...A Better Chance and similar programs, like the New York City-based Prep for Prep, can only hope to provide mobility for the few. Most of the children who seek placement will never get a spot.
THE fact, she said, is that most public middle schools serving urban youth simply are not preparing children for academically challenging high schools, public or private. Even if they were, there are not many seats available in the elite private schools, or enough scholarship money to support the students who need financial aid, she said.
“There are just not enough places,” she said in a telephone interview from her office in Englewood, N.J. “It’s like musical chairs. We simply have to come to grips with the fact that we are throwing away hundreds of thousands of talented children. We don’t even know what talent we are throwing away.”
Giving Minority Students a Push Along the Path to Leadership Roles
By CLARA HEMPHILL
On a recent cold Saturday, when most children around the city were relaxing after a week at school, 320 boys and girls, ages 10 to 13, filed into Nightingale-Bamford, a private girls’ school in a stately brick building on the Upper East Side.
The children, most black or Hispanic, were going to be interviewed for a shot at admission to a private day or boarding school, or an elite suburban public school, through A Better Chance, a nonprofit group. The boys wore jackets and neckties. The girls were in prim skirts or nicely pressed trousers. Some were confident, but many were nervous, folding and unfolding their hands, sitting up extra straight as they waited to be interviewed. The stakes, after all, were high.
The program’s mission is to increase the number of minority men and women in leadership positions. It is really about social mobility, whisking children out of their environment in urban neighborhoods and transporting them to institutions that are incubators for presidents, senators and titans of industry — like Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., President Bush’s alma mater.
“These schools are pathways to influence and power in our society,” said Sandra E. Timmons, the president of the group, pointing out that Governor-elect Deval L. Patrick of Massachusetts, the state’s first black governor, is an alumnus of the program.
Yet A Better Chance and similar programs, like the New York City-based Prep for Prep, can only hope to provide mobility for the few. Most of the children who seek placement will never get a spot. In 2006, for example, 2,153 students nationwide applied to A Better Chance; about half passed the screening process, but only 624 children were accepted and 455 enrolled. The others declined their spots, largely for financial reasons, group officials said.
The former president of the group, Judith Berry Griffin, worried so much about talented students who had been rejected that she left the organization in 2003 and established a new nonprofit group, Pathways to College, to help them.
THE fact, she said, is that most public middle schools serving urban youth simply are not preparing children for academically challenging high schools, public or private. Even if they were, there are not many seats available in the elite private schools, or enough scholarship money to support the students who need financial aid, she said.
“There are just not enough places,” she said in a telephone interview from her office in Englewood, N.J. “It’s like musical chairs. We simply have to come to grips with the fact that we are throwing away hundreds of thousands of talented children. We don’t even know what talent we are throwing away.”
