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The Center also invites Eminent Scholars from
around the country to visit the College of Education and university
as research consultants. These visiting scholars give presentations
for university faculty and students as well as the South Florida
community at large.
Dr. Asa G. Hilliard III
 DR.
ASA HILLIARD III, the Fuller E. Callaway Professor at
Georgia State University, kicked off The Center’s Eminent
Scholar Lecture Series Jan. 22-25 with appearances at
both campuses as well as North Side Elementary School in
Ft. Lauderdale. (See inside pages for bios of upcoming
scholars.) He closed his visit before an audience of public
school teachers, pictured on cover, at University Park. In
the first half of his presentation, he said the best way
to
help disenfranchised students achieve is by pushing them
to be “excellent rather than just adequate,” and
that all
children have an “awesome genius” waiting to
be
unlocked. He gave examples of inner city schools that
explode stereotypes by producing the highest achievers,
sixth graders learning calculus, migrant workers using
immigration laws to learn how to read. Later, Hilliard
discussed the importance of connecting children to their
heritage, giving a slide presentation of African history
that
included the mummified remains of the Egyptian royal
family, pyramids, and archival records in Timbuktu that
date back millennia. “The biggest problem is that teachers
see students as what they are rather than who they are,” he said. “We
forget what we should be worried about, connecting head to
head, feeling to feeling, spirit to spirit.
We should see each child as a ‘who’-someone who
is
linked to someone else, people, culture, history.”
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Dr. Pedro Noguera
 Dr.
Pedro Noguera ran the Berkley School Board from 1990 to 1994,
but he never really felt like he was making a difference. “I realized that we ask a lot of schools, to solve social problems that they don't have the resources to handle,” he says. “It opened my eyes to the fact that we need a lot more help.” Now,
as the Judith K. Dimon Professor at Harvard, he's attacking
the problems facing urban education from where he's most
comfortable: the classroom instead of the political pulpit.
Besides teaching at Harvard since 1996, Noguera has made it a point to teach and conduct research in public schools. Unlike some administrators and scholars who spend careers cloistered away in ivory towers, he wants to be close to the students affected by the policies he shapes. And the hands-on approach, he says, is one of the keys to getting results in urban schools. He encourages teachers to engage their classes to find out why they're struggling, and then to critically “reflect” on whether their
approaches are working. “We don't get to know each student as a whole person,” he writes in a recent article. “That lack of familiarity creates a barrier which makes it very difficult for the teacher to figure out what the student needs.”
Noguera's philosophy is about closing gaps not only the gap between student and teacher, but also the one between school and community. He cites Lowell Middle School , located in an economically blighted sector of Oakland , as an example of how community involvement can become a revitalizing force.
For a long time, the turbulence on the streets routinely spilled inside at Lowell , but the efforts of the staff turned it into one of the safest schools in the district. Instead of segregating and punishing problem students, the staff carried out a plan to give the entire population a sense of security: free meals, tutoring and recreational activities. And then there's Ms. Maze, a grandmother hired as the
campus monitor who, unlike the big security guards patrolling most urban schools, breaks up fights with love rather than force. “These kids often need the basics like food and clothing,” Noguera says, “but they really need contact with caring adults.”
Other areas of interest:
youth violence,desegregation and detracking.
Selected publications:
• “Confronting the Urban in Urban Education” (1996)
• The Imperatives of Power: Political Change and the Social Basis of Regime Support in Grenada (1997).
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Dr. Theresa Perry
 Dr. Theresa Perry, Vice President for Community Relations at Wheelock College , wasn't surprised to hear the reason a black Ph.D. candidate gave her for liking a professor, although it would appall many others: “He is maybe the only white professor I have had during my doctoral dissertation who didn't
automatically assume that because I was black, I was less than competent.” Perry knows that even
in the supposedly tolerant world of academia, white teachers view black students as second-class
learners. She argues that this attitude represents a major obstacle to black achievement.
