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Kids who fall behind in school, have been suspended, expelled or placed in jail need good alternative schools to motivate them to seek a better life, a professor at the Georgetown University Law School says.
“Teens who have experienced failure in school and in life are the ones who most desperately need schools to be caring, trusting, loving places,” says James Forman Jr., who will discuss “Race, Crime and Schools: A Civil Rights Agenda for This Generation” at 2:30 p.m. in the U-M Law School, 250 Hutchins Hall.
The talk, which is free and open to the public, is part of the MLK Symposium.
Some alternative schools nationwide don’t have the teachers, curriculum or safe environment to help troubled youths and this has concerned Forman since his days as a Washington, D.C., public defender in the mid-1990s. Critics suggest that it’s too late for these kids, or perhaps it is not cost effective to focus resources on them. But that is false, Forman says.
“We have been spectacularly unsuccessful at predicting, in advance, which teenagers who are behind in school and have other risk factors will make it, and which will fail,” says Forman, who served as a visiting professor at the Law School from 2001-03. “So in the absence of knowing that, it is our moral obligation to give them all the best we have to offer.”
Forman, a former law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, worked with David Domenici, son of U.S. Senator Pete Domenici, on a solution — starting with an after-school program that offered jobs and tutoring to kids who had had trouble in the criminal justice system. The two of them realized that an after-care program was not enough, and in 1997 they launched See Forever, a private tuition-free school created to help kids in trouble. A year later See Forever opened the Maya Angelou Public Charter School. In the school’s first year, it served 20 students. During the past decade, it has grown to five campuses with 500 students.
In addition to teaching academics, each school helps students develop social and emotional competencies. Forman said the students learn to control — and reflect upon — their actions, set goals and develop plans to attain them, delay gratification and take responsibility for themselves.
“Things will not always go right for them, but armed with these skills, they will have the resiliency to cope with setbacks and to make constructive, ethical choices,” he says.
