when they get information, when they hear from more of us, when they get straight talk about what's really the issue, I think those cataracts get taken away and we have clear vision. Absolutely. And if they take action. See, you know, yeah, we know you have cultural cataracts, but what action are you gonna take? Right. I mean, that's we we need to be more action orientated in a positive way so that we can change this narrative. We cannot let this narrative go on. And eventually, we want to bring in the major media to really recognize what we're talking about, because I think in almost every city in this country, they had the wherewithal to change the narrative. And that's what we need to begin to think about, that process and to take those action steps within our communities, in our churches, in our nonprofits, in our other organizations to begin to focus and change those narratives so our young people can have a life. Absolutely. So, we're going to wrap for this one, but we're looking to build a conspiracy of the caring here. I like that. We're looking yeah. Conspiracy of the caring. And that's what we're building there. This is nothing. You know? This is exactly what we're doing, Dick, Chris. It's gonna take a lot of us. And so there's two things you can look forward to. You can look forward to a lot more of this content from a lot of people that we're gonna pull into this conversation. That's number one. Number two, you're gonna get it straight here. You're gonna get straight talk from two people who've been working together a long time on this issue. And, you know, face it. Cesar says he's old. I'm old. We want to figure this out in our life. That's right. We want to see change. That's right. I totally agree. So help us do that. You can do it in two ways. Give us recommendations. Give us questions. Give us your honest feedback, and we'll take it from there. Yeah. And above and beyond all else, come back and get disrupted with us again. That's right. And get involved in your community. Yes. Thank you all.