Sixty Major School Districts Want Obama to Be Their 'Keeper'

President Barack Obama may have been too busy to visit the U.S. southern border to witness the humanitarian crisis during his recent Texas trip, but he found time to hold a town hall meeting at the Walker Jones Education Center in Washington, D.C., to add 60 major public school districts to his signature My Brother’s Keeper (Keeper) initiative on July 21.

It’s a program that launched in late February and was built on the achievement gap, a prime mover for education reformers. Its noble goal is to help the underserved, impoverished, and often-fatherless African American and Hispanic young men to reach better educational and social outcomes.

The Keeper program also intends to reduce the number of minority boys who are suspended or expelled from public school through the 2012 executive order signed by the President, who made it the law to discipline black male students differently. Mentorships replaced punishment. Also, “race-sensitive bureaucrats” were hired “to hold meetings and mandate racial discipline quotas,” Heartland Institute Research Fellow Joy Pullman wrote.

Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Superintendent John Deasy affirmed the disciplinary shift when he spoke to The New York Times at the Keeper event. He said that LAUSD reduced its annual suspensions from 50,000 in the 2009-2010 school year and down to 8,000 this past school year, in part, because of a new policy eliminating “willful defiance” as a reason for suspension.

Three of the newest participating school districts are from Texas–Fort Worth, Dallas, and Austin Independent School Districts (ISD). All 60 districts are members of the Council of the Great City Schools (CGCS) and call themselves “the nation’s voice for urban education.” CGCS coordinates the Keeper program. Other Texas CGCS members are El Paso ISD and Houston ISD. Nationally, LAUSD, the New York City Department of Education, and the Chicago Public Schools are among the council’s 67 total members. 

Some of CGCS partners include the first lady’s Let’s Move obesity program and the National Student/Parent Mock Election. CGCS is also affiliated with national associations of school boards and administrators, Pearson and USA Today.

Another CGCS partner is Barquin International, an “information technology consulting firm focused on supporting U.S. Federal Government agencies and their partners,” according to its website.

At the DC-held Keeper event, CGCS adopted a pledge that included 11 actions to better prepare African American and Hispanic children for those college and career-ready opportunities, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. They also reported that CGCS issued a statement saying they “collectively educate a third or more of American black and Latino students and nearly 40 percent of low-income boys and men of color.” The Fort Worth ISD school board unanimously adopted the pledge on May 27.

Breitbart Texas reported that Keeper kicked off as a $200 million five-year initiative of the public/private partnership with a laundry list of funding organizations, including George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, Kapor Center for Social Impact, and the California Endowment, the last of which is part of the first lady’s Drink Up campaign.

At the DC-held event, Obama shored up another $100-plus million worth of Keeper cash from companies like AT&T, which donated $18 million to support high school mentoring programs, and the Emerson Collective, established by the widow of Apple founder, the late Steve Jobs, who will help raise $50 million “to design plans for next-generation high schools,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

The College Board is also pitching in $1.5 million through its own All In initiative designed to ensure more male students of color enroll in at least one advanced placement course during high school, Education Week reported. AP is aligned to the Common Core State Standards. 

Citi Foundation will donate $10 million over the next three years to create a national volunteer program for 25,000 youth across ten American cities to cultivate 21st Century Learning’s College and Career Readiness Skills while Discovery Communications will “invest more than $1 million to create original programming to break down negative public perception of boys and men of color,” according to MSNBC. The Common Core-aligned streaming Discovery Education is a division of Discovery Communications.

Chicago non-profits Youth Guidance and Match will use part of $10 million in state and local grants to expand their mentoring and tutoring programs, the Chronicle of Philanthropy reported.

Time magazine noted that the President was working hard to be a role model for these young American men of color. He didn’t want the predominantly black youth to think solely of stereotypical role models like rap stars and basketball players. However, he didn’t tap Dr. Ben Carson, retired neurosurgeon who also grew up fatherless, to break through those societal myths and ceilings. Instead, the President brought in the NBA, who will lend players to recruit 25,000 new mentors and work with educators in at-risk schools to increase attendance and performance.

The Chicago-based “Becoming A Man” program, serving predominantly black boys was “instrumental in spurring Obama to take bold new action aimed at at-risk boys” following the Trayvon Martin trial. This group pledged $10 million to Keeper funding, also according to MSNBC. 

The Corporation for National and Community Service will team up with the U.S. Department of Justice to jointly fund a $10 million, three year AmeriCorps program to enroll disconnected youth as part of the Keeper pledge. Likewise, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) will team up with AmeriCorps, donating $3.8million to create youth opportunities to help restore the nation’s forests and grasslands. The USDA is the government agency under which the National School Lunch Program is housed.

At the event, the President personally pledged to mentor as many young men as he could, literally, although when Keeper launched, Obama wasn’t all in. Instead, he set up a team of 20 federal officials headed up by the Assistant to the President and Cabinet Secretary.

“America will succeed if we’re investing in our young people, and we also know that we’ve got to make sure that boys and young men of color are part of that success,” Obama said at the event, calling his Keeper program “one more tool that you have to expand your network of people who can support you, give you ideas, buck you up when you’re down,” the Los Angeles Times also stated in its article.

Obama noted that Keeper was meant to expose troubled youngsters to fields like graphic design, engineering, and law. Missing here, however, are the consonants of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math), the supposedly vital components on that college and career readiness pathway pushed upon pupils in all 50 states.

Breitbart Texas asked Texas Education Agency (TEA) Director of Media Relations Debbie Ratcliffe about the Keeper program. She said that TEA was not affiliated with this federal program.

Keeper will next expand to meet the needs of Asian American and Native Americans boys, according to The New York Times article. However, there are grumblings from American girls of color. Philanthropy consultant Nakisha Lewis was among a group of women to sign a letter to Obama, urging that minority women and girls be included in the program, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Lewis claimed Keeper will fail if it’s just for boys. “Women and girls of color are also in need of philanthropic investment and changes in public policy,” she stated.

Follow Merrill Hope, an original member of the Breitbart Texas team, on Twitter @OutOfTheBoxMom.