The Denver School of the Arts, which originally opened in the impoverished Cole neighborhood before moving to Park Hill, has become the most exclusive, public institution in this region. It admits a third of its applicants, its students are dedicated to hard work, its parents are fully committed to and supportive of their kids, and its faculty is dedicated and tireless. All make it an excellent institution, as did the DPS visionaries who were willing to make it an exemplary educational institution.
Because DSA admits kids from outside of Denver, and some Denver kids are turned away, some parents have complained of its exclusivity. But I wonder why there aren’t more such schools in the DPS system. Why doesn’t each Colorado school district endeavor to have something similar? I suspect it’s due more to a lack of imagination than anything else.
Many factors make DSA work and succeed, including parents, students and teachers working together towards the same goal: educational excellence. Surely some of what makes DSA so successful can be emulated by less successful schools. Others perhaps won’t reach DSA’s level of success, but they could at least raise the performance level of their less accomplished students.
The success of our educational institutions will depend on our ability to copy successful methods from elsewhere, including from across town. If we discarded institutional pride and jealousy, much of what’s done at DSA could be copied and transferred to other DPS institutions.
American concern about falling academic achievement almost always revolves around the poor. DSA and other magnet schools may be in poor neighborhoods, but they always attract the high-achieving students from elsewhere. But schools that give poor minorities any measure of success are few and far between.
DSA was fashioned after New York’s LaGuardia Arts high school. The city has nine such magnet schools, most known for their rigor and success.
Africa-centered J. S. Chick Elementary in Kansas City is another; its kids are from poor homes, and their parents promise and desire to be involved. The kids’ performance has been wildly successful. A few lucky black kids succeed in Catholic-run New Orleans schools, with an emphasis was on disciplined learning, uniforms and dedicated teachers.
Historically, many black academic institutions were strong and ascendant; the desire for black academic excellence lived and thrived. For many reasons, some shining black institutions, some in operation since Reconstruction, disintegrated after the integration movement forever changed blacks’ lives. Instead of keeping those tried and true institutions open, blacks abandoned much that was good for new, impersonal institutions, not always with the best results.
A shining black institution was the boarding school for children from poor homes. Before 1960 there were more than 100, mainly in the South. Today only four survive. Both former Ambassador Andrew Young and the Washington Post columnist William Raspberry attended Piny Woods School in Mississippi. Today the majority of kids there are from single-parent homes; their performance matches national norms.
America is not responding well to the educational emergency that’s leading to a withering of a large segment of our youth. Swathes of our cities are untouched by knowledge, education and enlightenment. There’s a dire need for a new black renaissance, beginning with reconstruction of some structures destroyed in recent decades, including boarding schools. The cure for many minority kids is to isolate them from their unhealthy environments. Boarding schools are an answer.
The magnet schools popular today work well for kids from healthy, viable homes. For others, we must devise new ways and methods, and we must borrow techniques from our history and from other places. DSA is doing a great job; we need to copy and expand its work beyond its walls.
Pius Kamau of Aurora is a thoracic and general surgeon. He was born and raised in Kenya and immigrated to the U.S. in 1971. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.
