How to save a drop-out...

...give them bribes. At least that is what Mansfield Frazier wants the schools to do with newly allocated TANF funds.

Specifically, we're talking about Black boys who are on the brink of dropping out of school. The Governor along with State Senator C.J. Prentiss is paying special attention to this demographic and is putting his (our) money where his mouth is.

There are all sorts of ideas on how to spend this money--$20 million--throughout the state of Ohio. And local columnist, Mansfield Frazier, suggests that we "bribe" students into staying in school.

If I read correctly, Frazier estimates that this money would amount to about $2,000 per child. And he argues that education and the pursuit of knowledge won't work on poor Black boys because they are part of a bigger societal weakness: poverty and it's gripping cycle. So, he says, give them money. Cold hard cash and that will encourage them to stay in school.

I like Mansfield most of the time, but today I am laughing because that has got to be the biggest crock of shit I have read to date this week. If you want to argue that these underserved kids are part of a bigger problem, then you would understand that giving them cash will only put a band-aid over a gunshot wound.

He says it works in New York. Everything seems to work in NYC. But I would want to look at the complete picture. Are New York schools just passing out checks, or is this coupled with quality programming with realistic objectives?

Hell, I can blow through $2,000 in a week if I really wanted to. If I were a 9th grader again, give me three days. Look, I understand what he is saying. (White) School administrators don't get it. Let me further clarify: middle class, educated administrators don't get it. They don't understand the pull that these boys have to fight to stay in school. That is why many of them don't stay; the pull is too strong. So when they come up with these preventative measures, they often reflect programming that fails to take into account what it means to be Black, male, and poor in Cleveland.

But where I begin to diverge from Mansfield's path begins when he attempts to solve the problem without yanking it out by the roots. To bribe them with cash also assumes that young Black boys don't care to learn, and that they are too dumb or too troubled to learn. I refuse to accept that young Blacks don't want to learn. Realistically, most of these young men won't go to college. But they have so many options....if they truly understood what it meant to be educated in this society, there's the motivation.

Mansfield points out that we as a society often equate education with money. Your high school diploma earns you this....your bachelor's gets you that. We need to stop doing that. When you look at what education meant to my parents' parents' parents' parents', you would understand that education meant a certain freedom. The ability to be mobile in whichever way you felt. Early Black Americans weren't thinking about how college degrees would earn them more bling, they saw it as a way to liberate their people, fuel the abolitionist movement, earn a place in the civic discourse.

Somewhere along the lines, we forgot that part. And here we are with a Black man advocating that $2,000 will keep a Black boy in school. It won't. Until we really look at our communities, out laws, how we support single mothers and how we educate our youth, those boys will still be on the street and that $2,000 will be spent. Their parents will still be poor and undereducated, and the state of Ohio will short $20 million dollars.

Try again, Frazier.