She says schools need to provide black students with “a counternarrative about themselves” in which they're portrayed as competent learners. The positive self-image can grow through student organizations and programs geared especially for them, or even rituals like the singing of the “Negro National Anthem” at historically black colleges. Implicated too is the debate on Ebonics, which
white conservatives relegate to the status of “slang,” but which Perry considers a “rule-based, systematic language” rich with poetic possibilities that black children should celebrate as they learn
standard English. Teachers can also reconnect black students with a proud educational tradition that traces its roots to Emancipation, when the credo was “freedom for literacy and literacy for freedom.”
Although it's sometimes lost on the younger generation, black people have a reverence for education that anyone who went to school in the Jim Crow South, as Perry did, recognizes. She says all her teachers instilled the same golden rule in their students: “Hold your head up high, throw your shoulders back, walk like you are somebody.”
Other areas of interest:
college/school partnerships, culturally responsive practice.
Selected publications:
• Freedom's Plow: Teaching in the Multicultural Classroom , co-editor (1993)
• Young, Gifted and Black: Promoting High Achievement among African American
Students, co-author (2003)
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Elaine Brown
 Elaine
Brown, once the chair of the Black
Panther Party, believes there’s a strain of
hidden “New-Age racism” plaguing the
country that is just as nasty as the more overt
forms she met head on in the 1970’s. But
Brown no longer belongs to the militant
Panthers, which she says have lost sight of
their original goals. She prefers to raise
awareness through lectures and books,
including the Condemnation of Little B (2002),
which argues that Michael Lewis, imprisoned
for murder when he was 14, is innocent, and
that even if guilty, he represents an indictment
of America’s secret loathing for black boys. “
Ultimately, he was condemned from themoment he was born,” she
says. “America
inculcates people with so much racism, we
don’t even notice it happening.
”Brown’s
analysis of American oppression radiates in all directions:
Iraq, reparations for
slavery, the AIDS epidemic, the prison system.
But she says that improving education for disenfranchised
people of color is always
near the core. For one, she believes the
history textbooks need a major overhaul. “
We’re not reading the real history of black
people. They don’t mention the genocidal
program against Native Americans that it took
to get this country started. Instead, we’re still
teaching General Washington cutting down
his cherry tree.”
Another of her
goals is to establish a model urban school in Atlanta, her
home, through
her non-profit organization Field of Flowers.
She says the most pressing educational need
in the inner cities is simply a safe place where
children don’t have to grow up so fast. Her
vision includes three meals a day, health care,
clothing, small classes, partnerships with
local businesses-and much more. “We need
something beautiful,” she says. “An
institution, not some little store-front thing.
Something that will not only transform the
children but also the community.”
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Dr. Charles Payne
 When most people think of failing urban schools , images of troubled children automatically come to mind. But what about the adults who struggle, sometimes against impossible odds, to run the schools? Dr. Charles Payne, the Sally Dalton Robinson professor at Duke University , says the specter of inferiority haunts them just as much as it does the children, and the effects can be devastating. “It's like an athletic team or a military unit that loses over and over again. When you have long-term exposure to a difficult situation, there's a decline in spirit.”
When teachers and administrators are demoralized, the business of education grinds to a halt, and not even new pedagogies nor extra allocations of resources make any difference. Payne stresses that addressing the student side of the equation is crucial – ”Everybody can do better” is a refrain he uses to explain what ails urban schools – but he concludes the grown-ups need work too. One strategy is to use facilitators who “re-teach adults to cooperate.” Another is to group them into “teams” responsible for different parts of the school's operation.
In his research on Chicago public schools that have shown the most dramatic improvement, he has also noticed that a strong principal can almost single-handedly right the ship by closely monitoring teachers and test results. Powerful principals can inspire the troops and, when necessary, strike fear into their hearts so the job gets done. “In the best schools,” Payne says, “you talk to teachers who say, ‘If I need certain kinds of support, training, materials, or I'm just emotionally whipped, I can go to my principal. On the other hand, I know that if do something wrong, he's going to break my neck.'”
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