The African-American community’s fight for quality education requires constant dedication and reflection on successful strategies to educate our children. Donald Hense and the Friendship Charter Network is an example of success worthy of recognition.
Hense is the founder and board chairman of the Friendship Charter Network, the largest African-American-led charter school network in America. Hense’s accomplishment is significant, because, while over 80 percent of charter school students are Black or Latino, fewer than 10 percent of charter schools are founded and led by Blacks or Latinos, according to a study by the Brookings Institute.
Three-quarters of the students enrolled in Friendship schools in D.C. are from Wards 7 and 8, the city’s two poorest areas, and nearly all are African-American. Their achievement is reflected in their continuous improvement on standardized tests. Most recently, Hense and his team celebrated, when five of Friendship’s 12 D.C. schools were rated Tier 1 by the Public Charter School Board – the highest of three ratings a charter school can earn.
As a native of St. Louis and graduate of Morehouse College and Stanford University, Hense has long understood the power of a quality education. But for years he had no interest in working in K-12 education. He was serving as executive director of Friendship House Association, a non-profit serving low-income families in Washington D.C., when he was approached by an executive from a local charter operator about using Friendship House to charter a school. After some reflection, he agreed to transfer his experience fighting intergenerational poverty to the fight for quality public education.
Hense made history as the first African American to win a grant from New Schools Venture Fund, which supports charter school founders. Friendship was among the first group of schools chartered by the D.C. Public Charter School Board in 1998. Twenty years later, it has12 campuses for students in grades Pre-K3 to 12 in D.C., an online school, and schools in Baton Rouge, La., Baltimore, Md., and Little Rock and Pine Bluff, Arkansas.
Hense is proud of Friendship and of education reform efforts in Washington, but he is not ready to celebrate. “We declared victory too soon,” he says. “Fifteen years of education reform is not an institution.”
To Hense, the fight to reform school systems serving African-American students should include more leaders of color. For years, he held a monthly meeting of black charter school leaders in D.C. to talk about their experiences and discuss lessons learned, but it “fizzled out” after young leaders lost interest. “We brought in second and third generation [leaders] and forgot to show them that [African-Americans] need to work together to get things done,” he says. “New [leaders] have to participate in black organizations.”
In spite of a few setbacks, Hense is still dedicated to supporting African-Americans interested in opening their own charter schools. The greatest obstacle to their success, he believes, is lack of experience in management. A potential founder needs “a good plan and a good board of directors. It’s best to go in [to the charter application process] with a strong [management] team.”
Fortunately, there are positive examples of young, African-American charter school founders to emulate. In 2017, Dominique Lee of BRICK Avon Academy in Newark, New Jersey won a Promise Neighborhood grant from the U.S. Education Department. Dominque aims to use the grant to educate 3,000 students in Newark over the next few years, making BRICK the state’s third-largest CMO and the only one led by a person of color.
Hense recommends that other African Americans interested in starting charter schools apply for funding fromthe New Schools Venture Fund or for charter school design grants from Friends of Choice in Urban Schools (FOCUS), if they are in D.C.
At 75, Hense says he is not done. The Friendship Education Fund continues to identify opportunities to replicate their model around the country. Friendship’s goal is to bring what Hense and his team learned in Washington to the countless districts struggling to grow African-American student achievement. As DCPS welcomes a new chancellor with experience championing school choice, there may be new opportunities in D.C. as well.
This article is a part of The ‘Reinventing America’s Schools’ series. This series highlights Change Makers from our community who are walking reflections of what’s possible when we place Accountability and Autonomy at the forefront.
By: Curtis Valentine,
Deputy Director of the Reinventing America’s Schools Project with the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) and At-Large Member of the Prince George’s County Public School System
When asked about his childhood, Troy recalls “School was difficult. My classmates teased me due to my inability to comprehend written words. My teacher would call on me and I would have to endure an awkward silence until she moved on and called on another student.” By every measure we use to determine success and life outcomes in America, Troy Simon should be dead, unemployed, or in jail.
Troy believes a lack of parental engagement played a significant role in his low school performance and diminutive interest in education. Troy says, “My friends were always ahead of me academically because their parents were involved. My Mom and Dad both struggled with reading, but I had friends whose parents had them at a young age too, but they didn’t struggle like me with reading. Overall though, hardly anyone in my community had school spirit or happy feelings about school.”
Troy recalls, “There was a gap where I could go to school and then go home and not hear anything about school. Maybe I was supposed to be the middle man to bridge the gap between my teachers, my parents, and my community but I didn’t—or I didn’t understand how to.”
As a result, Troy found acceptance outside of school; snatching purses in the French Quarter and as a street tap dancer after teaching himself to dance. But following Hurricane Katrina, a short stint in Houston and what Troy describes as a “spiritual experience,” he began to take school seriously. Troy returned to New Orleans and enrolled in the new Recovery School District(RSD).
