‘Helping Smart Kids Get Smarter’
Increasingly educators are addressing ways to motivate high-potential students.
By John O. Harney
The top end of the education achievement gap is a chasm. Few Black and Hispanic students score over 1200 on the SAT, fewer enroll in selective colleges and fewer still earn advanced degrees. Yet education reforms and media attention focus overwhelmingly on the lower end of the divide, preoccupied with students meeting minimum standards. As Dr. Freeman A. Hrabowski III, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, told a recent gathering of more than 200 educators and students in Boston: “When we talk about the achievement gap, we rarely talk about helping smart kids get smarter.”
Hrabowski was preaching to the choir. His audience had gathered in a Boston hotel to talk about precisely that topic — how tough love, positive peer pressure and other strategies could be employed to increase the motivation of high-potential minority students and bridge the chasm at the top. The conference they attended, “Room at the Top: High Achievement for Students of Color,” was sponsored by the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, which supports academic achievement and educational opportunity for students in the six New England states.
For a group of educators seeking ways to help minority students succeed, Hrabowski’s personal story offered a powerful reminder of what is possible. He told the group how his mother had become intrigued with the private library of the White family that employed her as a maid in Alabama. The family allowed her to go into the library when her work was done, and in time, she became an insatiable reader. “The more she read, the better reader she became, and the better she read, the more she liked to read,” said Hrabowski. She also liked to motivate her son. “My mother told me, ‘You’re special, and you can be even better,’” he recalled.
