NEWSBYTARICE GRAY

In the early 1900s, poor black sharecroppers couldn't attend school - so Booker T. Washington, president of the Tuskegee Institute, brought the proverbial mountain to them.

The Jessup Wagon was a school-on-wheels that engaged sharecroppers in the South without the need for desks, walls or windows.

Now, Dr. William Patterson, a professor of educational policy at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, is using the same idea with the N Search of Hip Hop Express, a way to educate black youth in their own neighborhoods.

Weaving hip hop into history, social activism and community-building, Patterson has produced more than 60 educational and social enrichment programs that infuse elements of hip hop culture into public schools. He's using Facebook and blogging as well to spread the message.

Some California schools get a "F" for teaching tolerance, an Islamic civil liberties group is saying. The Greater Los Angeles office of the  Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-LA) says it's hearing from students and their parents saying that children are being verbally harassed and tagged with labels like “terrorist” or “jihadi,” just for being Muslim. Girls have reported being physically assaulted for wearing hijab, the traditional headscarf worn by Muslim women.

They're appealing to the public, asking Southern Californians to report school bullying against Muslims, whether they've filed a complaint or are just documenting the incident. Parents should educate themselves and their children about bullying, request and read school policies on bullying and harassment and know the complaint process, the group says. They can also request a copy of CAIR’s “Educators’ Guide to Islamic Religious Practices” (copies of the guide can be requested from CAIR's Washington D.C. office by calling 202-488-8787.)

CAIR-LA's call to action is one of many across the country. The Texas chapter of the council made a similar plea after a 8th-grader who happened to be an Arab-American Muslim, had his jaw broken by a bully who beat while using ethnic and religious slurs.

Separate and unequal is a thing of the past, right? That's what one might think, given the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. But the most prominent civil rights organization in the country - the NAACP - is calling on activists to turn back the tide against re-segregation.

The NAACP is drilling down in Wake County, North Carolina, a community that became a battleground for equal rights nine months ago when their school board voted to switch from busing students to a "neighborhood schools" program. The busing policy, meant to bring together kids of different income levels and races, will now become a system where students attend school closest to where they live. 

The NAACP continues to argue that neighborhood schools are nothing more than re-segregation, and has announced a February 12, 2011 march in Raleigh to protest the board's decision. They've also filed federal civil rights charges against the district, which are being investigated now. The district could even lose its accreditation due to a complaint filed by the president of the North Carolina branch of the NAACP. Joining with other civil rights and education groups, the NAACP is also pushing a six-point educational equity plan to local and national officials, with more early education, year-round school and public money funnelled to the neediest students. To get involved, see the NAACP's website. 

Education is not a magic bullet when it comes to society's problems, but it may be a miracle drug to cure some societal ills. This week, a task force in Arkansas determined that expanding education for poor people can help reduce poverty. The Arkansas Legislative Task Force on Reducing Poverty and Promoting Economic Opportunity made the recommendation in an effort to reduce the poverty rate in the state within a decade.

The report suggests the state make childhood education more accessible, in part by the expansion of preschool education programs. The cost would fall between $60 million and $100 million more a year.

This proposal has roots in a similar message early education advocates have been touting for a while. Researchers out of Stanford University discovered after testing some 14,162 kindergartners, they entered elementary school with higher pre-reading and math scores.  Also, preschool has been shown to improve children's language and memory skills -- important learning tools that can get them on the right educational path early. The sooner children are encouraged to learn, the more they can embrace a learning system. In the long run, that head start translates to students becoming graduates, not dropouts.

African American boys in Oakland don't have the easiest road, if you go by these statistics. Two out of three of the young people being held in juvenile detention centers in August and September in that city were black, and 50 percent of the new detainees were black boys. (The total population of African Americans in that region is just 13 percent.)

Unfortunately, numbers like this are reflective of inner city communities across the country. Story after story highlights the downward spiral of black youth, specifically black males. But here's where Oakland is differentiating itself. They're addressing the problem.

This school year, Oakland's public schools superintendent, Tony Smith, created a privately funded Cabinet-level office with one major focus, to improve the lives of black male students. Chris Chatmon was audacious enough to take on this challenge.

The news about for-profit colleges and universities like Kaplan University and Everest College continues to be negative. Headlines offer warnings about the schools' not-so-subtle missteps. And here's a new twist: students are now expressing their dissatisfaction by suing these corporation-backed colleges and universities.

