Each Friday throughout Summer 2020, we'll be sharing the stories of Black educators who have worked to advance educational and racial equity. Today, we are highlighting Fannie Jackson Coppin and Kelly Miller.
Fannie Jackson Coppin was the first Black woman to hold the title of school principal in the United States. She was born into enslavement in Washington, D.C. in 1837, and gained freedom when her aunt was able to purchase Fannie at age 12. Fannie attended Oberlin College, the first college to accept both black and female students, and there established a night school to educate freed slaves.
Juneteenth commemorates the end of the institution of slavery in the United States. On June 19, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the Civil War had ended, and that those enslaved were now free. This news came over two years after President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation became official in 1863, which had little impact on Texas as the order was not imposed by federal troops. But, with the surrender of General Lee in April of 1865, and the arrival of General Granger's regiment, their forces were finally strong enough to overcome resistance.
Today, #Juneteenth, celebrates and appreciates the history, achievement, and freedom of Black Americans, and the extraordinary contributions they have made to the world. We honor this day as a holiday, to recognize and stand in unity with Black Americans in the Horizons Network and across the country. To commemorate, we will be sharing the stories of Black educators who worked to advance racial and educational equity in America.
Horizons National stands in solidarity with people of color throughout our communities and across the country. Black lives matter.
Horizons is committed to ensuring all children have the opportunity to thrive and learn. Eliminating inequities in education has been central to our work for over 50 years, and recent events remind us why this work is so important: systems that perpetuate, tolerate, or indulge racial injustice have devastating effects on our society and must be transformed.
We understand the communities we serve are disproportionately affected and harmed by violence and racial oppression. While the events we have seen in the last several weeks are heartbreaking, they are not new or isolated. Now and always, we stand with our entire Horizons community. We stand with our students and families. We stand with our staff and volunteers. We are united in our efforts to create an equitable world for our young people.
This moment makes our work together even more urgent – to build a society where every individual can experience the joy of learning, build skills for success, and have the inspiration to realize their dreams.
Will our nation’s K-12 students be back in school this coming fall? We all hope so. In the midst of a global pandemic, many school districts across the country have shifted to remote learning, online classes, pass/fail assessments, and other ways to continue teaching students when school facilities are closed. What will that mean for the fall semester? How will students, teachers, and families catch up from all they will have lost to the COVID-19 pandemic?
As you might expect, some districts are better equipped than others to handle this kind of disruption. The “opportunity gap” between under-served students and their more affluent peers, already deep and persistent, is widening rapidly as more and more students are learning at home and are at risk of falling further behind in their studies. It is the epitome of inequity to provide mandatory classes that can’t be accessed equally. This situation is tough for everyone, but students from under-resourced communities are once again at a real disadvantage.
Some are calling for schools to remain open, or re-open, in the summer. This would prevent a nationwide learning loss of several months. But, with uneven homeschooling for most of a semester, youth in under-resourced communities are going to need much more than that. They are going to need individualized intensive academic and social health support.
Organizations, including ours, have built and refined exactly these kinds of programs for decades, and the results have been significant. Students don’t fall behind academically; in fact, most move ahead. The solution is a mix of targeted education focused on helping every child succeed. The CARES Act is a rare opportunity for states and districts to direct educational funding to leverage this expertise for their students who need it most.
When we emerge on the other side of this situation, where will we find ourselves? Students from every community will have a lot of catching up to do. Districts will not be able to do it alone. We encourage funders and decision-makers to partner with summer and out-of-school learning programs who have a proven track-record of narrowing achievement gaps so we all can make the path to academic and life success a far more equitable one.
Everyone understands the value of a good mentoring relationship, for both mentor and mentee, but not everyone is quite so sure about how those relationships get started and sustained. At Horizons, we see mentoring is a natural part of the program.
When Josh, a college student who grew up in his local Horizons program from first grade through high school, looks back on his experience, certain people stand out – teachers, friends, and some he considers mentors.