The RSD, administered by the Louisiana Department of Education, was created to take over and improve schools failing to meet minimum academic standards for at least four consecutive years. But after Troy discovered that the large class sizes and lax curriculum offered were not conducive to his learning needs, he enrolled in Abramson Sci Academy, a public charter high school that emphasized college readiness. Founded in 2008 with only 80 students, by 2009 Abramson Sci Academy students ranked second in Math and first in English in the RSD
Troy excelled. He graduated from Abramson Sci Academy and earned a prestigious POSSE Scholarship.As a Posse Scholar, Troy could choose from 54 different colleges and universities. Troy selected Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Despite the early challenges of transitioning to college course work, Troy graduated with honors from Bard College and is currently a joint Nursing/Divinity graduate student at Yale University.
Evidence is clear about the impact of parental engagement on student discipline and student achievement. The United Negro College Fund found a link between parental involvement and positive educational outcomes including higher grade-point averages; increased achievement in reading, writing and math; lower dropout rates; and academic self-efficacy[1]. Although all students benefit from parental involvement, research by ProfessionalSchool Counseling shows that parental involvement for students of color and those from low-income backgrounds significantly impacts their children’s school performance.
But Troy, does not let policymakers and school leaders off the hook. He believes that the future of New Orleans and the Orleans Parrish School System depends on school accountability. “Failing schools would not be tolerated in privileged communities; and therefore, it should not be tolerated in minority communities as well because minority students deserve the same privileges, opportunities, and access to a quality education like any other privilege community and school.
The national education law, ESSA, now requires that school reporting must show improvement for all groups of students and faster improvement for groups that are behind. School rating systems must also reflect the progress of underperforming student subgroups and schools can no longer depend on overall “good averages;” while neglecting or failing to facilitate academic achievement for their most vulnerable students.
Fortunately, Troy plans to use his Yale Degree to support other young Africans-Americans. Troy’s goal is to work in schools to support youth traumatized by violence, but he believes it will take schools and school systems giving him and other educators autonomy to be able to develop relationships with students. Troy believes, “If I am able to connect with the students and their parents, I am able to fully assess what the student needs (partly) and what they are going through and how I can be of any assistance to ensure their success.”
This article is a part of The ‘Reinventing America’s Schools’ series. This series highlights Change Makers from our community who are walking reflections of what’s possible when we place Accountability and Autonomy at the forefront.
Educators and education experts discussed parental engagement, equity in education and teacher diversity, during a special breakfast session for the NNPA’s Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) Public Awareness Campaign in Washington, D.C.
The session took place during the National Newspaper Publishers Association’s (NNPA) Black Press Week, an annual celebration of the relevance and lasting legacy of Black publishers.
Panelists included Washington Informer Publisher Denise Rolark Barnes; DNA Educational Solutions and Support CEO Dr. Robert L. Kirton Jr.; NAACP Washington Bureau Chief Hilary O. Shelton; Prince George’s County School Board Member Curtis Valentine; and Dr. Lannette Woodruff, an ESSA (Every Student Succeeds Act) taskforce member for the Office of the State Superintendent of Education in Washington, D.C.
Dr. Elizabeth Primas, the project manager for the NNPA’s ESSA Public Awareness Campaign, served as moderator for the session titled, “Striving for African American Excellence in Public Education: The Role of the Black Press” at the Dupont Circle Hotel in Washington, D.C. on Friday, March 16.
“I’m pretty fired up about education,” Rolark Barnes said of the current state of education in the Black community. “As we celebrate 191 years of the Black Press in America, it’s important to remember that the education of Black people is rooted in the Black Press and the Black Church.”
Rolark Barnes also reminded the audience that one of the founders of the Black Press, Samuel Cornish, graduated from the Free African School and became a minister, before he started the Freedom’s Journal.
Shelton noted that the Black Press has been the voice of the Black community for a very long time; the NAACP Washington bureau chief also said that education is the bridge over troubled waters.
Kirton recounted a false, yet familiar adage that suggested that “The best way to hide something from Black people is to put it in a book.” Kirton used the saying to shine a light on the paucity of high-quality education options in the Black community.
“I got into the [education] fight, because I want to make a difference,” Kirton said.
Valentine advocated for increased parental engagement in our schools at every level.
“We need policies that are more welcoming for our parents to come in,” Valentine said.
Woodruff agreed.
“We want programs in our schools, so that children understand what [parental engagement] is all about,” Woodruff said.
In 2017, the NNPA received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support a three-year, multi-media public awareness campaign focusing on the unique opportunities and challenges related to the implementation of ESSA, according to a press release about the campaign.
Under the ESSA, states have more flexibility under federal regulations to design customized solutions to improve elementary and secondary education in the nation’s public schools. The law also ensures that every child, regardless of race, income, background, or where they live can obtain a high-quality education; ESSA received bipartisan support and was signed into law by President Barack Obama on December 10, 2015.
The NNPA selected Primas, a decorated and award-winning educator, as program manager and she famously refers to all her students as her children.
“‘My children’” are all of the children in schools that have been underserved, undereducated, and for all intents and purposes, forgotten about,” Primas said.
