Education and Hope for the City

Today’s cities face any number of issues that present very real challenges to the prospect of the realization of authentic community. Cities like Baltimore face ongoing issues with high rates of poverty and high school dropout, increases in violent crime rates, issues related to urban health, unemployment, under-employment, and drug addiction, among many others. Notice that in 2007, there were at least 278 murders in Baltimore. Although the murder rate in the city has decreased, it remains high.

Developing constructive approaches to educating the young of the city presents perhaps some of the most critical opportunities for turning the tide on the blight now evident in much of urban life. Why is the education of the young important?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German Protestant theologian, executed for opposing Hitler’s holocaust, said that the test of the morality of a society is how it treats its children.

I believe that Frederick Douglas’s statement from more than century and a half ago sheds additional light on the critical importance of properly educating today’s urban young. Douglas intimated that “literacy unfits a child for slavery.” I believe that education today, unfits our children for poverty, addiction and imprisonment.

The 2005 “Equality Index,” published by the National Urban League sheds light on the challenges urban education. It points to significant disparities among urban and suburban educational systems in several areas, including the quality of education (including teacher quality and credentialing), as well as educational attainment/achievement.[1]

It is important that we give constructive attention to how children in urban areas are being educated because – as Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund points out - urban children face the higher likelihood of being abused and neglected, born into poverty, born without health insurance, killed by a firearm, or born to a teenage mother.

Despite the challenges, signs of hope for the city can be found. Substantive discussions have begun among several educational, government, community church leaders in Baltimore to identify ways to begin to more comprehensively address the educational challenges facing many children in the city of Baltimore. A number of churches and their members have chosen to get involved with schools in their communities through the Baltimore Public Schools’, “Great Kids, Great Schools” Initiative. The Northwood-Appold United Methodist Church currently houses the Northwood-Appold Community Academy, a pubic charter school that, in its fourth year of operation, educates over 250 children.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once intimated that everybody can be great because everybody can serve. Let us all seek to be great by seeking to serve and educate our children.

[1] National Urban League, The State of Black America-2006: The Opportunity Compact (New York: National Urban League, 2006), p. 133 f.