There are a few formal complaints that have shock value. Kaplan University, one of four for-profit schools named in a lawsuit filed in Miami, Florida, has been accused of aggressive recruitment and targeting "at-risk" youth. One alleged tactic was using a sales pitch to prospective students hinting that government loans can be used for other things, once tuition was paid. This led to abuses like using government funds to buy a car while never attending a class. That's not all: the lawsuit also alleges that professors were pressured to inflate grades or lose their jobs.

Other students complain that their credits weren't transferable. One of Everest College's former students, who's now part of a class-action lawsuit, even described herself as a victim of a "used car" sales pitch. That's unfortunate, but well put. All to often, students have been sold a bill of goods that aren't great.

Leskisher Luckett describes her nine-year-old son Darren as a diamond in need of polishing. Education, she says, can provide the necessary buffing to unearth her son's natural glow.

But when the Lucketts returned to New Orleans after fleeing from Hurricane Katrina, Darren's ADHD proved to be an obstacle his school's staff couldn't seem to overcome. Their collective solution was to lock the fourth-grader in a closet and use physical force to restrain his behavior. This proved to be barbaric in action and result. Now this young boy wants to give up on school -- a direct result of a school that gave up so quickly on him.

Education's role is to help students mature and grow by providing easily-accessible knowledge. The accessibility of the knowledge is as essential as its quality. But five years after Hurricane Katrina, a civil rights group alleges that special-needs students down by the Bayou have been failed by the system. The Southern Poverty Law Center has filed a complaint against the Louisiana Department of Education, arguing that the school system turned away students with disabilities and pushed them into charter schools that couldn't handle their needs.

Last year, all-male Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia made some changes to its dress code. Students at the historically black college discovered they were now forbidden from wearing dresses, tops, tunics, purses or pumps -- really, anything that makes a man not look like one.

Morehouse College called it a just and minor part of their "Appropriate Attire Policy" instituted at the beginning of last school year. Others called it the last straw.

Vibe Magazine spoke with one student who no longer calls himself a Morehouse man and is seeking to get his education elsewhere. Part of  the openly gay population on campus  and its sub-culture of cross-dressers, he told Vibe that he now feels understandably out of place. The policy, which the college's gay organization voted on and passed, was and still is controversial. The punishment is heavy-handed: If the code is broken, a student can and will be suspended.

Morehouse's policy is troubling to an A student who happens to tote a purse. It puts limits on not only self-expression, but self-identity. Just this week, a student from George Washington University became the first transgender Division I athlete. Women's basketball player Kye Allums was granted the opportunity to be called a man by his university. His decision to no longer be seen as a woman was not scrutinized by his school, nor was it celebrated. He was simply allowed to be what he always was -- a student.

Founded on the idea that all Americans deserve an education, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have an important legacy in this country. These schools focused their academic attention on those for whom that idea didn't ring true. Essentially, these institutions created a welcome mat at the door of higher education for African Americans. Since their establishment around the end of the Civil War, these schools have been an avenue of success for so many.

Of the 105 HBCUs in this country, Howard University in Washington D.C. has been celebrated as one of the most prominent. Among Howard's alumni are the first black Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall, and this nation's first African American UN Ambassador Andrew Young.

But as the doors of other institutions of higher learning started to creep open, black Americans took full advantage of the Ivy league education that had at one point eluded them. Harvard University claims among its academic elite African Americans including President Barack Obama and his wife First Lady Michelle Obama.

[Change.org welcomes writer and journalist Tarice Gray to the Education blog. -- Eds.]

On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court made a groundbreaking decision: Schools could no longer enforce segregation. The Brown vs. Board of Education verdict was intended not so much as an invitation for educational unity, but for inclusivity in public schools.

Fast forward 56 years and one could argue that segregation is alive and exceedingly well in our school systems. Some educational institutes even embrace the concept. Charter schools have made it easier to do.

Two Minnesota charter schools cater to a specific group: Dugsi Academy, which focuses on the educational needs of East African children in America, and  Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy, which focuses on immigrant children primarily from Islamic backgrounds. The Albert Einstein Academy in greater Los Angeles embraces the Hebrew language.

The existence and proposed ideas of these institutions have been met by criticism. Some who continue to hold fast to the idea of educational inclusivity feel these schools should be challenged. Earlier this year, the Albert Einstein Academy was dealt a setback by the governing board of their school district. According to the Los Angeles Times, opponents argued the school would impede ethnic diversity.

Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy was also accused of being exclusionary. Two years ago, a teacher in Minneapolis questioned what she saw to be required Muslim prayer in school, and was put off by the inclusion of Islamic studies.