The Motive
With years of targeted education reform, poor, under educated, and minority children remain the most educationally vulnerable children in society. Test scores, graduation rates, and college enrollment and completion rates remain dismally low for these students despite the billions of dollars spent each year on their education.
There are approximately 50,000,000 students in public schools in this nation. According to the 2009 national reading assessment:
- 44% qualify to receive free and reduced price lunch and more than 80% read below proficiency
- 70% of students read at the basic level or below.
- 44% are minority students of which more than 80% of Black and Hispanic students read below proficiency
These groups represent and persistently remain the most educationally at-risk student population. These more than 22 million students have little to no ability to attend a private Christian school largely because they are not financially able to do so. In some instances, they are not academically eligible for admissions to Christian schools. As a result, poor, under educated, and minority children have extremely limited access to Christian schools. Currently, faith-based schools are educating only 2% of poor children, 6% of Black children, and 6% of Latino children.
However, around the nation, in every venue providing an education to these children, be it public or private schooling, Christian educators who are called of God and commissioned for Kingdom service are endeavoring to love and effectively educate these children in Jesus’ name through life-on-life transformational teaching.
The Measure (Proposal)
The Urban Schools Services Department is launching an initiative designed to identify and equip teachers of URBAN children who are bringing a faith-inspired, Christ-honoring influence to bear on the educational plight children who are poor, undereducated, or minorities regardless of where they attend school. The initiative will endeavor to further equip and enable Christian URBAN educators with the wherewithal to engage in transformational life-on-life teaching that is:
- Intentional in that teachers purposefully engage the hearts and minds of children;
- Incarnational in that teachers are relational in their approach to the children they serve as opposed to institutional; and
- Inspirational in that teacher employ spiritual resources to bear upon education.
By doing so, these teachers become a living curriculum of the love and values of Christ in the classrooms no matter the setting.
The Means
The overall strategic activities for facilitating the objectives are:
- Identify Christian educators of URBAN children in public schools.
- Investigate best practices of life-on-life transformation teaching.
- Integrate Christian educators from both the private and public sectors for personal and professional development and networking.
- Incorporate products and services designed to equip Christian URBAN educators in any educational venue.
The Method
- Conduct convocations to commission God’s educators for the purpose of publically validating the call of God upon their lives as they educate the children assigned to them.
- Convene annual regional gatherings of Christian URBAN educators for fellowship, networking, and equipping.
- Promote a national membership/fellowship organization of Christian URBAN educators.
Nor is it feasible to anticipate that philanthropic dollars can be raised to provide financial assistance for these children to gain access to Christian schools. For example, to provide just one percent of poor students with the average cost of tuition would require raising over a billion dollars ($1,100,000,000).