Let Brotherly Love Continue: An All-Male Public School Opens

Save to favorites
Print

Email Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Copy URL

Raising Kings: A Three-Part Audio Series From Education Week/NPR (Episode 1)

Introducing Washington, D.C.’s newest high school: the roughly $60 million Ron Brown College Preparatory High School, the capital city’s first all-male traditional public school.

The school is designed specifically to meet the needs of its young black male students – who are called “kings.” And for many of the young men, their needs are profound.

Two reporters, Education Week’s Kavitha Cardoza and NPR’s Cory Turner, spent hundreds of hours with teachers, students, and parents from the school for a three-part audio series on Ron Brown’s first year.

In this episode, we’ll meet Dr. Benjamin Williams, the principal, who personally recruited each of the 100 young men who enrolled as freshmen.

The principal at Ron Brown College Preparatory High School, Dr. Benjamin Williams, talks about the challenges facing his students- all of them African-American young men and many of them from low-income families. His school focuses on developing students' social-emotional skills, which he believes is the foundation of learning. A robust "CARE" team--most of them black men--includes a psychologist, a social worker and counselors. It’s a far bigger team than exists in most schools, but Principal Williams believes the poverty, violence and trauma that many Ron Brown students experience requires professional help with a manageable ratio of staff to students. It’s the CARE team’s job to keep students on-track--emotionally and academically. The CARE team begins each morning in a schoolwide circle, navigating conversations that include neighborhood violence and police shootings, protest and poverty. Many schools do one or two of these things, but few do them all – and with the conviction of Ron Brown’s staff. For the past year, Education Week's Kavitha Cardoza and NPR's Cory Turner visited Ron Brown weekly -- and some weeks, daily -- to witness the birth of this new school and to see how its staff tackles some of the toughest challenges. We spent hundreds of hours there, from the earliest days to the last bell. Read more: http://www.edweek.org/raisingkings

We’ll also meet two of the men at the center of what makes Ron Brown so unusual: Dr. Charles Curtis and Dawaine Cosey, members of the school’s CARE team.

"They feel like it's a place where they can take chances, where they can grow." — Benjamin Williams, principal	“I tell the guys here: You’re gonna get love and there’s really nothing you can do about it.” — Dawaine Cosey, director of culture, empowerment, and restorative justice	"When we look at these young people, we’re looking at them from a place of godliness, of kingliness, of royalty." — Charles Curtis, school psychologist

In the first few months of the academic year, the educators at Ron Brown work with an almost single-minded focus on establishing a school culture and ethos that few of the kings, and in many cases even teachers, have ever experienced.

They spend hours every week in restorative justice circles, putting offenders and their wronged parties together to talk through what’s happened and find ways to set things right. And the students resist. And some parents and school faculty push back too.

For Principal Williams and the CARE team especially, it’s an effort to convince many skeptics that this approach to educating young men of color is worth fighting for.