That was one of the key points made Thursday at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Annual Legislative Conference during a panel discussion about empowering HBCUs and PBIs.
In making the point, Dr. Rudolph “Rudy” Crew, president at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, lamented what he described as the “sick and sad continuous eruption of really bad education that happens for young people of color coming through this pipeline.”
“And the pipeline under-educates people so they have no choices of whether to go to college at all,” Crew said.
Crew said Medgar Evers College is building a partnership with 50 nearby K-12 schools in order to have a more substantial impact on the educational futures of students in the vicinity of the college.
“The purpose is not to get a handful of schools and call ourselves a winner,” Crew said. “There has been a longstanding pathology of failure that has failed people in central Brooklyn for decades,” including, he conceded, when he served as chancellor of New York City schools.
The purpose of the new initiative will be to “wrap programs around that pathology and double down on what it takes to get those young people elevated academically and socially.” The end-goal, he said, is to have students ready to attend two- and four-year institutions without the need for remediation.
